‘Educating the Natives’
Like most Americans, my initial and only knowledge of the Carlisle Indian School was in relation to Jim Thorpe, the star football player and Olympic athlete who was a student there in the early 1900s. I did a report in class on a young-adult book about him, and saw the sentimental, not especially good movie starring Burt Lancaster as Thorpe. Lancaster, though an athlete, was not only not a Native American, as was the norm in those days, he was far too old for the part. I was a big movie fan, and many of the things I saw dealt with the various ‘Indian wars’ in what is now the US, from Northwest Passage and Drums Along the Mohawk to They Died with Their Boots On and Cheyenne Autumn. They were mostly celebratory, the various tribes seen as impediments to the project of Manifest Destiny whether they were waging a full-out war or just adding an exciting chase to something like Stagecoach.
I think my first real questioning of the official story came from reading Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, each chapter exploring a different violent encounter between white settlers and the military that supported them and an Indian nation that chose to resist. I recognized movies that I had seen in many of these accounts, and came away thinking that not only were they much more balanced and believable in the book, but they were better stories. This may partly be my own preference for stories that recognize the complexity of human relations and political situations rather than a more ‘heroic’ approach. Reading the books of Mari Sandoz, and then the work of indigenous writers such as James Welch, N. Scott Momaday, and Louise Erdrich deepened my interest, and then, at least twenty years ago, I got a screenplay rewrite job on a story about a famous football game between the West Point team and the Carlisle Indian School during the last year Jim Thorpe played for them. The movie never got made, but the research I did into the materials available at that time got me interested in the history of the school and the impact it had on the kids who were sent there, enough so that I wrote a screenplay to direct myself, set at the school in 1890-91, the same time as the Ghost Dance and the massacre at Wounded Knee. The school grounds belonged to the US Army – they allowed Captain Richard Pratt to base his educational ‘experiment’ there till the First World War, then took it back. The Carlisle School archives, such as they were, had been sent over to the nearby city’s public library, where librarian Barbara Landis began to organize, and eventually digitize them, an enormous stroke of luck for me when I began research for my screenplay.
Very much like my last novel, Jamie MacGillivray, also based on a screenplay of mine, many years of effort went into attempting to raise the funds to make it into a movie, but we had no luck with either studio or private investment. A few years ago I decided it was too good a story to give up on, and began to adapt it into a novel. The biggest difference in the two forms, for me, is their relation to time. A feature film is meant, ideally, to be viewed in one sitting. Information and action are doled out in an almost musical rhythm, building and releasing tension, with a familiar set of time-transition devices to help you move the story along. None of my novels have been written to be read in one sitting- they’re not short stories. So moving a story from a movie format to that of a novel opens up opportunities in both depth and scale, and for me, in the number of points of view that can be accessed to tell a complex story. Though the events in the novel To Save the Man are basically the same as those in the screenplay, I wanted to experience them through more characters. The Carlisle school was rare in its day not only because of the ethnicity of the students, but because it was a co-educational boarding school set up like a military academy, students arriving with extremely different levels of ‘assimilation’. There were kids from the east whose tribes had been dealing with white people and speaking English for nearly two centuries, and others who had never encountered railroad trains, books, or stairways. Many basic classes were populated according to degree of comfort with the English language, so a young man of seventeen or eighteen might find himself sitting next to an eight-year-old. Kids from tribes that were traditional enemies found themselves rooming together, enormous differences of world view and religion between tribes were ignored by the white instructors in their quest to ‘civilize’ the students. So each of my student characters required a lot of thought and research to understand where they were coming from and what their reaction to the school and its goals might be.
In this I found My Indian Boyhood, by Carlisle graduate Luther Standing Bear, and Indian Boyhood, by Dr. Charles Eastman, a Santee Dakota who graduated from medical school and was present for the aftermath of the Wounded Knee Massacre, invaluable. The many writings of Zitkala Ska, aka Gertrude Bonnin, who taught at Carlisle a few years and was one of the mainstays of the Society of American Indians in their campaign to have native people classified as American citizens, were a revelation, and I based a character in the novel, Miss Redbird, on her.
Good research requires a critical eye and a good deal of cross-checking, and even writings you find factually suspect or even repugnant can be useful in understanding what the mind-set of a certain era or strata of society might be. One of my important characters, Marianna Burgess, wrote a novel called Stiya, which is as awful to read today as Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, and the inflammatory journalism that helped set the stage for the Wounded Knee massacre, including calls for genocide by L. Frank Baum of the Oz books, gave me a good idea of how poisonous the atmosphere was in that time and place. The Carlisle school’s founder, Captain Richard Pratt, was a progressive in his day, and yet felt the annihilation of native culture and languages was necessary for the survival of the people themselves (his oft-repeated motto being ‘To Save the man, we must kill the Indian’). His Battlefield and Classroom does a very good job of explaining his world view and how he came to it.
In researching a specific incident or area one thing tends to lead to another, and I discovered James Mooney’s The Ghost Dance Religion and Wounded Knee, written shortly after the massacre by an ethnologist well ahead of his time, explaining the ghost dance in both human and historical terms as something understandable and not at all exotic. And in that book I stumbled on a mention of a Catholic priest, Father Craft, who was stabbed during the fighting at Wounded Knee and survived. This led me to Thomas Foley’s Father Francis M. Craft, Missionary to the Sioux. This consists of several excerpts from Craft’s diaries, which make for twisted yet fascinating reading, one chapter aptly titled Was Father Craft Insane?
How can you leave somebody like that out of your story?
John Sayles is an American independent film director, screenwriter, actor, and novelist. He has twice been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, for Passion Fish (1992) and Lone Star (1996). He is the author of eight novels, including Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade’s Journey (2023), and his latest, To Save the Man, published by Melville House.
