In this episode, David talks with Patty Loew, a professor in the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and the inaugural director of NU's Center for Native American and Indigenous Research. She is a documentary producer, author, and a citizen of Mashkiiziibii. "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/
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I want to thank you again for all the encouragement you gave me to do this book.
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It's one of the most meaningful things I've done in my career. So it was amazing. I all all 684 pages.
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There was so much I thought I knew a lot about Jim Thorpe. But your book was so enlightening. Well, thank you. Well, it seems that
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you know, almost every Native American I've interviewed has some connection to the Carlisle Indian School, which was so integral to this story and to Jimmy ARPES life. Can you tell us about your family's connections to that school?
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I had great uncles and aunts who went to Carlisle. And, you know, those stories didn't really come down to me directly. Because my grandfather and my great grandfather did not go there. They went to boarding schools in Wisconsin. But Carlisle was the
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that was that was the school upon which all the other boarding schools in America were patterned after, you know.
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So I got a sense of Carlisle through the stories that my grandfather told of toma because toma was patterned after Carlisle
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probably even worse, in some ways.
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Told ya, you know, it was it was interesting people forget about the industrial part of the American Indian industrial boarding school.
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Children worked me they were they went to school half days, and the other half of half of their day was spent working far, you know, as farmhands or scrubbing floors, washing dishes, chatting lace, depending on their gender, of course.
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So it was, it was a life that was intended to create
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a generation of Second Class Citizens, because these children, were going to be taught just enough
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for them to be suitable, you know, blue collar servants or farm hands.
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You know, yesterday, I talked to Suzanne, Sean Harjo, and she said that they were trained to be good prisoners or soldiers.
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Well, that's the other thing. You know, if you look at World War One, the number of Native American boys who enlisted in the in the military and became part of the expedition, no American Expeditionary Forces, it was a seamless transition from the boarding schools to the training camps to the frontlines. Because they were marching to dormitories, they were marching to their classrooms, they were, you know, marching to their jobs after school. And every aspect of their life was regimented.
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That's one of the many, many paradoxes of that situation that they were trained to be like the US Calvary that killed their grandparents, basically, you know, and what I really appreciated in your book was,
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you know, the fact that you
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you nuanced what it meant for those American Indian boys to be playing the sons and grandsons of army generals who had, you know, terrorize their communities. And now, you know, that that's the amazing thing about sports, which I think you did a really good job in, in, in explaining is that that was really the only place where these boys had any kind of freedom. And here they were, being allowed to compete. And, and, you know, sometimes they hatch pretty, pretty brilliantly the, you know, the sons of the generals that had, you know, in some cases annihilated their people. Yeah. Now, I'm not quite sure how to pronounce it, and correct me if I'm wrong. But going back to your family at Carlisle, wasn't there a woman to know me?
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A relative of yours who also had a connection to the nursing school there? With torque was there?
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Yeah, I didn't know much about her. It's interesting. The urban Janome is pronounced that way the enemies
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above highway eight, north of Highway eight in Wisconsin is kind of
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anyone Jeremy or Janome.
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And are you talking about Alice or Elena
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also pain. I don't know which.
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Yeah, she wound up in an administrative position at Carlisle. And I had I had other relatives who wound up going to boarding schools and then joining the Indian service, which
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the organization that that that really
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shaped Indian lives on reservations through boarding schools across the country. And I should have pointed out earlier that you come from the Bad River, part of the Ojibwe nation. Can you tell me about that sort of culture and his heritage? Yeah, I was hoping that you would give the old college try to pronouncing the actual
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which is Mashka Zb.
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Have a good chuckle because nobody gets that right. zd, Mashka Zb, which translates to medicine River. That's what we call our community because the Bad River, which is French gave this beautiful Madison River, which provided so much of our food and medicines and still does actually it's a really abundant wild rice producing area.
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So we're located on the south shore of Lake Superior and our lives traditionally revolved around fishing,
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gathering wild rice Mahnomen, as we call it,
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planting corn gathering berries and and taking deer. Those are our five traditional foods.
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Our our seasonal cycle was pretty much organized around foods. In the winter you spirit fish through the ice
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in the spring, you
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you spirit fish on the ice and cleared
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in the summer you gathered plants and tended to garden in the fall you gathered wild rice and the winter you trapped. So
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we were never adversaries of the federal government.
