David talks with Suzan Shown Harjo, (Cheyenne & Hodulgee Muscogee) recipient of a 2014 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and renowned advocate for Native American rights. She is a poet, writer, lecturer, curator, and policy advocate who has helped Native peoples recover more than one million acres of tribal lands and fight against the use of racist mascots. "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/
0:07
Well, Suzan, thank you so much for your patience and for being willing to do this. You know, I know. You're, you're a legend in the field of Native American Rights and activism and your help, to me was substantial for this book. So I really appreciate that. Wow. And I wanted to start sort of near the end, and then we'll go back and deal with a lot of different subjects. But, you know, I, I was fascinated by the play that you and Mary Katherine Nagel wrote about Jim Thorpe, basically the struggle over where he would be buried in his bones. Can you tell me about the origins of of that play and in your involvement in it?
0:55
Well, I saw where the Autry Museum had a short play contest. And it was a few months out, but maybe two or three months. And so I called Mary Katherine said, Should we do a play together or short play for that contest? And she said, Well, on what and I said, How about repatriation? And she said, Well, I started something a while back on Jim Thorpe. But I didn't get anywhere with it. And I. And it was just about the controversy over his body. And so I said, Well, let's go with that. So we did, and, and wrote a play a short play. With that as a as a jumpstart. And we were that play was chosen, I think they chose five to present in. In staged readings, not full production, but a stake trading, and ours was one of them. And then they chose one to go forward with a full production. And it was not ours. But I mean, we were very happy to be among those chosen, and we could, I couldn't do it myself, but MK went to LA and was there. I'm sure they loved having the writer there. during the rehearsals and the like. And then in the meantime, we don't know exactly how we did this, maybe. Maybe I contacted Native American Rights Fund, and told them we had this play, because they were Oh, that's That's right. But Native American Rights Fund was doing was helping the second Fox nation with and two of the Thor summers, the two who were living with a campaign to bring Jim Thorpe home. And I said, Well, what we could do is where you need the play down and need some attention to the lawsuit. And whatever else goes with it, we could be part of the kind of PR campaign and have the play read a staged reading in various locations, and have a panel discussing it. And question and answer from the audience. A pretty easy thing to put on as long as we didn't have to act or direct. So but we did do, we had to change. Oh, so everyone said Oh, yes, that's great. And we had to change the play with every location, because we had a there was a different emphasis in the lawsuit. It was a different audience than the the circuit court, the appellate court in Pennsylvania. knew the federal appellate court was one target. And we did the plane, a local director in Philadelphia, directed and assembled all the actors. And they did the staged reading and John Echo Hawk from Native American Rights Fund myself, the chairman of the second Fox nation, one of the cultural rights people from Sac and Fox, and Richard Leventhal and Lucy Fowler Williams, from the Penn Museum.
All were on a panel. So we're talking about this from in, in legal terms in in anthropological terms, archaeological terms, repatriation terms, and just, you know, giving the reasons that Jim thought deserved to go home, and that he wanted to go home, he always spoke had been selfless being buried in second Fox country. And so his wishes should have been, should have been obey, it should have been followed, I mean, that no one speaks for the disease like that. And instead, on the last night of the ceremonies at second Fox, and it's really the most important night, because in front of all the witnesses and the relatives and friends and more other mourners than his name, his Indian name is returned. And that means that it's no longer his name. And it can be used again by someone else, or others, and in the nation. And you know, he would be remembered by it, but also other people could use that name. So that's the last step before actual burial for the second parts people. And so they were finishing that ceremony and in through the doors that are only used during that ceremony to to go out. That is, it's only used for the deceased to leave for the spirit to leave for people to take the remains and, and go out to the burial. There's a third wife showed up with big strong people and a big car, and they took his body, took the coffin and took his body. And she drove around with it. Putting him on ice, and until, I mean, keep in mind where they were there, the Stroud, Oklahoma, not too far from where he was born. And right, maybe half an hour, 45 minutes to the east of Oklahoma City, and kind of Northeast brown. So she drove him all the way to Pennsylvania, to a town where he had never been to two towns actually. And they were willing to change their name to Jim Thorpe. And we never could found out how much money was was exchanged, that there was money exchanged, that it's not much more than a good guess. So I agree. Yeah. She seems like they paid her she dropped him off. And they built a roadside attraction where he remains today. So they, so we had all of these. I know this is a very long answer to a short question, but we had I think Got about 10 different iterations of that short play. for different purposes, there was a sovereignty conference, the one at the Penn Museum at UPenn. We thought it would be prestigious school for the judges on the appellate court to pay attention to that something was being done on this subject. And, and, you know, a clerk might even show up there, that kind of thing. And who knows if that happened or not, but they did not
