Volume 35 Number 3
Spring 1996

Sports have become one of the most significant and perhaps puzzling legacies of the policy to educate and assimilate Native American children via a system of off-reservation boarding schools. Virtually nobody who designed the federal boarding school system in the late 19th century mentioned sports as a reason for creating these institutions. Yet, by 1950, out of federal Indian boarding schools had come world famous athletes like Jim Thorpe, nationally ranked football teams, regionally dominant girls and boys basketball and track teams, and highly rated boxing teams. Superficially, many of these athletes served to legitimate the boarding school project; promoting the idea that Native Americans could become assimilated in ways that the federal government hoped they would. Sports at Indian boarding schools, however, were a far more complex form of popular culture that students, boarding school administrators, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) itself often struggled with each other to define. These struggles reveal how, through sports, students, administrators, reformers, and government officials negotiated important issues of cultural memory and national identity that were in dialogue with the specific historical contexts that Native Americans encountered in the 20th century.

Cultural memory was an issue often relevant to the struggle over sports at Indian boarding schools. These institutions throughout their history have been defined by the extent to which Native American cultures could be remembered and toward what ends. The boarding school system was developed in the 1870s at the behest of a loose coalition that included cattle ranchers, reformers, homesteaders, oil companies, land speculators, and politicians. The motives of these groups varied, but generally all opposed Native American sovereignty, and saw any occupation of tribes upon North American soil as an obstacle to social progress and financial gain. At the same time, they saw themselves as "humanitarians" because they recognized American Indians as human beings whom they felt could be educated and absorbed into mainstream society. In the minds of their most zealous promoters, such as Carlisle Indian School founder Richard Henry Pratt, this process could be completed in a single generation (Olson & Wilson, 1984, pp. 60-61).

Life at boarding school, particularly between 1880 and 1930, was defined by a highly rigid curriculum, schedule, and system of military discipline. Students wore uniforms, had their hair cut to standardized lengths, and were not allowed to speak any language other than English. Punishments for breaking rules were often harsh, involving heavy labor and sometimes physical beatings. Recently, scholars have employed oral histories and personal records of former students to gain more understanding of the experiences of Native American children who attended boarding schools. Brenda Child, Sally Hyer, Alice Littlefield, Tsianina Lomawaima, and Sally McBeth have created a body of scholarship that explores the complex memories and emotions that former students have toward boarding school life, and the significance of boarding school memories to contemporary understandings of Native American identity. In spite of an often brutal boarding school system, students have often managed to negotiate and create new understandings of tradition and cultural autonomy while at these institutions, and remember their lives as students with a complex set of mixed emotions (See Child, 1993; Hyer, 1990; Littlefield, 1989; Lomawaima, 1994; McBeth, 1984).

Few, however, have interpreted the cultural significance of sports to boarding school history and experiences. Those who have done so have come to some widely varying conclusions as to what sports have meant. Ward Churchill, for example, has focused upon the popular representations that athletic teams at boarding schools have garnered, and the uses of sports within Indian boarding schools to socialize students (Churchill, Hill & Barlow, 1979). Churchill et al. write about the success of the athletic programs at the Carlisle Indian School and Haskell Institute in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Beginning in the mid-1890s, Carlisle began to field football teams that competed successfully against the national powerhouse programs of the time. In 1899, the school hired the legendary coach Glenn S. "Pop" Warner, who led Carlisle's football team to tremendous success over the next fifteen years. Carlisle also competed successfully in track and baseball, and introduced the public to a number of star athletes, including future baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Charles Albert "Chief" Bender, distance runner Louis Tewanima, and, most prominently, Olympic gold medalist Jim Thorpe. After Carlisle closed in 1918, the Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas assumed national prominence in football, particularly during the 1920s when its teams traveled to play in Yankee Stadium, and generated enough publicity to finance the construction of a 10,000 seat football stadium on its campus (Oxendine, 1988, pp. 183-202; Bloom, 1996, pp. 97-110).

