In this episode of the "Ink in Our Blood" podcast, Norbert Hill joins David Maraniss to talk about the genesis of "Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe" — almost 20 years ago — and much more. Norbert S. Hill is an enrolled citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and has recently retired as Area Director of Education and Training for the Nation and co-editor of The Great Vanishing Act: Blood Quantum and the Future of Native Nations. "Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe" is available at bookstores or online at: https://davidmaraniss.com/library/path-lit-by-lightning-the-life-of-jim-thorpe/
0:09
Great. Well, Norbert Hill, I'm delighted to talk with you today. I've said that you were the inspiration for this book, although I didn't quite realize it at the time. But almost 20 years ago or so, I was in Denver on a book tour. Do you remember what happened that day what you were thinking how you came up to me?
0:32
Well, I saw a flyer that you were, were speaking at the Denver Press Club in I became a member of Denver Press Club, because I, I started a little small magazine, so I was really there under fraudulent identity. But any case, they had good food at the different Press Club, so I figured I had read the Lombardi book and the Clemente book. And I saw Roberta play in Pittsburgh. So I thought I'd come and see you. And I really, really enjoyed your, your talk. And I thought, well, I thought I would ambush you and and talk to you about Jim Thorpe because I had been collecting materials for a long time. And, and I sent them to you and I said, Well, this has gotten no place. I didn't realize I was planting a seed.
1:25
You sure were what got you interested in Jim Thorpe?
1:29
Well, actually, my father was an athlete, and a boxer and a football player. In fact, curly Lambeau looked at my father when he was playing high school football. And so as you probably know, your first classroom in your lifetime is your kitchen table. And my father would talk about Jim Thorpe, or other Oneida athletes, and as a kid, I thought pieces making this stuff up, you know, and I didn't realize till later, you know, what a valuable source this was. And then I came to know Vine Deloria. And he talked about the renaissance of Indian athletes, the golden time, in that we may have been defeated by the armies in the Calvary. But we weren't defeated on the athletic field. And so there's a lot of notable athletes that came through in the late 1800s and early 1900s. That said, we may have been beaten on the field, but we're not going to be beaten on the athletic field. So anyway, there's some great athletes that time,
2:43
that's for sure. And, you know, the inspiration for Jim Thorpe and football was in Oneida Indian, who went to Haskell Institute. After being at Carlisle for a while there was Chauncey Archer, can you tell me about him?
2:58
Well, yeah, Chauncey. And TJ, interesting. He was a 200 pound fullback at the turn of the century, which is huge at that point in time. And I think Thorpe was might have been about 10 years old, and he was attending Haskell, watching them playing football and the sort of kind of fascinating and John's he kind of took him under his wing. And he's, he took him to the leather shop, the harness shop and get scraps of letter and fashion of football, he must have stuffed it with shirts, or I don't know what they stuffed it with. But he gave Jim to the football. And that's sort of kind of piqued his interest. And so I'm contacting the archer QCAT family members that are still living here, you know, in so and letting them know that their history and, and so they'd be interested in your your parents and your Greenbay. So that's kind of interesting. Yeah, my father talked about Chachi. Chicken, and the other really Green Bay Packers. And, you know, again, it's this factor fiction, you know, it was almost to Ripley's Believe It or Not, you know, and so, but he was true to his word.
4:12
Yes. I mean, there are myths about Jim Thorpe, but he was, he was magnificent enough just to really reality rather than some of the myths of, you know. How do you explain the brilliance of so many Native American athletes during that, what do you call the golden era?
4:33
Well, I think there's still a lot of pride, you know, and the persistence of not giving up, and that we could still win, but we're not we're not gonna win politically or militarily in that, that there's still ways that we can show how proud we are. I know. You guys like Jim Thorpe and other athletes made us Sit straighter and stand taller because we had so few heroes, and, and of course, Tharp remains as a hero, but those, those other ones that we need to take pride in them and make ourselves so feel a little bit better. So I think that's, you know, you had all the great Haskell teams and you had the Carlyle teams, you know? Where did Louis Tijuana come from? I mean, he came from Hopi, from from nothing, you know, and was one of the great runners of all time. And I've met some of his relatives and hobbies, you know, and they still talk about him. And so and he didn't he didn't die until in the 60s. I don't think he was. He lived quite a long time.