rule the way we would have wanted. And we had there were we did the same sort of thing in Oklahoma. At their sovereignty conference every year, the Oklahoma Supreme Court does a sovereignty conference, native sovereignty conference. And so I asked them if they wanted to ask the main judge who works on that if they wanted to host this play? And she said, Oh, yes, of course judge conquer. And so we did the play in the judges building, which has a beautiful theater with a glass floor that actors always hate performing. Slipping and slide, but beautiful, beautiful setting. And and they had everyone there, to see the play, and to have conversation about it. Before they had, what they were hosting is the opening reception for, for the whole symposium. And it's a it's a really important symposium nationally, and especially important in Oklahoma, because you have, because the Oklahoma Supreme Court is, is sponsoring it. So we have lots of judges who are interested tribal court judges, state judges, federal judges, and lawyers who are interested and tribal leaders. And it's a real mix of people. So that was another place we wanted to show this. But we also did a guerrilla theater kind of thing. Taking it to a mall. And show showing it that afternoon, same cache, same local cast, and this was an all native cast, and native director. Because it's Oklahoma, and that's where the end. So they did a staged greeting there in the mall. And then redid it in the ground theater of the Oklahoma Supreme Court justices. And we did one in Washington after the first lady had her meetings with with or convenings with with philanthropists, and also with students. There was a big unity youth Unity Conference in a hotel in DC. And so we cashed and this was one that we did pretty much direct ourselves and we cash high school kids, native high school kids in all the parts, which was really interesting. And that was one of the best performances. They were just great. So anyway, we we had, but every step of the way. Things would have changed and somebody from the campaign would say, do you think we could emphasize this more was Oh, sure, no problem. We do a quick rewrite, and updated and we were just trying to get as much to draw as much attention to the campaign as we could and to give, you know, the thought brothers and and the second Fox nation, a leg up wherever it might be needed. And so that's that that's sort of that play?
15:19
Yeah, well, it's uh, I mean, I've read it it's a very powerful argument and play. Unfortunately. It spread the word but it didn't affect the United States Supreme Court's decision on not to hear the, the appeal. So Right. Right. I'm afraid that that issue is kind of over with now. But the the larger issue of repatriation of so many 1000s of Indian bones is still an enormous issue. And, you know, even at Carlisle, they're finally starting to repatriate some of the bones of the students who sadly died there.
16:04
One of them is my mother's. Right, and whose parents that
16:10
write her name, tell me about that. Her name
16:13
is washed, washed, which is Washington River, and the massacre site in Oklahoma. And her agency name was Elsie Davis. And she was 16 when she contracted tuberculosis, and was sick for about six months and was scheduled to go to the Chicago World's Fair. And to be one of the students exhibits in in the Carlyle classroom exhibition, where they replicated a classroom. Am took students so she died. And one, before she died, she had done an etching of the Cheyenne version of the Morningstar, which is our very important symbol in our cosmology. And there's a distinct way that the just the Cheyenne people have showing the Morningstar and it's where shines are just people come from and where we go when we return to Starbucks. And so it's sort of like she had a premonition that she would die. And anyway, that, so that was that etching was on the wall of that exhibition during the Chicago World's Fair. And I've never seen it, but she
18:23
was already good by that point. She
18:24
was. Oh, and Uber what year that was, is it? Approximately? Was it 93? I think. Yeah, I think that's
18:37
33. Okay.
18:39
Her so and and her. Her passing was noted and the pebble the publication's a couple of the publications that they did. Now her older brother thunder flies around, who was also known as thunder bird, and his agency name was Richard Davis. They were the two youngest children of Chief bull bear who was the head of the dog men society. When the dog men society families, comprised over half of the Cheyenne nation and comprise the Cheyenne resistance. And so chief bull bear had several students, several children and grandchildren at Carlisle. And because pret the superintendent of Carlisle was like a Plains Indian rupee. He I love the Plains Indians, which is what he is the profile that he pushed on all the other Indians. So even those who didn't have that kind of profile, that kind of headdress, that kind of leather and feathers outfits, had to have them because he loved the way the SU and, and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Kyle was looked. And those are the people he spent a long time trying to kill. Oh, he wrote.
