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Cited by 6Physical Education and Sports StudiesAmerican Sports and LiteratureIndigenous Cultures and History

Assimilationist Athletics: Indian Boarding Schools, Sports, and the American Empire

Tardif, Cameron·2021·Journal of Sport History
DOI 10.5406/jsporthistory.48.1.0001
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Abstract

When Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Boarding School in 1879, his goal was to civilize Indigenous bodies. In doing so, the school implemented a series of forceful measures including language training, Western-style dress, hair cutting, and, perhaps uniquely, sports. At the same time that Carlisle was collecting children from across the continent, the United States was expanding territorially: Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Hawai’i. As many scholars have noted, the United States was becoming an imperial force. Like Pratt’s students, those who fell within the American imperial network were exposed to sports as a mechanism of control. While there is extensive work on both the relationship between sport and empire, as well as the use of sport within the Indian Boarding School system of the 1870s to the 1910s, there is a dearth of historiographical work that puts the two into conversation with each other. By exploring the domineering effect that sports had in the Indian Boarding School network and contextualizing it within the larger arc of sports in American Empire, this article expands the conceptual framework of sport and empire in order to paint a more complete picture of the consistency and significance with which imperial governments imposed athletics in various geographies.

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  • These contemporary forms of bigotry ripple from the legacy of past U.S. and Canadian assimilation policies carried out in residential/boarding schools where Indigenous children upon arrival were stripped of all of their belongings and had their hair cut.

    “These contemporary forms of bigotry ripple from the legacy of past U.S. and Canadian assimilation policies carried out in residential/boarding schools where Indigenous children upon arrival were stripped of all of their belongings and had their hair cut (McKee & Forsyth, 2019;Tardif, 2021).”

    From Indigenizing Sport Research: Analyzing Protective Factors of Exercising Sovereignty in North America (2023) · cites this paper as Tardif, 2021

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Research works printed but not linked: 18

  1. 2. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), 183.
  2. 3. John Bloom, To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sports at Native American Boarding Schools (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 1, 13.
  3. 6. For literature on various facets of American Empire, see Victoria De Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005); Kristin Hoganson, “Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream, 1865–1920,” The American Historical Review 107, no. 1 (2002): 55–83; David Kennedy, “The Origins and Uses of American Hyperpower” in Andrew J Bacevich, The Short American Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Andrew Preston, “Monsters Everywhere: A Genealogy of National Security,” Diplomatic History 38, no. 3 (2014): 477–500; and John Soluri, “Empire’s Footprint: The Ecological Dimensions of a Consumers’ Republic,” OAH Magazine of History 25, no. 4 (2011): 15–20.
  4. 8. Ann Laura Stoler, “Intimations of Empire: Predicaments of the Tactile and Unseen,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 2, 4. For more on the theorization of bodies, see Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993), Introduction, Chapter 1.
  5. 10. Gordon, “Internal Colonialism and Gender.” 435, 437. For more on the externalization of empire and work of defining American Empire, see Daniel Immerwahr, “The Greater United States: Territory and Empire in U.S. History,” Diplomatic History 40, no. 3 (2016): 373–91; and Michael H. Hunt and Steven I. Levine, Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012), esp. “Introduction.”
  6. 12. For more on language, ideas, and words such as “civilization,” “civilize,” and “savage,” see Adams, Education for Extinction, preface, x; and Harvey Pearce, The Savages of America: A Study of the Indian and the Idea of Civilization (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1953).
  7. 17. Gerald R. Gems, The Athletic Crusade: Sport and American Cultural Imperialism (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
  8. 32. Adams, Education for Extinction, 2. For more on American reform policy toward Indigenous peoples, see Chapter 1.
  9. 33. Adams, Education for Extinction, 15. For more on imperial education reform in the late nineteenth century, see Cliff Stratton, Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).
  10. 34. Lewis Henry Morgan, The Indian Journals, 1859–62, ed. Leslie A White (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1959), 6, 10.
  11. 36. See Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867–1904 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003), esp. Chapters 10–15. Also see Richard Henry Pratt, The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Its Origins, Purposes, Progress, and the Difficulties Surmounted (Carlisle, PA: Cumberland County Historical Society, 1979). The Carlisle Indian School is also sometimes referred to as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
  12. 40. Harold Edward Fey and D’arcy McNickle, Indians and Other Americans: Two Ways of Life Meet (New York: Harper, 1959), quoted in Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 5. For more on Indian Education, see Jon Allan Reyhner and Jeanne M. Oyawin Eder, American Indian Education: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).
  13. 41. John Bloom, “‘Show What an Indian Can Do’: Sports, Memory, and Ethnic Identity at Federal Indian Boarding Schools,” Journal of American Indian Education 35 (1996): 38.
  14. 45. Steve Sheinkin, Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team (New York: Roaring Brook Press, 2017), 73.
  15. 49. The Philadelphia Press, 8 November 1896, quoted in Sheinkin, Undefeated, 123.
  16. 54. “A Brief Description of Our School,” Indian School Journal, February 1909, 41, quoted in Sarah K. Fields, “Representations of Sport in the Indian School Journal, 1906–1913,” Journal of Sport History 35, no. 2 (2008): 245.
  17. 56. For more on various Indian School sports, see Linda S. Peavy and Ursula Smith, Full-Court Quest: The Girls from Fort Shaw Indian School, Basketball Champions of the World (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008); and Tom Swift, Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008).
  18. 61. Isaac Stein, “Lift the Red, Stay in the Black: The Public and Private Economies of Race Ideas at the Carlisle Indian School, 1879–1904,” Chicago Journal of History (Autumn 2006): 69–89; http://cjh.uchicago.edu/issues/fall16/7.9.pdf [accessed 18 March 2021].

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Authors
Tardif, C.
Affiliations
Cornell University (US)
Corresponding author
Tardif, Cameron
Venue
Journal of Sport History
Publisher
University of Illinois Press
Published
2021-04-01
Volume
48
Issue
1
Pages
1-16
ISSN
  • 0094-1700 (ISSN-L)
  • 2155-8450
DOI
10.5406/jsporthistory.48.1.0001
OpenAlex
W4312784238
Semantic Scholar
5226707f7fb300a3b721bae34753cc203e71466a
Cited by
6
References
20
Citations by year
2025: 2 · 2024: 1 · 2023: 3
FWCI
1.39
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
  • Journal of Sport History (publishedVersion)
  • Project Muse (Johns Hopkins University) (submittedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Physical Education and Sports Studies
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › History › American Sports and Literature
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Indigenous Cultures and History
Keywords
Indian boarding schools, assimilationism, sport and empire, American imperialism, indigenous peoples, physical culture, language training, Western dress, hair cutting, territorial expansion

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