5:48
He did die tragically falling off a mesa. You know,
5:51
that's right. Yeah. Yeah, some of his niece and his nephew was supposed to walk them home, and he didn't, and it was dark. And that was devastating. That was too darn bad. But, but there are other you know, if you look at the Athletic Hall of Fame at Haskell, there is a lot of athletes there that were unsung, you know, that played ball and, and I know we were maybe we didn't have enough fast food that we eat well, and and stay in good condition physically, and, and love to play ball. I know my father went to my grandfather went to Carlisle. Yes. And they were sort of indentured there. They put them on farms, kind of make the farmers and they work harder than slaves did in the previous generation. But he used to go around from small towns to small town and as a baseball player, and they paid him to pitch he made more money pitching baseball in small towns in Pennsylvania, than he did as a farmer. And so I mean, so they're, you know, you know, that said, in the DNA of our family,
7:00
and Norbert, what was the name of the grip of that grandfather?
7:05
My great grandfather, Charles Allen Hill. Yeah, he, Charles.
7:07
And while he was at Carlisle, he was also playing baseball in the summer.
7:14
Yeah, he was Moonlighting. Yeah, that's right. So I, you know, you probably got 10 bucks to pitch a ballgame. But you know, but he didn't get that much in a week, being a farmer, if they paid him at all, you know, so,
7:27
yeah, that's the whole outing system, as they called it, which was, that's really a rip off.
7:34
Yeah. Well, that didn't encourage anybody or support anybody to be a farmer, that's for sure. He was, it was a lot of work. And so they had more fun playing ball. And, you know, you know, there was that whole tradition of playing lacrosse, that games went on for weeks. And with without any any goal, but it may be a rock or have some kind of geographic, a place it have hundreds of people playing, you know. And so, athletic feats were not uncommon. And it may just the athletic feat of riding a horse and killing a buffalo. I mean, that's pretty daunting. And in other physical things like that. So I think athletics was sort of kind of a natural for a lot of native people.
8:27
And, of course, sort of the, the epitome of that level playing field against the US Army was the 9012 Carlisle army game.
8:40
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Sort of
8:43
Finally, some revenge. Yes.
8:46
Well, that that's right. You know, and, you know, I can't imagine with those cardboard helmets and no face masks, you know, it had to be a fistfight every time they centered the ball. But they had guys that, that when they quit, and they they played hard, and they beat a lot of really great teams in those days.
9:11
Harvard army, Syracuse, and those were the teams that Carlo beat them all.
9:19
You know, they say Thorpe had such great timing, you know, he was 180 pounds, maybe. But his timing and strength was beyond others. And of course, you know, those those athletes he played with from other tribes just bonded together and they became a tribe on it to themselves and so they just weren't gonna get beat, you know, that was sort of what he called the, the epitome of high performing teams, you know, and I don't think guys at Penn had that kind of bond. And so and plus they got to travel little bit.
10:01
So there were quite a few students and athletes from from the Oneida Nation in Wisconsin that went out to Carlisle. How did that happen? Did they go voluntarily was there? You know, I know some people were sort of forced to go there. What? What was the story with your great grandfather and that generation and how they ended up in Carlisle?