20:43
Let's go just a second. Suzanne. Let's get back to the relative who died there. She was buried in the cemetery there.
20:50
She was buried in the cemetery and they got the year wrong. Tori, and she has a headstone. And on her, her Cheyenne name is not on it just says Elsie Davis, and the year and Cheyenne. And, but the year they have just five years out.
21:19
That's not surprising. A lot of the names are misspelled, yes, the tribes are wrong. They have the Christian cross, whether they were religious in that sets or not. That whole cemetery is kind of a travesty in so many ways when
21:37
she so she and others were buried, and then they were exhumed. And, yes, they owe because they wanted to build the art building. So they built that they rebury date those children, and then they wanted to build a road for so they exhumed them again, and built a road. And then they exempt them again, to make way for a stadium and then supposedly re buried them in the historic cemetery. So I don't believe that all of them were re buried. And I do believe that the students were mined for their body parts, just like the like their relatives were being mined for body parts at home, through the army surgeon general's Indian cranium and through the Army Medical Museum and the Smithsonian Museum, as it was called, at that time, efforts to harvest Indian skulls and bones and grave goods, as they called them. And they even advertised in the Rocky Mountain News and other newspapers for people to go out and harvest they use for their collections. And that just send them to either one of us and we'll divvy up the goods. And so they got a lot of their collection there. As well as the 4500 skulls that were studied. And here, here's their scientific study. They would an army officer, all the army medical officers were, you know, in an outpost in the West were tasked with a quota of skulls so and I think some of them were were I think some of them may have been killed for their heads. Mangas Coloradas. For example, the Apache leader, there's much in the literature about he has a huge head he has a really big head and the army officers report is then these are written reports. As soon as the shot body fell to the ground, I immediately decapitated it, and found it and weighed the brains and emotion of the stone. When found, though the skull were smaller, the brain were larger than that of Daniel Webster. So that's a heck of a lot of information for an army officer to have at the ready, you know, as soon as the shot body fell to the ground. So there's sort of thing was going on. And by the time we forced the Smithsonian Institution in the 1980s, to have a to have an inventory.
They had 18,500, human remains, and 4500 skulls. And that was in 1986.
26:05
And how many do they have now?
26:08
I'm not sure what it's down to.
26:12
But you've been able to repatriate many of them.
26:15
I think many of them have been repatriated. Have all of them now have most of them? I think not. But, you know, it's kind of slow going. Because immediately they disassociated what they called the grave goods, the funerary objects, and we changed that whole lexicon and, and repatriation law, mainly because hearing, you can't legislate respect. Well, what you can do is force people when they're when they're acting within a certain law to use a certain language. So we changed specimen and bones and skeletons and all of that to human remains. We change grave goods to funerary objects and sacred objects and so forth. So it's as close as you can get to legislating respect by just forcing people to use non racist language. Exactly. So
27:34
we could talk for hours and hours about are you one of the subjects that I love, you know, to listen to you. But let me let me move on a little bit. Okay. I want you to tell the story about your father in the dinner table.