Churchill et al. (1979) argues that although Indian school athletes enjoyed great success, the media images that they generated did little for Native Americans themselves other than to promote a vision of American Indians as animalistic, racially defined, purely physical beings. They write:

Insofar as the objectives of such institutions as Carlisle and Haskell were to assimilate native American youth into the dominant culture, athletics served a distinct purpose. The native American within non-Indian mythology is (and has always been) an overwhelmingly physical creature. Sport was and is an expedient means of processing this physicality into a 'socially acceptable' package without disrupting mythology; Indians traced as Indians into the mainstream. (p. 31)

This interpretation of boarding school athletics shows how a commercial entertainment industry aimed at white consumers can manipulate and coopt non-white sports heroes. Yet the interpretation also does not draw much from the experiences and perspectives of former students to understand the ways that memories of sports might have been meaningful to them.

Conversely, Alice Littlefield (1989), in her oral history of students who attended the Mt. Pleasant Indian school in Michigan, takes note of how those who attended the school often positively remember sports. Littlefield found that in her interviews, former students, particularly male ones, frequently remembered not only that Mt. Pleasant competed successfully on the high school level in football and basketball, but they also recalled that teams usually won against non-Indian opponents. For some, the only photographs that they retained from their years in boarding school were ones of athletic teams. "Given the assimilationist aims of the BIA educational system, athletic prowess became a symbol of Indian identity and Indian pride," Littlefield notes (p. 438). Along with "pranks" and "adventures," "athletic conquests" composed some of the fondest memories for students. She argues that former students who remember sports actually express sentiments of resistance to the regimentation and discipline that they faced while in school (p. 438).

Littlefield's work suggests that sports were a complex part of boarding school experiences. The specific historical contexts of boarding school life shaped school sports, but through sports Native American students could reimagine and rearticulate their cultural memories, traditions, and identities. Her observations might seem, at first glance, relatively implausible given the ways that boarding schools used sports to socialize students and promote assimilationist policies. Yet, as April Schultz (1991) has argued in her work on immigrant ethnicity, "historical evidence that seems to embrace Americanization can sustain alternative interpretations" (p. 1267). In a nuanced study of ethnicity and assimilation, Schultz states that ethnic identities are a "process of identification at a particular moment to cope with historical realities" rather than a fixed item that is either maintained or lost (p. 1267).

Patricia Albers and William James also have argued in their study of the Santee (Sioux) that ethnic identity is dynamic and changes over time. Albers and James (1986) see ethnic identity as a dialectic process in which people "differentiate and label themselves in relation to others" within the "concrete circumstances and dynamics of social relationships" that are present at a moment in history, and that help define how groups are differentiated from one another (p. 12). Popular culture is a location where this kind of dialectical process often takes place. George Lipsitz (1990) suggests that popular culture forms, which can include popular sports activities and events, are contradictory and multi-layered, and can be understood as vehicles for recalling alternative memories from the past that exist in dialogue with the concrete conditions that subjugated people face at any historic moment.

Such dialogic interpretations of ethnicity are useful to understanding the significance of athletics at Indian boarding schools, for the historical contexts of boarding school life were, in and of themselves, complex and contradictory. This is reflected in the conflicting positions and attitudes toward sports that boarding school administrators and national reform leaders expressed over time. The role of sports at boarding schools and the attitude of local school administrators and the federal government often changed between 1890 and 1950, and always contained contradictions. This became particularly true after 1928 when a commission headed by Lewis Meriam issued a scathing report that criticized the wretched conditions at many schools, the highly regimented forms of military style discipline they employed, and the lack of respect payed to diverse Native American cultures and traditions (Brookings Institute, 1928). Among their criticisms was a lack of time for free play and recreation. With the appointment of Will Carson Ryan as Director of Education in 1930, and John Collier as Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1933, the BIA set out to reform, and ultimately eliminate the boarding school system, heeding many of the Meriain Report's recommendations (Szasz, 1977). (see Note 1)