10:27
Well, a lot of Oneidas went to Carlisle as volunteers. Because we, originally the night is a friend of the Iroquois Confederacy, we figured this out is that we better learn how to read and write and, and if we're going to, if we're going to do anything, so we sent probably one of the two or three highest populated tribes that went to Carlisle. And so we thought education was, was something that would be a good foundation for us to figure out what the white guys were doing. And so, we better my father, I started about putting on the white man's tennis shoes and running faster than he can. So. So education was, was a forerunner because we, we, you know, were there 100 or 150 years before people move west, where they were put on reservations, and we figured we better, you better figure this, figure this out. So we always embraced the opportunity of education. But the cost of that was that we lost our language. You know, we became English speakers first, you know, so there's a, there's a price for this white man's education, and, and all the discrimination that went with it, but we're still one of the progressive tribe in terms of understanding, you know, there's some tribes right now that don't have checking accounts. You mean, they deal with cash only, you know, and, and they haven't figured they probably don't have any, you know, two or three college graduates, you know, so we always valued education, and some passion. But, you know, we wanted people to, you know, be Indians when they finish their education had to be round guys that had a white man's education. And so, we've always had the challenge of balancing all of that.
12:33
Yeah, that's the paradox of the boarding schools, right, that right? Because their purpose was to, to basically drain the Indian is out of Indians. So you had to figure out how to survive that and maintain your, your identity.
12:51
Well, that and and the church had a big deal with that, too. They wanted the Christian nice Indian, so they wanted to take the Indian out of the Indian. And I think there's now a rebirth of that. Now, in terms of people wanting to identify as being Indian, and belonging, what does that mean, you know, and so colonial kind of thing of, I think a senator in Delaware, Higgins said in 1865, the solution here is intermarriage. And that we can get rid of the Indian problem by by diluting the blood over time. And so that's that's, that was always the plan. And, and, of course, the government was always and in the corporations were always after land and resources. So that was, we're still fighting on that one. Yeah.
13:47
And sort of the symbol of of some of that is the cemetery at Carlisle. Were 185 Young people died while they were there. And some of them only now in the last few years are being repatriated to their homelands, including from Wisconsin, right?
14:09
That's right. That's right. In fact, we had some more natives that were repatriated, and, you know, the some people said, you know, if I send my kids to boarding school, I may never see them again, you know, in fact, my aunt died at at Haskell, you know, and my grandmother was a doctor, they didn't call her until it was too late. And she she had to go back and pick up a dead body rather than going out there to be a doctor to her. So that was a family tragedy in our family and our family. So
14:44
Norbert, one of your many accomplishments was being the co author of a book that was very valuable to me the great vanishing act and dealing with so many issues around blood quantum and, and the, you know, the sort of genocide against Indians over centuries. Tell me about sort of your perspective on why you did that book and what your, what your what points you were trying to make?
15:10
Well, my first job in education was an interview and a professor asked me, Why are you an Indian? And I said, that's not a interview question. But nobody ever asked me that question. I says, Well, it came with the body why? You know, and really wanted to say, why are you a white guy? But I figured, well, I blew the interview already. But I did eventually get the job. But that was a seed for the book. And it's a great question. But it's not an interview question is a question that we internally have to ask ourselves or ask our families or our dear friends in terms of why are we Indians? And what does that mean? So the seed was about belonging, and identity. And then the more we, we dug into it, we talked about policies, the Indian Reorganization Act, and the Allotment Act, and all the things that you wrote into our own identity along with the millions and millions of acres of land. And so, so we're trying to figure out, one of the biggest challenges we have right now is, our birth rate is lower than our mortality rate. You know, we don't have families of 10 and 12. anymore, we get families of wanted to, because the economics and baby boomers are dying out now. And and people, Indians marry out more than any other ethnic group. And so the blood has been diluted. And so how do you maintain our sovereignty and local control on reservations, when you have more people living in Southern California? And so it's a political legal DNA issue that we're dealing with? So we're trying to find, in fact, I have a meeting next week with people in the Great Lakes about, you know, what, what is our? How do we push the edges of the envelope to be able to make sure our people make informed decisions? Because if we dilute the blood to a point where foreign tribes, US lineal descent will have 20 million Indians? And, you know, you know, we lose local control. And, and so the conversation is really about civics and citizenship, rather than what benefits and other things. So it's a it's a very complicated issue more than people think, you know, so,
17:49
yeah, it certainly is. But it seems to me, correct me if I'm wrong, that the whole notion of blood quantum was something basically imposed upon Indian nations by the white power structure, is that right?