27:55
Well, Dad, went to two more than boarding schools. He was taken to Yuichi Indian boarding school, in support Oklahoma. And he was after that he went to show Onko Indian agriculture, boarding school, where he met my mother, and they fell in love and then he went away to border she went away to Haskell, boarding school and they they got married after he got shot up at Monte Cassino and returned as a war hero and a disabled veteran and had to go back to Shaco Indian school because he was had been taken when he was a sophomore. And so he went back and boarding school looked better after being in war. So he went back and finished his high school. Got his high school diploma in the year after the war, so he he graduated with the post war. And when he went to Yuichi Indian school he spoke in Skokie. And that was his language. And he could speak because of ceremonies and get togethers, he and he was a really fast learner. He could speak a lot of the other Muskogee languages, Seminole and Choctaw and Chickasaw on Alabama, Colorado. They're just a whole raft of them. So he began in school, just like you'd be in a lunch line
sorry, he'd been a watch line and you'd say to the kid next to him, bucks changed, gone. Let's go eat boy, which is the polite way. thing you would say to someone coming to your house or someone. When you're out someplace, you're inviting them to get in the line for the food. And so he'd get beat up for that. And I go by the discipline Aryans, the teachers and the disciplinarian. They were all disciplinarian, but it would either be the the teachers, the matrons, the Proctor's the people who ran the school,
31:21
and they would beat him up because he spoke in Muskogee. Yes.
31:23
And, and he didn't speak English. So I asked him what he was beaten with. And he said, with boards, with one by twos, and two by twos, and that's a bat, when you're nine years old, you're not much taller than a bat. And that's what they were beating him with. So he figured out that you're not supposed to talk in line. So then you didn't talk in line. And he would be seated at the table and ask someone to pass something or he would pass something to someone else or offer some food to someone. And they would beat him up for that. We thought okay, you're not supposed to talk around food. But he heard everyone else talking. Yeah, okay. You're just not supposed to talk your language. You're not supposed to talk Indian you're not supposed to talk Muskogee around food. So he said that was pretty much an incentive to learn English really fast. And he did. And you know, when he went away to war he and he was with the 45th Infantry Division, the Thunderbirds, and they would come in in Company C. And they used to, you know, how the companies are ABC Able Baker, Charlie? Well in Oklahoma, it was a for Anadarko. B for Bae comb, which is an upper school, C for Schelotto. Because that stole the boys in Company C were functional ACO and and they were dad was one of the one of the hubs for the code that they develop. They weren't like the Navajo code talkers, who overlaid over layer, the Navajo language, a top a code that was developed by the Marines, that this was a wholly different kind of organic code that they figured out in basic training and on the trip ship to North Africa. And they based it on the coordinates of Chicago. And, you know, where you had a lake, you had this kind of hiding place and that kind of hill and and everyone knew the directions of this and that and, and they they used as many words and phrases as they knew of the students who went to Schelotto So even though none of them are only a couple of them were Pueblo, and they didn't really speak their language that that well.
They were they would, all of them. All the students, irrespective of how fluent they were, or how conversational they were, they all knew words and phrases, and had relatives or could describe someone who looked a certain way that and that, so, they would use that aspect of that particular person in that particular student's family. You know, now soldiers family, to main Italy, or to me, the Chaldeans or, and then, you know, on this would mean not saying That was mean. So, they, and they became rather famous for it in North Africa. And their superiors would approach them and say, Okay, we need, you know, reconnaissance, and you go here, and you go here, and here are some walkie talkies and just talk to each other. And so they did that. And, and so, this was, it's so ironic that the language that that they were beaten up for, and torture really, for speaking, or singing or thinking in was part of what helped when the war in Europe and in the Pacific Theater, because lots of these almost every Native nation in the United States had some sort of code, even if they were only using their words, for word for word. And it wasn't strictly speaking a code. They were just using their language. They still had some sort of code and, and then, out of these boarding schools, you had that mix of language where you developed a code that could never be broken under any circumstances, and Dad used to say that they were perfectly schooled to be they were perfectly schooled to be prisoners or to be soldiers, by their experience in boarding school. Because they, they learn to withstand torture, they learn loyalty to each other, and never to turn each other in or rat on each other.
38:49
And that's very powerful Suzanne, and prisoners
38:52
they were not afraid to, and they could evade the enemy. Yes. So that was the
39:00
that's the drama of that early experience. When he was beaten for speaking in Muskogee, when he at the table, there's something that you noticed about him for the rest of his life, right?
39:18
Sure. I am. So even, you know, after he graduated from from Schelotto, then the army had a recruitment for disabled more veterans, especially those who they could teach cryptography, and how to decode and how to make up codes and decode them. And so dad was part of that. In the army, and he would, he'd learned lots of different languages. At the Presidio at Monterey, for example. The three dialects of Chinese and the Korean language and it's a total immersion thing. But so and and he picked up European languages like, what they were his second language.
