To The Best Of Our Knowledge; The Spirit of Jim Thorpe

It's to the best of our knowledge, I'm Ann Strainchamps. Welcome to the story of one of the greatest athletes the world has ever known. The greatest athlete in the world, one of the greatest athletes of all time. Just that much better than everybody else. A pro football player, Major League Baseball player, Olympic gold medal winner, and a Native American athlete who battled racism and discrimination every day of his life. His name was Jim Thorpe, and today his legend is being revived by a new generation. He's important to me as a native youth when I was growing up just because that representation, like I was watching the NFL, the NBA, never seen any native superstar athletes. He's really part of a larger narrative about America and how we've come to deal with race relations. We'll have his story after this. You

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You You I'm Ann Strainchamps and welcome

to to the best of our knowledge. Today we celebrate an American icon. The greatest all -round athlete America has ever produced. Ladies and gentlemen, Jim Thorpe All -American. Jim Thorpe was a Native American athlete who died 70 years ago and is still one of the greatest athletes who ever lived. Maybe the greatest. A legendary pro football player, Olympic gold medals for the U .S., and a Major League Baseball player. I thought it was a hell of a ball player. MLB coach, Al Shaqt. He could hit a ball as far as anybody. He could run as good as anybody. He was one of the passions man I ever saw in the run and run of the base. He was fast. Man was a great athlete. He could do anything. Former President Dwight D. Eisenhower actually played against Thorpe in college. He can do everything in any way as good as he could. And

we saw him just without the slightest form. He put the football on his foot and kick it out of 60 yards and punch. There's no trouble at all. We were standing back there. It was like from 75 yards and one. He either pulled the ball, was spiraling anything out of the pool and down there. That's almost the... He could throw the ball, he could run, he could tackle either any. He could do anything. Except, outrun racism. As a Native American athlete, Jim Thorpe proved over and over again that he was better than anyone else in the world. Today, Jim Thorpe is having a moment. He's important to me as a Native man and as a Native youth when I was growing up just because that representation. Tall Paul is an Anishinaabe and a night a hip -hop artist enrolled on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota. And for him, Jim Thorpe was everything.

As a kid, I didn't see Native men or Native women on the big screen too often. Especially not in an athletic sense. Like I was watching the NFL, the NBA. Never seen any Native superstar athletes. So I got curious and started doing some research and found out about Jim Thorpe in my school library. And that inspired me here and about him being an Olympic athlete and everything. Even though he's been gone at this point for a long time, I needed somebody to look up to who was Native and that was important for me as a kid. If you don't think Jim Thorpe is the greatest athlete of all time, you need to watch this video. There's a feature like film in the works. There's a new best -selling biography out. The greatest athlete of all time. Jim Thorpe. Just damn much better than everybody else. Wow. He's popping up in Netflix documentaries and in Hulu's hit series, Reservation

Dogs. I doesn't surprise me at all that there are Native kids running around with Jim Thorpe T -shirts on. Patty Lowe directs the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University. And she's a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior, Ojibwe. I think young Native kids finding somebody like Jim Thorpe are thinking, hey, I'd like to be able to do something like that and really distinguish myself in some awesomely. And have people write songs and write books about me 70 years after my achievements. I think almost any person who follows sports knows the name Jim Thorpe and understands that his story is really part of a larger narrative about America and how we've come to deal with race relations. So who was Jim Thorpe? Where did he come from? How did he achieve what he did?

Here's Shannon Henry Clybert with Thorpe's Biographer, David Marinus. What originally drew you to Thorpe? I know you've obviously written about politicians and your sports biographies of Roberto Clemente and Vincent Vardi. What drew you to Jim Thorpe at this moment in time? I'm always looking for the dramatic arc of a story, just a great story. And then for a way to illuminate history and sociology through that story. Jim Thorpe is both an incredible story of perhaps the greatest athlete ever, someone who did things that were unparalleled. No one before had one gold medals in the Decathlon and Pentathlon, been an all -American football player, the first president of the National Football League, and a major league baseball player. And he was also, by the way, a great ballroom dancer and could play ice hockey, and people said he was even good at marbles. You could do sort of anything. So that's part of it, but what was

also most important to me was to be able to use his life as a lens looking at the Native American experience. And so was that combination that drew me to Jim Thorpe? Well, yeah, let's talk more about the Native American experience. The name of your book is Pathlet by Lightning, which is a translation of, how do you pronounce it? Is it Wathauhuck? Withauhuck, yes. It's most commonly shortened to Bright Path, but I saw a translation of Pathlet by Lightning, and I thought that's illuminating. Yeah, was that like a North Star for you, his name? Yes, absolutely, it was, in so many different ways. He was born in 1887, and a little cabin near the North Canadian River in Oklahoma. The reason he got that name, I think, was literal. There was a thunderstorm along the North Canadian River

the night that he and his, by the way, he was a twin, his twin brother Charlie, and he were born. So that's where he got the name, Pathlet by Lightning, Wathauhuck. But I viewed it as both a description of this incredible, I mean, lightning reflects sort of energy and electricity. It also describes something that is dangerous in a way. And then the word Path, I like so much, because the story of Jim's life is a path of great accomplishment, difficulties, and perseverance. His mother always told him that he was the reincarnation of Blackhawk, who was the greatest second fox warrior. And so Jim's sort of always lived with that in his mind, that he was following the footsteps of Blackhawk. By the time he was growing up though, it was the 1890s, and native people were living under white man's rules.