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But there was an effort to remove us, Zachary Taylor wanted to relocate us much the way the sock and Fox were removed during Blackhawks era. And by the way, I have to tell you, I absolutely loved the connection that you made between Black Hawk and Jimmy Dore, especially as it related to the parades, you know, Black Hawk was paraded through East Coast cities as this prisoner of war and this symbol of the vanquished Indian. And then, you know, generations later there's his, his descendant, Jim Thorpe, being paraded and celebrated through those same cities. I thought that was brilliant. Really thought that was brilliant.
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So back to back to bed surgery. Taylor tried to move you across the Mississippi, right? He wanted to put us right in the heart of Sioux country, and the Egyptians who were
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traditional enemies, and we were able to resist and just refuse to move. It's a long story.
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The government moved our treaty annuities to Minnesota tried to get us to move there was a debacle. Many people died, and it just furthered our resolve not not to be moved. And then the next president, Villard, Millard Fillmore rescinded the removal order, and we were able to establish our reservations in Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan as a result.
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How many people are there now of your my trash? Yes. Well, there are different bands and tribes of Ojibwe both in the United States and Canada. There's somewhere between 300,300 50,000 Ojibwe people. We have cousin kissing cousins among the OG Cree
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Ojibwe, Cree people and you know, some other some other people that may not be
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well, that shows how you know the vanishing race did not vanish because at one point, there weren't even that many total Indians counted in the whole country. Now 250,000 or something? Yeah. And that, you know,
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that, to me is nothing short of miraculous David when you think about the efforts that the United States government took to assimilate annihilate remove
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have,
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you know, trying, we're trying to get us to vanish. And the fact that here we are many, many centuries later, and we're still here.
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We have some problems. I mean, we're, we're losing our language, our languages. That's a huge thing. There's so much anxiety in Indian country over the loss of language. And that's a direct result of the boarding schools. Yes. Killed. Man.
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Is there anything being done about that tried to preserve those languages? Yeah, actually, and and I think it's really interesting. Google, I think, has a big initiative now to provide translations, you know, as they do for, you know, the Romance languages and Chinese and Arabic. Now, I think they're going to add Navajo, and there's some other languages as well. But I think most tribes are taking really serious steps to revitalize their languages.
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If you if you just Google
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a tribe and language, you'll find that there are language classes online, there are language camps being held in the summer.
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You know, there's this sort of desperation, knowing that a lot of our ceremonies, our identity is embedded in the language, that's where, you know, culture resides in the language. So it's really important for us to try to reclaim that. There, there are
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immersion schools popping up across the country where children are learning their native language. And in the sixth period, for foreign language, they're learning English.
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The opposite of the boarding school presents in a way. And what's really interesting, you know, I'm thinking about the duck and dotting, which is an immersion school in the Lakota, a reservation in northwestern Wisconsin.
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The, you know, the, the teachers use traditional activities like
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the sugar bush, preparing maple syrup in the spring, which involves a lot of math and science with boiling boiling points, and, you know, that sort of thing. They're incorporating math and science into cultural activities, incorporating art and, and history into into cultural.
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The cultural activities and practices that tribes do routinely. They're using those as experiential learning.
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That reminds me sort of a braiding sweetgrass, Robin wall, Kimmerer book that she's a botanist to use, went back to some of those old ways. That's, that's one of my favorite books, if not my favorite book I, I bought, I buy about 10 copies a year, and give them away to other people that I love or want to impress, you know, or,
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or want to save.
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up and comers written sweet crickets. And I teach that I use that in my classroom, I teach in sweet grass. And it's always, you know, at the end of the year, when you get those student evaluations, that's always, you know, one of the highlights of the year for my students is reading that book. It's really transformative. Yeah, it certainly is. Well, Patti, I know that among your many
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interests and talents is sort of a love of sports, and the history of sports. And of course, there's a strong history of athletes from Wisconsin, going out to Carlisle and I know you studied some of those. Can you tell us about that sort of connection? Yeah.
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And, you know, for someone that wrote extensively about the Green Bay Packers, you probably know that the first professional football player was a no NIDA, Indian who went to Carlisle and was a big deal there came back and
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you know, every little town had a football team, and I can't remember whether it was you know, Bessemer or Mark had or one of the teams in the the Upper Peninsula was trying to lure him to their team and the Acme packers, I think they were called Local Green Bay team.
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The the team from the up had offered him
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a free apartment, I think, and I think the Packers offered him 20 bucks.
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And, and maybe an apartment too close enough to live at home. I can't remember. But anyway, he was the first documented paid athlete, and I always thought that was kind of a funny, funny story. I think. There were lots of Matok
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Since who went parallel that came back?
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Joe gyaan was a pretty
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famous us a great player. Yeah, a really good player.