40:20
So how many languages can you speak?
40:23
Well, I'm not really sure. I know it was at least nine. It depends on how you count the languages. But he, he was. And he spoke a pretty sophisticated language. You know, to be able to write code. In most languages, it had to be pretty nuanced in the language. So that was his orientation. And even with all of that, he and his perfect diction and grammar and so many languages. He only stuttered in one and that was Muskogee. And why? Well, because that was the one who used to get beat up for speaking. So. And he didn't stutter in ceremony, which was interesting. And he didn't stutter when he was singing in the scope. But just talking in a formal way, or talking in just a conversational way, he stuttered. And from that experience, to the other lasting thing was that he really had a hard time eating and speaking. At the same time, we joked he couldn't do it, he couldn't talk at the table. And whenever we lived with mom and dad, sometimes were raised by our grandparents, and on the east side of Oklahoma, and on the west side of Oklahoma. But Mom and Dad took us to the garden spots to Hawaii and Naples, Italy. And and that was always great being with them and these fabulous places. And so he would, when we all lived together, my brothers and my sisters and myself and our parents, we would he developed him routine, where he would ask us questions. And we would have to whatever it was, we would recite something when he he loved poetry. He would ask about what was going on in the world? What was going on in our school? What was going on with friends? What what did we think of this or that political figure or cultural figure, or Elvis Presley or whoever was the whatever occurred to him, and so he would generate conversation. And he could eat that way. And it really helped us. And I didn't notice that that was the reason he was doing it. I knew that what we were doing was different from a lot of my friends. And we had a table that was very active and, and inquisitive and curious and all of those things, and that we were expected to know stuff. And to be able to call so we were learning all sorts of great stills. From his inability to make conversation himself around food. He just couldn't do it. And at times, he would just kind of pull back from the table and go into another room. Oh, which, I mean, we didn't attribute that to anything, we thought that was just his way.
But when we really my brothers and I really were the beneficiaries of my parents, our parents having gone to boarding school, and having had some pretty bad experiences, with abuse, and, you know, just emotional violence and physical violence and torture and all of those things. Now, in addition to being malnourished, and in all of the things that go with, that kind of setup for where people are buying food on the cheap, and you know, not the best cooks in the world, and you're kind of eating slop and that sort of thing, so. And my parents, our parents really made it a life mission to figure out with precision. How they did this to us how that happened. And dad would say, like, my mom would say, well, in our way, in the Cheyenne way, this this the other thing, and he would say, that's not Shem ham that chalok. And she would say, Well, you know, that's not Muskogee that's Yuichi you Indian School, and they would they were each other's ears. And hearing that was pretty amazing. What, what they were able to do,
47:11
yes. Again, I can talk about that subject forever, too. But let's move on to another one. I know that you've devoted a lot of your, about in the many, many things you've done. You've been a leading spokesperson trying to change the racist mascots of athletic teams. When did you get involved in that? And how do you feel about how things are changing now?
47:43
Well, I don't remember getting involved. I've just always been involved. Family wherever I was living in Oklahoma, everyone hated little red at the University of Oklahoma. Called in everyone called him the dancing idiot. And had all sorts of why I hate little read stories and jokes about him and
48:16
and he was always really ignorance, but who was little red?
48:19
Oh, I'm sorry, the University of Oklahoma's mascot. You know, the University of Ohio, it used to be that all the schools just had colors. So Oklahoma was Big Red, red and white. And so they had to have a diminutive name for a mascot and they always had a white guy playing portraying an Indian and they call that mascot little red.