The Collier administration took a critical stance toward the position of sports that had developed at boarding schools. In internal memos, Ryan, for example, noted the irony that while the need for free play and recreation had been neglected at schools, institutions like Haskell and Carlisle had fielded nationally famous football teams that had competed with top ranked colleges from around the United States (see Note 2). Such teams brought fame and notoriety to schools and school administrators, as they also generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. Collier and Ryan may have initiated a shift in federal policy toward boarding school sports, but they also articulated objections that had been present since Carlisle first fielded its nationally ranked football teams in the 1890's. Richard Henry Pratt, for example, expressed particularly conflicting views on the usefulness of football. He wavered between seeing the game as a vehicle to bring notoriety to the work of assimilation being conducted at Indian boarding schools, and seeing football itself as a brutal, corrupt, and dishonest game (see Note 3). Carlos Montezuma, the famed Pan-Indian leader and Native American Doctor who was a staunch supporter of Pratt, served as the football squad's team doctor in the 1890s. After a victory over the University of Wisconsin in Chicago in December of 1896, Montezuma praised football, writing from that city to Pratt,

I can give no words that will express the amount of good the awakening power of what Carlisle is doing for the rising generation of the Indians by your football team and band coming to. . . . The press club-the pulse of Chicago-has had their eyes opened and now they understand Carlisle as never before. . . . They thought at first the team was coming only for what money there was in it, but now they see different. It was only to make a way into their hearts, so that they may realize their obligation to the Indian children for education and freedom into their enlightenment. (Larner, 1983, Reel #1)

By November of 1907, however, Montezuma had reversed his opinion of football at Carlisle. He had become angered after the BIA dismissed Pratt in 1904 for making incendiary comments about the federal government. In 1907, W.G. Thompson, a former Carlisle administrator who had helped to introduce football at the school, wrote to Montezuma of corruption within the football program that he felt was emblematic of a larger gap in moral leadership that had taken place since Pratt's departure. Thompson's letter expressed a strong sentiment that sports symbolized a more general decline that had taken place at Carlisle. "The school has degenerated into a school of professional athletes where everything - the welfare of the individual as well as that of the community-must step aside to gratify the desire of . . . .'Pop' Warner" (Larner, 1983, reel #2). In response, Montezuma wrote a nationally syndicated column on football at Carlisle. In that article, he cited specific instances of corruption within the school's athletic program, and harshly condemned Carlisle athletics for professionalism (Montezuma, 1907). By the 1930s, an institutional split developed over the use of sports at boarding schools. Generally, local school administrators tended to enjoy the local notoriety and school spirit generated by athletics. Against their best wishes, however, national leaders such as Collier and Ryan opposed this use of sports and favored the promotion of intramural athletics and recreation which would allow a greater degree of free play and incorporate a larger number of participants.

Although this approach showed more respect toward Native American cultures, it was still contained within a progressive discourse that had guided federal education policies toward Native Americans since the late 19th century. For example, the Gallup Indian Ceremonial in April of 1939 included exhibits of "authentic Indian-made" arts and crafts from the southwestern pueblos that the BIA had encouraged Indians to develop into marketable consumer products. The agency's monthly magazine, Indians at Work, featured a photo of one such exhibit which illustrated the uses of such items in the decor of the "modern home." The photo and exhibit were significant for they positioned Native American cultures and traditions as consistent and compatible with middle-class tastes, commodity buying, and family living ("Pueblo Art," 1939). In other words, the Bureau was enlisting one form of Native American cultural memory to establish the legitimacy of federal leadership and commodity capitalism as progress, yet it was precisely such ideas of "progress" that had historically worked to render Native American cultural and social relations "obsolete."

Two statements with regard to physical education at boarding schools exemplify these changes and contradictions within federal policy toward American Indian education. One is from the universal Course of Study issued in 1901 to all Indian boarding schools. The manual suggests, "In order to get the best out of life, it is necessary to look into the physical condition of pupils and give them the training that will counteract the influences of unfortunate heredity and strengthen the physique, in order that they may be able to bear the strain that competition in business and earning a living will impose" (Reel, 1901, p. 196). Here, the student is defined as a racial inferior, categorized as the offspring of "unfortunate heredity." As she or he is not defined culturally, the memory of specific cultural differences is completely ignored. Physical education is presented as a means by which the student can overcome the assumed barriers of biology.