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Tell me about a vendor who had relatives that Bad River. I think White Earth claims him but he was an Ojibwe and the first
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I think, well, he might not have been the first American Indian inducted into the Hall of Fame or maybe it was the first picture. But he invented the slider.
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And I have I have a I have a
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riddle for you apart.
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Charles Albert Bender, who was called chief Bender of Annapolis, yeah and detested.
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based, and retired
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night, all nine innings of the batter's that he faced so 27 batters up 27 batters down. But it wasn't a perfect game. So how did he do it?
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Whoa, yeah, okay, so 93 players, three three opposing batters each. Face them retire them in a row with a buddy didn't pitch a perfect game.
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This was a great rebuttal. I mean, it couldn't have been a strikeout the catcher. So nobody ever got on first.
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I didn't say that.
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Third Strike. He walked one minute, one batter. Oh, who attempted to steal? Got it? Of course. We picked them off. And so nine batters 27 betters up 27 batters?
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Anyway, so there were the I mean, to get back to your original question, there were
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a lot of really great Native American athletes in that era. And, and, you know, sports is, is such a window into culture. And when the race lines were going up, the Jim Crow rules were were being enforced.
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There's so much activity and so much race blurring that's going on during that period of time. Yes. And it wasn't really about race. It was really more about color, in my opinion. If you were, you know, like, like the Cuban giants who were not Cuban. They were African Americans. If they were light enough skinned, they,
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you know, there were some that that were able to sneak into the major leagues and play absolutely right. There was a Negro League player by the name of Grant, who was the second baseman for I want to say the New York Giants. And cummiskey wrote a letter and and said, I know, I know who that second baseman is. That's Charlie grant. And, you know, I know that he plays in the Negro Leagues. And if you put that I'm not going to use the word on second base, and I'm gonna find myself a Chinaman and put them a third, you know, so it was really weird. And Asian Americans couldn't play in, you know, in Major League Baseball. And this is about the time the Thorpe is playing baseball.
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But of course, there were Indians playing at a time when African Americans couldn't, right. It's one of the one of the sort of parts of American history that fascinates me is that the difference between how the dominant white culture treated blacks and Indians in terms of they both were subjected to genocide and incredible racism in various ways. And yet, it seemed to me that the American Indian was sort of, as I say, in the book, romanticized and diminished at the same time. Absolutely. It will. And that's what I mean about about race, that it wasn't so much about races, it was about color. You know, Native Americans were lighter skinned Asians look different. And so boom, they're out, you know, African Americans, too much difference, you know, too much skin color difference, they're out. Latinos, if you're light enough, then you can play if you're dark enough, and you can't, if you fast forward and there there's a story about two Cherokee brothers during World War Two who were drafted. One they were twins, not identical, one had darker features, the other had lighter features, one went into the 92nd.
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You know, the 92nd unit, which was a segregated group.
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Why am I blanking on the one
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then the other went into integrated an integrated unit.
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So this country has always really struggled with race and color and ethnicity.
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Absolutely. Well, we still do, we still are very much. So
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when when Thorpe was
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given his gold medals before they were taken away.
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You know, he was
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he was praised as sort of the model American citizen at a time when he wasn't even a citizen.
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But I'm fascinated by your, your nuanced perspective on the whole connection between US citizenship and Native Americans. Yeah, you know, that was one of those issues that really tore a lot of native communities apart, because on the one hand, you had people like Carlos Montezuma, and Teresa Bender, and some of the, you know, some of the Native Americans, intellectuals of the time pressing for citizen citizenship, saying, you know, we're just as smart and as productive and as contributing citizens as white people. So we should be citizens to. On the other hand, you had communities like the Mohawk who were saying, look at, you know, we're a sovereign nation, and we want to be treated as such. And, you know, don't go conferring citizenship on us without, you know, without talking to us first. And, interestingly enough, again, in World War, World War Two, in World War One, Native Americans couldn't be conscripted, because they weren't citizens, World War Two they were, and I thought it was really interesting that the Mohawk had,
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they,
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they were really unhappy and sued the US government saying you don't have a right to,
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you know, to force our men into registering for the draft, because we're a sovereign nation. But at the same time, their leaders were independently declaring war on the Axis powers and encouraging their young men to live. So, you know, this is really developing the progressive era, which was anything that progressive Americans is such a fascinating time, because the country is being built with Indian resources. You know, the, the lumber that is building cities of America, and the railroads is coming out of forests from reservations, like mine,
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the
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map metal, you know, the, the minerals that are being used to,
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you know, build skyscrapers. And, and, I mean, they're coming out of there being mined out of areas,
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from Indian Reservation. So the, the wealth of the United States is coming at the expense of native people who are becoming impoverished or losing their land, who, whose lives are totally, you know, regulated in every aspect.