18:04
Well, that's right. It really came in 1934. With the Indian Reorganization Act, of course, it was the height of depression. And and it gave an opportunity for Indians to recover some land to form some government. And there's a lot of goodies involved with that, you know, but at the same time, the government lawyers says, Well, you have to accept a blood quantum mess and identity because they're trying to figure out how to do resources. And we bought into it. So we may terminate ourselves with our own hand with our own constitutions. So we're talking about constitutional change in terms of how do we reinvent ourselves as natives in an authentic way, rather than one where the government can count noses. And so that's the issue. And so, you know, again, we want people to have an informed to be informed to make a good decision at the end, so I don't know where it's going to end up, but at least they'll know why.
19:09
You know, one of the issues that I deal with in the third biographies, the different ways that the dominant white society, regarded Native Americans versus African Americans, you know, both subjected to genocide in different ways and, and second class citizenship and everything else. And yet, you know, in terms of blood quantum, for instance, white society, if you have any black blood in it, you're considered black, right? Whereas with
19:44
Right, yeah, right. Yeah.
19:49
Part of that has to do with I think I sort of have a different perspective of the dominant white society on the two different races that Indians were sort of diminished but romanticized at the same time, you know, so white people claim a little bit of Indian blood, right. Whereas they would do that with with blacks.
20:14
Well, that's right. They're romanticize by it. You know, if you just looked at the National Baseball, you know, you had a lot of Indians playing professional baseball, whereas they wouldn't let blacks play until 1946. With Jackie Robinson, you know, so you had Jim Thorpe and soccer Electus. And, and other people that were
20:37
exactly even was was pregnant.
20:39
That's right. That's right. So there was a, there was a lot of a lot of contradictions in this whole thing, you know? Yeah. Ya know?
20:53
So, you know, just in terms of how did, how did Native Americans survive all of this? I mean, you were down to what it was, like, 230,000 Indians at one point?
21:13
Well, that's the magic of it all, you know, you know, part of it is that we were here first, and we never surrendered, you know, you know, I, the two books I love the most are the book about Crazy Horse, and Malcolm X, because they were really willing to die for what they believed in, in terms of who they, they were, and you know, I, you know, there's so much going on here. So, if you look at the company, who wanted them, get everybody back on the boat and send it back to Europe, you know, but Indians are not reclassified as minorities, but we're nations. And we have land, and I think that makes a big difference. Because, you know, Columbus, and, and they didn't drag any land with them, you know, so, you know, so we still had a resource and, and, and, even though it was diminishing, we claimed it as our home. And I think that, that, but also the treaties, you know, make a difference is it's like, we're not nonprofits, we have treaties that go back and, and we hang on to those ideals. And, and, you know, what were our forefathers thinking in terms of philosophically in terms of how we live and who we are, and how we're stewards of the land and other things that young people are now kind of embracing. So that's a good thing. So.
22:59
So you see a young generation of Indians that are sort of moving back in a different in a different way to the pride of the past or adapting it to a new world.
23:13
So when we send an Indian to school was a college, we want them to land under moccasins done under Gucci's. And so we want them to be Indians at the same time not to give up and become anglicized to a point. So we still need to learn how to do calculus and science become doctors and engineers. But that same time, you know, Indian elders would ask the question of when you get out of college, it's not what your head knows, what does your heart know? And what is your responsibility to community? And so we're trying to build bridges backwards from the university, to the reservation systems, how do we revitalize our own communities? And that's where we are right now. And I think on the a lot of young people want to do that. And they're, they're starting to listen, so we have a critical mass that will do that. You know, we'll need grab bro bottles, and then in the big cities still, you know, and so there's a lot of urban Indians and so we're trying to figure out how do you how do you belong? In Los Angeles, you know, we get our Cherokees in Southern California we do in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. And so they all want to be part of it, but they we don't know how to include them without giving up our local controls and, and identity. So that that's that's the barrier that we're wrestling with.