48:52
So it was supposed to be an Indian
48:55
right? And who would go out and do something that they thought was a native dance on the football field and later they had to compromise and and it and said From now on we'll only have Indian boys the little so the the movement to get rid of Little Red shame them out and whoever was chosen and they would drop out and other would be chosen they would drop out. And finally everyone mobilized across across the ODU campus and many other campuses and and I had a real cross cultural cold notion of, you know, the Black Student Union that Chicago Student Union, the women's union everyone who was trying to press their rights in the 60s joined up and everyone had their own kind of issues with this. Not so much the sports world but but advertising world and tokenism and mass starting and native people were backing Chicano people and getting rid of Frito Bandito, who was a really annoying racist cartoon. And the Chicanos and native people were backing the Black Student Union trying to get rid of Sam bones rushed and did eventually. So these were all really successful names now. And Little Red was the very first one and in in American sports to to die. So that was the first dead mascot was was little red. And that was in 1970. Well, I had been kind of recruited for the know mascot movement in 1962, by Clyde warrior, who was a panko celebrity in Indian country, and alcohol, Oklahoma, because he was a fancy dancer, and a very important Howell dancer, everyone knew him. And he was. And he was the head of Oklahoma and what was it, Oklahoma Indian Youth Council and was starting with some people from the northwest and from Nevada and other places around the country, the National Indian Youth Council. So part of his recruiting for ni yc. And for the Oklahoma version was at our high school in an Oklahoma City at Harding. And he spoke to our school and met with the Indian students and, and really energized us and informed us about the seriousness of that issue. And he stressed you know, little red just has to go and we have to take care of that. But the worst one is the one in Washington, DC, right there in the nation's capitol. And the way he talked about the Washington football team, and horrible name, you would have thought that they lived and played underneath the Capitol dome. That was sort of the image that we got. So I was fully prepared to do something about Odin help do something about getting rid of that one, too. But, so Clyde warrior really was, you know, in addition to my family and other people that
they knew they didn't like little red. And if you really push them, they could save why. But they didn't have a way of articulating it in the same way that that Clyde did. And so in addition to Clyde being a very handsome man, we were all going oh, he's really cute. He was an intellectual and was someone who was quite an auditor. And so we were really privileged to be schooled by him. He didn't live he died very young and did not live to see the end of little red in 1970. He died in the late 1960s. But that really was his victory. And, and he had the people he had been working with were on campuses where they got rid of their mascots to Stanford and Dartmouth and Syracuse and Mark hat.
55:22
But it was a long fight to get rid of the one in Washington. It certainly
55:26
was. And, and it continues because there still are some teams in the country that have that same horrible name. Although we got rid of it, every college in America, we've gotten rid of that word, as a as a team name in every college, and we've gotten rid of over 2000 of the of all of them all of those sports references, mascot mascots and names and slogans and behaviors, the tomahawk chop and that sort of thing. In from 2000 different locations, different schools. And they're still about 1500. left to go.
56:38
No kidding.
56:39
Yeah. So, but their drives like
56:41
Braves or whatever. Yeah.
56:45
And some still that are word but but not in higher education schools. Just some high schools and but they're, they're changing fast. And every time you have I mean, we knew when, when we were contemplating filing suit against the Washington football team that we would probably not win. But we could help a lot of schools, a lot of native people who were fighting the battle at home, in their schools in some two and three generations fighting. And that every time we would make news that we would see changes and and that that's exactly what was happening for the 25 years that we were in litigation, 17 years and our lawsuit, and then about seven after viewers and the identical case that I organized with native young people between the ages of 18 and 24. So you know, but for our combined continuous litigation of the quarter century where we actually won almost everything we never lost on the merits. And we would only lose on technicalities. And but nonetheless, there are loss. But every time there would be something happening in our lawsuit, or in the subsequent lawsuit we would have 50 to 100 and sometimes more schools changing their names. So it's a really important gym strategy and I mean, we it was calculated we knew what we were doing.
59:26
What do you think was the tipping point for finally getting the Washington football team?
59:31
Well you know, depending on Well, there's so many they they took a pandemic that took all of us watching George Floyd murdered before eyes. And most people in the world have never seen a dead person, let alone seen a person murdered in front of them. And that's what we saw. And that was, I think, that shook a lot of people to their core. It shook the people from who controlled Aunt Jemima to their core, it shook Fred Smith, the owner of FedEx to his core, after being hard hearted, and just messing with us for about 10 years, and not doing anything to keep FedEx out of the management and promotion business for the team and being its main enabler. But something happened there. And, you know, then, of course, an economic meltdown. The the cheerleaders and their their openness about what was happening, the women who worked in the front office, bringing their complaints of sexual harrassment to the minority members of owners, minority interest owners, Fred Smith and the two others around 40% of the team of the franchise that I think had a lot to do with it. The general discuss, as I understand it, on their part about Daniel Snyder, he's just not a very well liked person.