In 1941, Collier approved a document titled the Manual for Indian School Service that also addressed physical education. The manual criticizes both the earlier, racist use of physical education as well as interscholastic competition. Instead, it promotes, "Intramural athletics and games in which everybody has a chance to play" (Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1941, p. 28-29). This statement shows a concern and respect for the well being of students and concedes the importance of creativity in play. At the same time, however, it ends by presenting sports within a utilitarian context, useful as a method of bringing about social progress.

Athletics and recreational activities in our schools should be planned with a view to the adoptability of the games, skills, and social activities to after school life in rural or reservation areas. If this is consistently observed, much can be done to forestall delinquency through substitution of constructive and worthwhile activities. (Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1941, p. 29)

In the minds of federal officials, then, not only were interscholastic sports opposed because they were exploitative, they also ultimately did not bring about social progress. Intramural athletics were not only preferred because they were more playful, but also because they built character and promoted "constructive and worthwhile" behavior.

In spite of the conservative implications of such rhetoric, it also exemplified the more general conflicts that were expressed in BIA educational policy during the 1930s. In attempting to legitimate federal leadership, the Bureau drew upon ethnic identities and values it had simultaneously been subverting. Yet by recalling the memory of such identities, it also allowed for students themselves to recall their own positions and histories in dialogue with the historic conditions they faced while in boarding school. Lipsitz (1990) has argued that, within popular culture, ethnic memories have often been used to establish the legitimacy of new social arrangements built around consumption, bureaucratization, corporate leadership, and ideologies of rugged individualism, making selfish acquisition and commodity buying seem consistent with "traditional values." Yet he also argues that evoking such memory invites counter-interpretations of the present drawn from the textured experiences of the past. There is always the potential that drawing from memory might not transform values in ways that it is intended, but instead recall a past that can be used to understand the present and future critically rather than ahistorically (pp. 39-75). (see Note 5)

In 1995, I conducted a total of 10 oral history interviews with 11 men and 5 women who had either attended boarding schools themselves, or who had relatives who were former boarding school students. They often discussed their experiences with sports in terms that related a sense of struggle over identity. At times, they discussed sports as an expression of Native American pride, but as importantly, they talked about sports as something that was pleasurable in ways that did not always conform with the utilitarian and progressive mission of boarding school educators.

The expression of Native American pride was something particularly important to students. This mattered in part because the professed goals of respect toward Native American cultures did not always match the actual experiences of students who attended boarding schools after 1933. For example, many remembered not being allowed to speak English while at school. An Ojibwa man who was sent to the Wahpeton boarding school in North Dakota in the early 1930s, and then later to Pipestone Indian School in Minnesota, recalled being beaten for speaking his native language. First sent to Wahpeton at age five, he spoke "nothing but Ojibwa language . . . they beat that out of you in a hurry boy." A Navajo man who attended Intermountain boarding school in Utah during the early 1950s remembered that students who spoke Navajo had their mouths washed out with soap. He said:

What they wanted us to do is to speak English and be civilized or whatever. You know, and then forget about our own language, our own way of doing things.

Like many others, this man felt that sports was something that he associated with both cultural memory and pride. He was on an intramural cross-country team at Intermountain, and discussed how the tradition of running among Navajo males made him and his schoolmates a formidable team. For others, sports became a way to express a more general sense of pan-Indian pride. I interviewed one man who was a successful boxer at Santa Fe. He discussed how boarding school had brought him to meet people from a variety of different tribes: plains Indians, people from nearly every New Mexico Pueblo, Apaches, and Indians from the Pacific northwest. When I asked him what motivated him to win in the ring, and to overcome any fear of getting hurt, he mentioned a sense of pride located in an expansive understanding of Native American Identity.

Well, I'll tell you, you got the pride. . . . If there's any race that's speaking different languages, outside of you, well you got the pride to demonstrate that you going to be in there fighting . . . for with all that you have. Because you're an Indian, well you going to show what an Indian can do.


A man who attended the Flandreau Indian School during the late 1960s remembered a great deal of discord between students from urban backgrounds and those who grew up on rural reservations. Throughout all of this, however, beating white teams in sports such as basketball gave all students a sense of common pride, and as importantly, a respect for their common positions as Native Americans in North America in relation to European American society.