24:45
But seems to me speaking of role models that Deb Holland the Secretary of Interior is quite an important one right now.
24:54
Yeah, she Yes, you know, but I tried to get her to talk about blood quantum and she wouldn't be really? No, I sent her the book. She wouldn't. I think it's too political for her, you know? Yeah. Because every tribe gets to decide who gets to be a citizen. So she, she can't dictate that, but I wish she would have. And I thought I had an inside track to get her to speak. But she's, she's stuck in me. So well, I'm gonna meet her. Her being an interior, though,
25:27
of course, yes. And her work on the environment in schools. And, yeah, it's quite important. But I'm going to meet her in later in June, and I will bring that up to her.
25:41
Oh, please do it. You know. And, you know, during the Johnson administration, the first since the Civil War, there is a Assistant Secretary of the Interior, Bob Bennett, who grew up with my dad, he was no nice guy, you know, who and he was internal to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, but he said, you know, with the political apparatus, he says, I knew I could only get one or two things done. Important thing. So he kept us focused on that. And he got them done before. Cecil Andrus, I think, or Alaska fired him for representing Indians. Yeah, so anyway.
26:25
Well, I'm greatly looking forward to getting up to Oneida country. Well, yes, yes. September and, and getting you a copy of the book. And you've been a very inspiration to me, Norbert, so?
26:43
Well, I, I can't tell you how excited I was. I am so pleased that you, you included this. And then that may educate a lot of non Indians about the policies and what happened to Indians, not just Jim Thorpe. I mean, yes, the you got, you got. You got two subjects here. You got Jim Thor. What else you got? What happened? It's a great history lesson in terms of, you know, I hope they don't cancel your book in schools. But you know, you know, but it's a great teaching tool. Not only good news, but the non Indians in terms of, you know, here's the history here. And you had, you know, the first commissioner of Indian Affairs, and you got a guy who won the national ballroom championship, and, you know, he's still a humble guy, you know, and,
27:37
yeah, that's when I wrote the book. You know, I'm always looking for more than just the drama of the individual. But when you look at Jim Thorpe's life, I mean, he was born the year the Dawes Act was passed, right? Yeah. Yeah, died in 1953, when they tried to do you know, the tribal eyes, the country. So and sort of those 65 years, is quite an important part of Native American history that I used throughout the book.
28:04
And I think the thread of his life is he was always trying to do the right thing for Native people. And rather than trying to make a buck, you know, and he was trying to survive, survive, of course, but yeah, he was the guy you wanted on your team, right? Absolutely. I mean, always in one.
28:25
Yeah. He had a lot of troubles in his later life. But yeah, my my conclusion was, this is not a tragedy. This is a story about perseverance. Survival.
28:37
But I think you can make a perseverance case at a macro level. Yeah. As well as a micro level. Yeah. Yes. So that's the that's the larger question, isn't it?
28:48
Yes. Yeah, Norbert, it's a pleasure talking with you. I really enjoyed it. And thank you for all you're doing and I'll see you later this year.
28:58
Yeah, same here. Thank you so much, David, for your work and I'm glad to see you and Oneida. So okay.
29:09
"Path lit by lightning: The life of Jim Thorpe" is available online and bookstores on August 9. Visit DavidMaraniss.com To order your copy. This has been an episode of the David Maraniss "Ink in Our Blood" podcast. We hope you enjoyed it, and that you'll subscribe to the Ink in Our Blood podcast on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify or whichever podcast service you prefer. If you loved it, we'd love it if you left a rating and review ink in our blood is produced by Metamorphosis Agency, LLC. Music has been written and provided by Monika Ryan. Ink in Our Blood is hosted by Sarah Maraniss Vander Schaaff. Thank you for listening.