1:02:08
an understatement. So it was a perfect storm of a lot of different factors,
1:02:13
a lot of different factors and what and I mean, we knew who he was, he bullied us. No more than Jack Kent Cooke had we sued him first. Or John can cook. But still, he believed us. And then really, really was nasty to us. And and did a lot of very underhanded things the lawyers did, went out, for example, they went out to Pine Ridge and Rosebud in South Dakota to Sioux reservations. And they went to the one star family. And the one star man was there, their ancestor was a student at Carlyle, in the 1880s, early 1880s, and that's whose identity lone star gates stole with exactly with the assistance of Richard Pratt and Pop Warner. Pop Warner who recruited and all sorts of ringers who were not native and who were not even teenagers.
1:03:51
Suzanne, Pop Warner is the villain of my book, excellent access pages and lodestar deeds was not really an Indian. No, he
1:04:00
was not. He was not an Indian, despite the the Washington football teams propaganda that he was a full blooded Su. And he wasn't he had two parents who were German, German American, that he was from South Dakota. He wasn't he was from Wisconsin, Wisconsin, and that he was a beloved coach will help beloved can you be Jew last only 11 miles. Doesn't sound like a really beloved guy.
1:04:38
But he was there when the Boston Braves became the Washington Redskins. He was
1:04:43
he was and probably Pratt didn't like that term Redskin. Pop Warner seemed to really like it. And Dietsch was and accommodation is to warn her. And so though those
you have that that identity theft, which showed up in our lawsuit with the trial judge overturning in our case, overturning the three trademark expert judges 146 pages of your nana unanimous decision in our favor. And and the way she started off her opinion was that with the team propaganda that he was this lone star do that. The reason they were honoring us and not offending us was that lone star Dietsch was native who was a full blown Su, from South Dakota, and beloved coach, and they wouldn't have named used a bad word or dishonorable word because of how wonderful he was, and they were trying to promote him. So it was all a fraud, it was all a fraud, and which they Daniel Snyder still hasn't caught up to. So they went out to the lawyers from whitened case went out to to Lakota country. And I got a call from a friend of mine, who was the attorney for Bob Gough, who was the attorney on a lawsuit about Crazy Horse malt liquor. To show a Lakota extended family of Crazy Horse did not want his name used, especially not for malt liquor. And so they got that taken off the market. And but they were fighting that battle and the one star family was a part of that was part of the descendants of enchanted horse Crazy Horse.
1:07:35
And so there was a belief that lodestar was related to the one star family
1:07:43
right because he had he had falsified his his credentials and taken on the the the identity of one star games.
1:08:04
So the lawyers went out to Lakota country and try to do what
1:08:08
they went out with lots of clothes with the R word all over jackets and and they wanted Mr. One star to sign something saying that lone star gates was his ancestor, and that they had no problem with the name and they wanted to honor their ancestor. So I'm just mister one star was telling me about a bob golf put him on. And so he was telling me about the clothes. He said, our kids love the clothes. He said, it's real cold day here. And they put on sweatshirts, and their T shirts, and they have sweatpants and they have a jacket and they have hats. They have everything and and everything's really warm, and they're playing and they're all really happy. And then he said, these lawyers gave me their paper. And so I told him, I couldn't sign that because it wasn't true. You said so. I said, we'll take the clothes, we'll keep the course. But I just can't sign your paper. And he said they went away with really long faces. I thought how tacky trying to go out there and bribe them to their kids and you know, to get some sleazy thing like that. I will say that in our 25 years of litigation, they never produced a single negative person on their side who would withstand court scrutiny. I mean, they didn't even try. Because they they were just coming up with people who were fakes. They were just, it was obvious when they would open the door that they were takes. And they saw it. And they were attacking us as people who had no support, even as they were trying to keep out the evidence of our support. In one case, trying to keep out of evidence, and make a brief by the National Congress of American Indians National Indian Youth Council, National Indian Education Association and Thai car, which is Tulsa, Indian Coalition Against Racism, which was founded to get rid of the R word to me as a team name of Union High School in Tulsa, which didn't give it up until after the Washington team change.
1:11:27
"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.