To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sports at Native American Boarding Schools. Sport and Culture Series, Volume 2

The Carlisle Indian School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were among the many federally operated boarding schools enacting the U.S. government's education policy toward Native Americans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, one designed to remove children from familiar surroundings and impose mainstream American culture on them. To Show What an Indian Can Do explores the history of sports programs at these institutions and, drawing on the recollections of former students, describes the importance of competitive sports in their lives. Author John Bloom focuses on the male and female students who did not typically go on to greater athletic glory but who found in sports something otherwise denied them by the boarding school program: a sense of community, accomplishment, and dignity. This book explores the history of sports programs at federally operated boarding schools for Native Americans. The focus is on students who did not go on to greater athletic glory but who found in sports something otherwise denied them by the boarding school program: a sense of community, accomplishment, and dignity. The first two chapters explore the emergence of high-profile sports programs at the Carlisle and Haskell schools. Sports helped to justify and promote the educational mission of boarding schools by displaying Native Americans behaving and competing in a manner that was contained, civilized, and restrained. Yet such publicity also created controversy, for it contradicted these same goals by appealing to desires and passions that the public enjoyed in sports and popular culture and generally associated with Native Americans. These tensions reveal that sports were a cultural form that could elicit a variety of interpretations even within dominant cultural contexts. The final three chapters explore how students were able to take advantage of this ideological incoherence and through sports experience pride, pleasure, and the creative formation of identity. A chapter on female physical fitness describes how schools discouraged females from playing competitive athletics. Instead, they promoted passivity, sexual restraint, and domestic femininity by emphasizing indoor activity and light exercise. Chapter 5 presents recollections by former students describing the importance of competitive sport in their lives. (Contains 120 references, photographs, notes, and an index.) (TD) "The Carlisle Indian School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas were among the many federally operated boarding schools enacting the U.S. government's education policy toward Native Americans from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, one designed to remove children from familiar surroundings and impose mainstream American culture upon them. To Show What an Indian Can Do explores the history of sports programs at these institutions and, drawing on the recollections of former students, describes the importance of competitive sports in their lives. Author John Bloom focuses on the male and female students who did not typically go on to greater athletic glory but who found in sports something otherwise denied them by the boarding school program: a sense of community, accomplishment, and dignity."--Jacket Contents......Page 6 Acknowledgments......Page 8 Introduction......Page 12 1. Native American Athletics and Assimilation......Page 24 2. The Struggle over the Meaning of Sports......Page 54 3. The 1930s and Pan-Indian Pride......Page 74 4. Female Physical Fitness, Sexuality, and Pleasure......Page 100 5. Narratives of Boarding School Life......Page 120 Conclusion......Page 146 Notes......Page 154 Works Cited......Page 160 B......Page 168 C......Page 169 G......Page 170 M......Page 171 P......Page 172 S......Page 173 Z......Page 174