I think that's the only thing we felt that we were equal on. That the only thing that they see us as being equal were- we played them and we beat them . . . you get the impression . . . they already got us beat just by looking at us. But then we end up beating them and they see how good we are, it . . . makes them think of more respect for us, you know.

Citing the case of pan-Indian identities and mobilizations, Albers and James (1986) write that, in particular kinds of historical situations, groups thdt had once seen themselves as different might choose to elevate their common identities, while at other times they might retain and highlight their differences (p. 12). Boarding school students, particularly those who attended during the 1930s, often report drawing an increased sense of pan-Indian identity from their experiences (McBeth, 1984). In her book on the Santa Fe Indian School, Sally Hyer (1990) writes that sports were an important cultural form in which students imagined such commonalities. "Athletics unified the many tribes represented at the school. Being a team player was at least as important as individual excellence" (p. 52).

In addition to such statements about pride, however, former students also remembered a certain amount of pleasure they gained at boarding school related to mischief or to disobeying authority. The man who attended Flandreau refused to go out for a sports team, for instance, because he did not want to get his hair cut. Instead, he talked of tormenting the track coach by racing members of the track team during practice, running outside the track and beating members of the team. He said to me, smiling, that the coach was heard asking a student, "who was that asshole?"

The man who was beaten for speaking Ojibwa answered when I asked him if he played sports, "I wasn't an athlete, I was a lover." He told a seemingly endless number of stories about pranks and petty theft that he and his friends conducted at Pipestone during the 1930s. Another man who boxed for Santa Fe during the 1930s recalled that he was motivated in large part by a desire to beat up the boys' disciplinarian, a man named Stein.

I used to think about the time when I grew up. I said, 'I'm going to be a fighter. I'm going to tangle with that Mr. Stein,' the boys' advisor.

The man who ran at Intermountain said that the students would often run to a nearby orchard to steal fruit off of trees, and that the coaches would watch this happen, time the best thieves, and recruit them for the team. Such stories of mischief were a common part of the oral history interviews I conducted with former students. K. Tsianina Lomawaima (1994) notes a similar pattern among graduates of Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma. She relates such stories to student resistance against the disciplinary nature of boarding school curriculum and life. On one level, these stories portray sports as an agent of socialization, as with the student who refused to get his hair cut. At other times, sports provided a context for students to experience excitement and fun. When this happened, athletic events assumed meanings that branched out beyond the progressive intent of boarding school educators and BIA officials.

Boxing, for example, emerged as a popular sport at a number of boarding schools at the precise moment that the BIA was discouraging interscholastic athletics. It was perhaps the sport that created the greatest amount of friction between the BIA and local school superintendents. Generally, school administrators, coaches, and businesses in the vicinity of boarding schools enjoyed boxing, and thrived on the revenue and local publicity gained through fights. The Bureau, however, frowned upon the sport, eventually banning it in 1948. Yet boxing teams at schools were extremely good, and many Indian School boxers went on to compete nationally in Amateur Athletic Union and Golden Gloves competitions.

Students who were not boxers recall how fights were exciting, fun-filled events that people looked forward to each week. Importantly, they were events that girls and boys were allowed to attend together, and at which they could intermingle and express excitement. This type of social event was particularly important to students, in part because sexuality was highly regulated at boarding schools. Girls and boys were often segregated at meal times or in class rooms, and dating was often carefully monitored (Child, 1993). During the 1930s, schools tended to allow more time for free interaction between boys and girls, but their contact was still scrutinized. Many of the pranks that students recalled from their boarding school days involved the breaking of rules related to the regulation of sexuality. Boxing, as a social event, provided a context for interaction between boys and girls, and intense emotional expression. A woman who attended the Santa Fe Indian School during the 1930s, interviewed for the documentary Santa Fe Indian School: A Remembrance, recalled, "I never thought I'd like boxing, but I really enjoyed it then. The whole school attended" (Reyna et al., 1990).