It was very oppressive, patty low again. The government had the right to tell you where you could live, the religions that you could participate in, and native religions were not among them. Native governments were illegal, they had the power to tell parents where they could, they had to send their children, they could arbitrarily decide to send the children to boarding school. Every aspect of a native person's life was controlled by the Commission on Indian Affairs, later the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which during this time was located in the War Department, which tells you something. Jim Thorpe was among the native children sent to those Indian boarding schools. He ran away from one, and then wound up at the most famous, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Its founders motto was kill the Indian, save the man. The mission to

Americanize native children through a military -style program of forced cultural assimilation. Carlisle's coach, Pop Warner, spotted Jim's athletic talent, first in track and field, then on the football field, and the baseball diamond. In those days, sports was one of the few paths to mainstream achievement even available to native people. You know, these athletic fields were the only place where native people were free to express themselves, to compete against themselves, to compete against white men. Some of them, the sons and grandsons, of the military leaders that had fought against those native men's parents and grandparents. So, imagine Jim Thorpe, whose great grandfather, Black Hawk, was ruthlessly pursued

by the American military. And now he's playing against teams from West Point. You know, I can't imagine what must have been going through his head. It must have been... He must have had some pretty interesting thoughts before those games. Whatever fueled him, everyone who saw him agreed. Jim Thorpe was unstoppable. Sometimes he would score all the points for his team, because he was a running back, he was a kicker, he punted, he dropped kick 70 yard field goals. It's really, really remarkable what he was able to accomplish. It is July 1912. King Westoff of Sweden officiates at the opening of the newly built Olympic Stadium in Stockholm. It is the sixth revival of the

modern Olympic Games. It was the year Hannes Colomine in the Finland won three gold medals in the 5 ,000 meters, 10 ,000 meters, and cross -country. But his achievement was surpassed by an American Indian, Jim Thorpe, who won the 5 -Event Pentathlon, and then would attempt to win the first Olympic to Catalan ever held. Jim started training for the Olympics in the spring of 1912. Just a few months before the games began, he'd always been a fast runner. But now he added jumps, hurdles, the shot put, pole vaulting, javelin, discus, hammer. He'd be competing in the 5 -Event Pentathlon and in the first ever decathlon. The most grueling contest in Olympic history, he would win them both, outstripping every other competitor, and despite an unexpected handicap. So he's competing in Stockholm, and he's doing

really well. I think it was the last day, and Thorpe was about to do the high jump. And his shoes are missing. Somebody may have taken them or somebody walked off with them mistakenly, but he doesn't have any shoes. And so Pop Warner finds two mismatched shoes. They're not the right size, so he's got to adjust with a couple of extra socks on one and some jury rig cleats. And I think he had to wear two socks on his left foot, and he still performs and he winds up winning. That's a pretty extraordinary story, I think. There's a photo from that day. It must have been taken shortly after he won. Jim is standing on the field still in his track clothes, looking directly, almost challengingly at the camera. You can see muscles clenched in his face, and on his feet, sure enough, two mismatched shoes.

There's another moment from that day, also part of the Jim Thorpe legend, about the moment he stepped up to receive his two gold medals from the King of Sweden. David Marinus. What transpired between Thorpe and King Gustav V during those 15 seconds would become a defining scene of Jim's life. The accepted story goes that the King greeted Thorpe in English by saying, you, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world. To which Jim replied, thanks, King. Thanks, King. Totally inappropriate to address a royal that way, but kind of been during. But the question arises, how is this conversation known to have happened? Was it a reasonable, if slightly, imprecise description of what was said, or was it meh? That's the thing about iconic figures. It can be hard to separate

the person from the myth. But how different is a myth, really, from a stereotype? In the press, Jim could be cast as both a heroic athlete and an ignorant rube, brave warrior, or quote -unquote, dumb Indian. The romantic myth and the derogatory stereotype wrapped together. He would be dogged by both throughout his career. Some of the myths are small. You know, like the myth that Jim Thorpe hit home runs into three different states in one game. Arkansas, Texas, and Oklahoma while playing in Texarkana. It's a great story, but it's geographic impossibility. Throughout his life, he had to deal with people who romanticized and diminished him at the same time. People who helped him rise and then turned away from him at the times of his crisis. So I would say the largest myth I deal with is the myth that the White Fathers know best. The legend of Jim Thorpe was born in Stockholm,