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And, and so, you know, this,
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this world of sport is the one area where Native people are able to express themselves, where they're able to compete, where they're able to show off their talents. And this is certainly the case, you know,
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involving Jim Thorpe, who is, you know, arguably the world's greatest athlete, and humble, you know, his I really appreciated learning more about about him. There's so many great moments in your book.
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I wanted to ask you about his relationship with Pop Warner, because I found that just really fascinating. I saw that movie, you know, and Pop Warner really portrayed as, you know, as this magnanimous savior.
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Biggest booster and He's my boy, and I learned so I think he's the villain of my book in many ways. There are worse people in terms of race and pop. But, yes, he presented himself as Thorpe's savior. But when the most crucial time of Jim's life, he, you know, he abandoned him basically and lied about it.
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Yeah, and then the movie portrays him as the Savior. So, you Well, as you pointed out, I didn't know he consulted on the movie. Yes. Good on you for pointing that up, and he rebuffed Brenda Brundage too.
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Yeah, underage drunk fronted gentleman
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fronted Avery Brundage. I have a hard time with that name.
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Yeah, well, I just recorded the audio version of my book. So I was stumbling over it to
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know about his Nazi connections.
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And you
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do I mean, you don't you don't come out and say that it was jealousy that drove him. But do you think that that his performance at those same Olympics that Thorpe shown, you know, you think that was that sort of, I understate that, because I don't really know about I think it?
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Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
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Boy, there was such callousness. Oh, no, you know, yeah, it's just really tragic. But, boy, he, you know, Thorpe hustled to the end, Denise? Yes. Never really gave up. No, no, I, you know, I was alternately feeling sorry for him and admiring you, you know, kept going all the way. So along with the the issue of citizenship, I'm also fascinated as an outsider on the whole issue of blood quantum,
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which seemed to me, you know, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to be sort of imposed on a native society by the dominant white society. Yeah, that goes back to the treaty making, you're aware, you know, the government negotiated these treaties, and Lancome, you know, coerced land, people in exchange for dry goods, and a blacksmith shop, and a school and all these things that may or may not have come in money. And then, you know, they call that annuities. And so, you know, the tribe would receive
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an amount, an annuity amount for a set period, period of time, maybe 10 years, maybe 20 years. And the way, the government, you know, but by this time, there have been a lot of intermarriage and so blood quantum of native people was diminishing. And so the out that the government used was to say, well, once somebody gets below 25%, why then they're not an Indian anymore. They're assimilated, and they're just white. So that 25% blood quantum was imposed on Native communities initially.
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And during this period, during the progressive era, where native governments were not functioning, I mean, you couldn't have a government, you couldn't practice your religion, you couldn't wear a native clothes, you couldn't speak your language. I mean, it was just so repressive. In 1934, the government
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realized John Collier, who had was
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ftrs, Bureau of Indian Affairs Secretary, or Commissioner of Indian Affairs, had worked with immigrant
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communities in tenements in New York and found that, that immigrants who were
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doing, you know, relatively well, we're doing so because they had a strong sense of culture and community. So Collier kind of convinced the powers that be in Washington, that by helping native communities, revitalize reclaim culture.
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And at the same time stopping this whole allotment process, which was privatizing Indian Indian land, and opening up land to white homesteaders that
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native communities would stabilize and begin to prosper.
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That didn't really happen.
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But anyway, that was that was the the idea. So when the the Indian Reorganization Act was approved in 1934, Native communities were encouraged to reconstitute their governments. So these Ira governments emerged, but they were really foisted on Native people in in a white image. So they they were set up like Mayor Town Council, you know, with a chair which Chairman then now just you know, Chairperson
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which is more, you know, what you think of when
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when you think of organizations like the Red Cross or, you know, a service club, have Chairman's, you know, these these governments didn't have presidents or
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so,
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these these constitutions were set up and and they
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were set up in the in a,
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you know, a white model.
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And sometimes it created these, these weird power dynamics, but they adopted this 25% blood clot.
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And so I'm sorry, it took a long time to get there.
