Native American Culture: Athletics

Front 1

Athletics

Back 1

Indian players, like other Indian performers, carried with them specific tribal histories and general Indian histories that rendered their experiences unique.

Front 2

Athletics

Back 2

Athletic competition provided an entree into American society--a chance to beat whites at their own games, an opportunity to get an education, even at its most serious, an occasion for fun and sociality.

Front 3

Athletics

Back 3

Intercollegiate sports evolved into a crucial signifier of masculine, class, and race identities.

Front 4

Athletics

Back 4

Unlike blacks, Indians had long been enmeshed in the discourse of American assimilation. "Giving the indian a chance" was a culturally appropriate move, a shouldering of the white man's burden.

Front 5

Athletics

Back 5

Indians were harassed in athletics for being Indian. "Chief."

Front 6

Athletics

Back 6

Indian athletes, especially those who helped a team win, could receive a surprisingly genuine welcome in many quarters.

Front 7

Athletics

Back 7

In the early twentieth century's connection with cultural primitivism, Indians could be objects, not simply of racial repulsion, but also--as they reflected nostalgia for community, spirituality, and nature--of racial desire.

Front 8

Athletics

Back 8

Viewing Indian bodies displayed on the diamond, spectators naturalized the meanings that they had imagined for Indian difference, placed them in the specific historical moment of modernity, injected them with value, and then used their own rhetoric to spice the stew of melting-pot America as it was blended in athletic performance.

Front 9

Athletics

Back 9

Successful performances affirmed assimilation, social evolution, successful Christianization, and evolving forms of ongoing domination.

Front 10

Athletics

Back 10

The idea of sportsmanship proved that Indians were becoming like whites. Becoming manly meant becoming white.

Front 11

Athletics

Back 11

Sometimes, modern American society valued them all the more for NOT becoming white, for continuing to embody a primitivist virtue that still looked like racial difference.

Front 12

Athletics

Back 12

Indians athletes were often expected to reflect white cultural understandings of Indianness back to their predominantly white audiences...

Indians were expected to "Play Indian."

Front 13

Athletics

Back 13

White people thought Indians were all wild men.

Front 14

Athletics

Back 14

Sports served as a meeting places for transformation and persistence; for distinct, even mutually exclusive Indian and white interpretations; and for shared understandings.

Front 15

Athletics

Back 15

Indians were able to move more confidently in non-Indian society.

Front 16

Athletics

Back 16

After WWII, a new push to terminate tribes and force Indians to become white and modern helped close the primitivist windows of opportunity that had opened during the first half of the century.

Front 17

Athletics

Back 17

After WWII, Indians were then viewed as backward rather than pure and primitive.

Front 18

Athletics

Back 18

Indian political thought began turning away from integrationist models that had undergirded cross-cultural athletics and toward a renewed emphasis on autonomy and distinctiveness.

Front 19

Athletics

Back 19

In other words, the entire cultural, social, and economic system that had supported Indian athletes in the early twentieth century had been transformed in ways that almost completely shut them out.

Front 20

Athletics

Back 20

Sports became a critical part of the expectations haunting American culture during the early twentieth century-and no less critical to an unexpectedly modern inter-Indian cultural system.

Front 21

Athletics

Back 21

The memory of Jim Thorpe's body carries with it a whole host of expectations about Indian primitivism and modernist balance, ability and inability, history, education, physicality, and character---making Thorpe and anomaly.