The social atmosphere that boxing provided mirrors what Kathy Peiss describes as the turn from homosocial private spaces to heterosocial public spaces associated with urban popular culture forms for women at the turn of the century. The Victorian family model of the 19th century allowed for very little public interaction between men and women, relegating public space a male "homosocial" arena, and private spaces of the home predominantly female homosocial locations. Commercial popular culture forms, however, allowed women to gain access to public space, albeit in ways that were dependent upon commerce and male companionship (Peiss, 1986). Boarding schools attempted to maintain Victorian ideals well into the 20th century, relegating female students to primarily domestic chores and courses of study. Schools tended to track female students, for example, into sewing, laundry, ironing, and cooking in their vocational instruction. During summer outing programs, female students often worked as domestic help on farms or in cities.

It is appropriate that the woman quoted in the Santa Fe Indian School video should feel somewhat contradictory, then, about boxing. On one hand, the sport itself is a brutal one that elevates violence and masculine body power in ways that translate to real oppressions women face at the hands of men. In addition, as Lomawaima (1994) describes, boxing reflected a very real atmosphere of physical violence and intimidation that existed among boys at boarding schools. Simultaneously, however, boxing matches were an opportunity for women to enjoy the pleasures of public spaces denied to them so often within their boarding school lives.

In fact, the wild and exciting atmosphere of boxing matches was something that former students often recalled during interviews. Nowhere was the boxing better, and the ambience more intense, than at the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma. A 75 year-old Navajo man who fought for Santa Fe recalled that when the team competed at Chilocco, the room was raucous and so filled with smoke that his lungs hurt after the fight. A man who attended Chilocco during the 1930s, and who later went on to coach there, also recalled that fights were particularly exciting events at the school, involving both students and non-Indian spectators from Oklahoma and Kansas.

At Chilocco, the people would come from miles around for that boxing. There's something about it, about boxing. It's kind of like gambling I guess, people were crazy about it! Boy, they just packed that gym. Just packed it up. . . . It was just those ranchers from over around Pawhuska, and people from Wichita, Kansas, and people from Tulsa would come up for it. That's a hundred miles, you know. Back then, that was about a three to four hour drive. But they'd come up there and just pack that gym.

The crowd, however, was not only something that created pleasure for students and townspeople, and undoubtedly revenue for promoters and school administrators, it was a source of concern for federal officials throughout the history of boxing at Indian boarding schools. When the Bureau of Indian Affairs did finally ban boxing at boarding schools in 1948, their rationale included a discussion of the crowd. In an article published in Indian Education announcing the ban, BIA Director of Health, Fred Foard, and the agency Director of Education, Willard W. Beatty, wrote,

There is still an animal-like ferocity in many of us, which accounts for attendance at prize fights, wrestling matches, midget auto races and other spectacles where life is endangered or where sadistic punishment is inflicted. (Foard and Beatty, 1948)

The authors of this statement importantly align boxing with a range of working class amusements popular during the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, and use the same language of savagery, with terms such as "animal-like", to describe fans of such sports as earlier proponents of boarding schools had used to describe Native Americans themselves. Certainly, officials in Washington were concerned about the liability they faced with regard to the health of students who were being injured in the ring. But their rhetoric also suggests that they feared the crowd and the passions it expressed as well, associating each with a breakdown of order and civilization.

Within the historical contexts of boarding school life, boxing matches for some students might be understood as liberating. For with the Navajo boxer from Santa Fe who mentioned racial pride, they provided a public setting for the expression of ethnic identity and the enjoyment of public life. This is not to deny the exploitation that boxing also involved. For example, the man who attended Chilocco reported to me that all boys were required to try out for the boxing team. The boys fighting put their bodies on the line in ways that greatly benefitted the school with both publicity and money. Yet oral history interviews also illustrate that students could understand and enjoy boxing in alternative ways that were not always under the control of coaches, teachers, or superintendents.

Just as boarding schools defined rather starkly the vocational activities for boys and girls, so they also tended to allow boys a much greater degree of participation in sports than they did girls. At some schools, there were girls' teams that played interscholastic sports. For example, at Santa Fe, they could play basketball and softball (Hyer, 1990, p. 52). However, even there, female students were often frustrated by the limits placed on their opportunities to participate in sports. Hyer quotes a female former student at Santa Fe as remembering, "Every Sunday afternoon, all the girls had to go to bed and take a nap. We couldn't be outside. We had to sleep for two hours" (p. 51). During a group interview I conducted with a gathering of Ojibwa men and women who attended the Pipestone Indian School in southwestern Minnesota during the 1930s, a question about girls' athletics turned into an opportunity to crack some jokes about the gender dynamics of boarding school life.