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So it was worth it. Right? Well, so in 1934, Indian Reorganization Act,
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native communities are allowed to reconstitute their governments. But this 25% blood quantum is a holdover from the federal government. And it's written into most of these Ira constitutions. And it's only been over the years that native communities have kind of looked into the future. And, and, and realize, hey, we're blood quantum in ourselves right out of existence here. You know, and, and right now, we, you know, we have these communities that are struggling with,
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you know, they're small, and if, and they're young people are marrying outside their, their tribe, because they're related to everybody in their tribe. And so they're realizing they have to do things differently. So some are going to lineal descendency. Others are allowing
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blood quantum from related tribes to count, which just delays the inevitable problem of genocide of self genocide.
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So it's a problem that, that many communities are currently grappling with. And of course, it's the complete cultural opposite of the way white America treats African Americans, right.
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If you have 116, black blood, you're black, you're black. Right. But they did the opposite. And mostly, when you say for financial reasons, this was opposed on the tribes? Oh, absolutely. It began with, if you drop below 25%, then you don't get into the immune a new to annuity money. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So Patti, this has been wonderful. Um, can you close by telling us about the various things you've been traveling around the country? I know, going to Alaska and Montana all over the place? For your studies? Can you tell us about some of the things you're looking at and learning what I'm doing?
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So I was lucky enough to receive National Science Foundation grant, with my colleague, Deborah rec, Sani, who works with giant screen films, and they create
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large format screen films for science museums around the country. And were ours as part of a
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of a project to create a giant screen film,
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a PBS series and for and for youth produced short documentaries about climate change. So I'm working with the Quinault in Washington State, I hope to be working with the Salish Kootenay in Montana, working with the porch band of creeks in outside Mobile, Alabama, and then Bad River, my own community, and helping to nurture young kids to look at how climate change is affecting their cultural and natural landscapes, and what their communities are doing about it. And one of the things that I think is really interesting is that,
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by and large, Native American nations are really leaders in climate change mitigation and adaptation.
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The Quinault, for example, have lost you know, they've been losing their salmon because of the loss of their glacier in 2015. There, they have storms that are increasing in frequency and intensity. There, salmon, rivers are running too fast, so that when the salmon lay their eggs, the eggs get washed out to see rather than being able to, you know, there's spawning grounds are all messed up. So they are engineering these giant log jams and bolting root falls and Douglas fir together and dropping them in their river to slow it down and the seminar coming back.
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And they're really pushing the federal government to
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dismantle some of the dams that were created in the 30s and 40s. To allow those salmon to come back and spawning those once fabulously produced salmon producing what? Restaurant along the Columbia or
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Washington State
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Quinault are on the, the coast of the Olympic Peninsula. Okay, so they're on the Pacific side. And, and they're also dealing with rising sea levels and their,
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their, you know, their oral history tells them that every 300 350 years or so they get a huge earthquake and tsunami, you know, I mean, like 100 foot tsunami, and a lot of their critical buildings, housing, children and elder programs are located in the tsunami zone. So they're trying to move to higher ground. So there's some really interesting stories there. And I'm working with two young women who are freshmen in high school.
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They want to interview their grandma about fishing and tribal people about natural resource enhancement, and, and, and some of their cultural leaders about why salmon and so culturally significant to their people. I just can't believe I have a job like this.
36:09
So cool. I think one time I was trying to reach you, you were in Alaska, right? Yeah, I went to the Arctic encounter symposium, we have some science, some of our scientific collaborators on this project, which is called Ice worlds, located in Alaska, so boarded, I learned a lot at that, at that conference.
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You know, it's really interesting, the circumpolar region 70% of the landmass is Russian. And so when the, you know, and the Russians are being shut, and right now and critical issues like climate change, and, you know, fishing and in Arctic waters, you know, those issues don't go away.
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But there was a lot of anxieties, especially among the Scandinavian countries.
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And now Norway and Sweden, they're talking about joining NATO. So there were a lot of really fascinating issues that were discussed there.
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At the end of June, I'm going to the Department of Interior to give a copy of the book to Deb Holland.
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Oh, lucky you. I just, I'm struck by her so strongly. What do you think she means to the whole Indian community? Everybody is so proud of her. And she has such a genuine heart. You know, you talked to anybody that knows her. And they, they talk about how sincere and honest and authentic she is. And, you know, when she and Sharif David's first got into Congress, the first thing they did, you know, one of the first bills they they crafted was the two bills to address the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women. And that brought a lot of awareness. You know, that was something that those of us in Indian country knew about, but that that kind of awareness was something that needed to be brought to a mainstream audience. And now her work with Indian boarding schools.
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She's just I think she's doing a really bang up job there.
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It's nice to have somebody who knows Indians,
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for sure.
38:28
Oh, Patti, this has been great fun. Thank you so much for everything you're doing and for encouraging me.
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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.