Bloom: Did girls have any sports when you were there? You mentioned, we were talking about basketball a minute ago.

Male Former Student: Yeah. Trying to keep away from the boys.

[All laugh].

Female Former Student: Track!

[More laughter].

Later in the interview, the female student recalled that there was not even very much emphasis placed upon girls' physical education.

We would go in there and exercise. But I don't remember if there was any rigor daily, or even two or three times a week yet. I would say the boys had more opportunities for than that the girls did.

Such memories reflect not only the specific policies of boarding schools, but more general trends during the 1930s away from offering girls opportunities to play competitive, interscholastic sports. As Susan Cahn (1993) documents, many of those who most opposed female participation in athletics were women in the profession of physical education themselves who favored informally organized "play days," in which schools would gather and compete in sports during a day long festival, over organized team sports that were often financially exploitative and governed by men. The concerns of female physical educators parallel those expressed by Collier in his curriculum manual for Indian schools, and in his opposition to Indian School boxing.

In Cahn's account, women often resisted the constraints placed upon their participation in athletics, playing in competitive team sports whenever they were able. This also happened at boarding schools, where female students sometimes found in sports opportunities to act in ways that were not sanctioned within the confines of the gendered curriculum they experienced elsewhere. Hyer, for example, quotes a female student who graduated from Santa Fe in 1929 as remembering that she loved basketball as it allowed her to be "mean and rough" (1990, p. 52).

At the same time, the particular relationships of female students to sports at boarding schools were more complex than this, as they could also serve as a site for cultural dialogues over gender and ethnicity. This became particularly apparent to me during interviews I conducted with Navajo women regarding female athletics at boarding schools. During an interview, a woman who attended Ft. Wingate in western New Mexico during the 1950s told me, predictably, that girls did not have as many sports to play as boys. When I asked her why, I expected to hear that school administrators were the barrier to their participation. However, she explained to me that girls did not play on teams because Navajo parents and grandparents refused to let their daughters wear short pants in public.

A lot of them [grandparents] still had their culture, because our grandparents frowned upon for me to be wearing shorts, and short skirts.

Another Navajo woman who attended nearby Thoreau boarding school during the 1950s told a similar story. She understood objections to wearing shorts more sympathetically than did the first woman, seeing such a refusal as an act of resistance rather than only a reflection of conservative attitudes by older Navajos. She discussed the discomfort with wearing shorts in terms of Navajo culture, which tends to be organized matrilineally, and in which women tend to have a level of power and authority that is substantial when compared to that of being promoted within boarding schools.

With our tradition, we ask to have respect for each other if we were brother and sister as we grew up. . . . We couldn't wear cutoffs, or we couldn't wear anything, even above our knees, or anything like that. So when we were sent off to boarding school, we were actually embarrassed towards the boys.

She went on to discuss how her school would seat boys and girls together in the dining hall in an effort to teach students manners and etiquette. The woman felt such an act displayed a lack of respect for girls. "Some of us fought back," she said, "Some of us . . . didn't want to have nothing to do with learning what's going on with the white man's world."

Refusing to let girls wear short pants might not sound like much of an act of rebellion. In fact, in contemporary contexts, most would associate it with the very control over female sexuality and pleasure that characterized Victorian culture. However, within the context of the gender and cultural politics of boarding school education, some interpreted this refusal as necessary in order to maintain an aspect of Navajo identity against boarding school efforts to coerce students into accepting a Victorian model of patriarchy.

This is not to say that girls were always happy not to play sports. The woman who attended Ft. Wingate felt constrained by her relatives' objections to short pants. She was happy that there was now a successful girls' basketball team at the school, and that girls' basketball had become quite popular on the Navajo reservation. She had been on the pep squad in school, and while she enjoyed it, she was not content only to play a role that was supportive of boys. She and her female friends eventually organized baseball games themselves that they played on the campus green each Sunday afternoon. These two Navajo boarding school graduates might not completely agree with each other's understandings of girls' sports at boarding schools and Navajo responses to them. However, neither understands sports to have contained seamless, inherent meaning. Instead, each discussed girls either using or refusing sports in ways that were both pleasurable and strategic.

When examined from one perspective, sports appear to be a stiflingly conservative, assimilationist, and colonizing aspect of boarding school life. Among students they promoted school patriotism, and were employed by administrators to convey values of rugged individualism and upward mobility. Leslie Marmon Silko (1977) conveys this experience of boarding school sports in her novel Ceremony when she presents the character Rocky, the brother of the book's protagonist, Tayo. As a Laguna Pueblo student at the Albuquerque Indian School in the early 1940s, Rocky learns to reject the traditions of his family in order to succeed. She presents sports as a central part of his education.

He was an A-student and all-state in football and track. He had to win; he said he was going to win. So he listened to his teachers, and he listened to the coach. They were so proud of him. They told him, "Nothing can stop you now except one thing: don't let the people at home hold you back." Rocky understood what he had to do to win in the white outside world. (p. 51)

Silko correctly presents sports as consistent with the progressive ideologies that guided boarding school policies throughout the century. However, oral histories also reveal that students understood and created pleasure through sports in a variety of ways. As M. Ann Hall (1988) has argued, play, games, and sports are "real social practices", not "idealist abstractions with no connection to the making and remaking of ourselves as human agents, nor are they simple products of material conditions" (Hall 1988, 331). Sports are cultural formations that are dynamic, that change over time, and that provide some concrete sites in which people have struggled to recreate ethnic identities that draw from the past, but that also critically speak to and reflect upon the present. For adult Native Americans today who lived through boarding school experiences, sports constitute an important ethnic marker, one that positions their ethnicity in dialogue with the particular historical circumstances that they have experienced. Within oral histories, former students reveal how sports constituted a complex cultural practice where Native Americans could not only respond to an educational system that was often insensitive, but through which they could also experience pride, mischief, or pleasure, and create new ways of expressing their identities as Native Americans.

1. Although their intent was to eliminate boarding schools, they did not succeed. In fact, many schools' enrollments climbed during the Depression due to the economic needs of Native American parents. The BIA was successful, however, in building more day schools, especially for educating younger children.
2. National Archives, Record Group 75, Decimal Classification 750 for Chilocco, Letters Received, August 14, 1934.
3. On November 25, 1896, for example, Pratt wrote to Gen. John Eaton about a game against the University of Cincinnati.
   
   The boys had a great time at Cincinnati, were most highly entertained and probably no incident ever contributed more to enlighten the people on the Indian in that great city. You and I probably do not differ upon the football business but it is doing wonder for us in the way of notoriety and so I hope will lead to wider consideration for our work and ideas.
   
   What Pratt means when he says "You and I probably do not differ on the football business" is not clear in this letter, but it might well refer to a sense of uncertainty over the virtues of the game. This is evident in a letter he wrote less than two weeks later to Edward C. Mann in which he stated, "I have given the subject of football more thought this year than in all the previous years, and am becoming convinced that good, honest, fair, straight football is almost an impossibility" (Pratt Papers).
4. Hyer also notes that, by 1946, Indian school policy once again began to stress assimilation and vocational training.
5. One can see such contradictions within Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) propaganda of the time period. In an essay in the May 15, 1933 edition of Indians at Work, Collier criticized "planless individualism" that guided allotment policies of the previous generation. He advocated "planned cooperative use of the land and its resources," and specifically discussed this sort of land use as reflective of Native American traditions. Yet his commentary was also placed within the context of a more general patriotic and nationalistic agenda. New land policies on reservations, according to Collier, "unquestionably will blaze the way on many tracks for the faster experiment and readjustment, now being started, which is intended to bring about a rebirth of the American people-a rebirth in spirit, even more than the rebirth of a more fairly distributed prosperity" (Collier, 1933, 3). This early statement evokes a radically egalitarian vision of society drawn from the historical memory of many Native American groups even as it places this vision ("more fairly distributed prosperity") second to the national pride that Collier hoped it would foster.