whose performance there catapulted him to superstardom. But the events that followed would haunt him for the rest of his life. He arrived back in the US a hero with a ticker tape parade down Broadway and national acclaim. Six months later, the International Olympic Committee stripped him of his medals. Could you tell that story a little bit because I don't think a lot of people know. I mean, they know he won gold medals in Stockholm and they were taken away, but why? Yes. Well, he played Bush League baseball for two summers in the Eastern Carolina League. This was in 1909 and 1910, two years before the Olympics. It was a period when literally hundreds of college athletes were playing summer baseball for money. Most of them were doing it under aliases. Dwight Eisenhower played in the Kansas State League under the name Wilson. There were so many aliases in the Eastern Carolina League that the joke was they called it the Pocahontas League because

everyone was named John Smith. Or another line was there were more aliases in the Eastern Carolina League than there are aliases for gunmen in New York City. But Jim Thorpe played under the name Jim Thorpe. He never hit it. His name was in the paper in North Carolina for two summers almost every day. But nonetheless, after he won his gold medals, a story broke in the Worcester Telegram in Massachusetts, interviewing one of Thorpe's old coaches from the Eastern Carolina League. And it just broke into this huge scandal from there when the guy said that Jim Thorpe played for him. All of the people who were important to Jim's rise lied about their knowledge of what he was doing to save their own reputations. So Pop Warner, his coach at Carlyle knew exactly what Thorpe had done. He had sent many of his players down to play baseball before. They were scouted by one of Warner's closest friends. Warner met with Jim several times during the period when he was playing baseball and not

at Carlyle. And yet when the story broke he said he didn't know anything about it. So these people, you know, sort of the white saviors, people who were promoting the purity of amateurism lied about Thorpe to save their own reputations. George S. Patton was on that Olympic team. He was in the US Army. He participated in the modern pentathlon, which had five events that were all military oriented. And he was getting paid by the Army to practice that for a year before he went to the Olympics, but he wasn't called an amateur. The entire Swedish team was allowed to take off from their jobs for six months before the Olympics to just train and still pay full time. They weren't. So in so many ways Thorpe was victimized and let down by people around him. Do you think that he was targeted? I mean, it just seems so many other people didn't have to play by those rules, but they wanted him to play by those rules. I don't know if he was targeted so much as he was victimized by it because he was an easy

scapegoat for everybody. So that when Pop Warner, for instance, when the scandal broke Warner, actually wrote a letter for Thorpe, under Thorpe's name explaining what happened. And the basic defense was, well, he's just to, you know, low the poor Indian. He's just an ignorant native, which was wrong in every respect and insulting. So he was easy to have Jim take the fall. But I think his story of accomplishing the impossible and then having it taken from you as he did, distinguishing yourself at the Olympics, having your medals stripped from you for transgressions that nearly every major athlete was doing at that time in history. I think those are the kinds of injustices that really resonate with people. It wasn't until the summer of 2022 after years of pressure from his family that the International

Olympics Committee finally restored Jim Thorpe's gold medals 110 years after he won them. I was happy for Thorpe's family and I know that there were people in the Native American sports world that were finally satisfied that that had been returned. But, you know, for me, it was just a reminder of how injustice had worked for such a long time. Sometimes the best form of resistance is remembering. Today, a younger generation of native activists and artists are rediscovering the story of Jim Thorpe. As I was writing this album, there were definitely moments of anger. Take tall Paul. Just thinking about all the stuff that Jim Thorpe had to go through thinking about the boarding school history and how they started. And we had to get our hair chopped off and we had to speak, look, dress, walk, talk, like civilized white people basically.

Yeah, yeah, there was some anger there. And that's been the case to all my whole life learning about Native history, you know, not even just this album, so yeah. Tall Paul is a hip -hop artist. Anishinaabe and Onida enrolled on the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota. His new album is called The Story of Jim Thorpe. And we had to

get our hair chopped off and we had to speak, look, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, dress, walk, for example, everything is all yours all yours all yours it's indigenous excellence when we touch down, it's indigenous excellence when we touch down If what happened to Jim Thorpe during his life makes you angry, wait until you hear what happened after he dies it's a story you could not imagine, not in a million years I'm Ann Stanford champs it's to the best of our knowledgeи from Wisconsin Public Radio, and PRX Okay! From the story of his birth to those mismatched shoes of the Olympics, Jim

Thorpe has become a legend, and there are conflicting stories about him, even after his death. Can you take me back to Jim Thorpe's funeral in 1953? Can you describe what happened then? They were having the fourth day of ceremonies, Native American activist Suzanne Schoenharcho, talking with Steve Paulson. The second folks have their journey to the ancestors ceremony. Each day stands for something. After everything's been done on the previous three days, the fourth day is where his name is returned. So that means it can be used by other people again. It's a good name can be used by someone else. So

that ceremony was in process when his widow, his third wife, came in with large men and some sort of legal paper saying we can take him. And people picked him up in the casket and took him out and put him in a car, her car, and she drove off. Thorpe had been through many, many ceremonies for other people, of course. And he wanted that ceremony for himself, a traditional Second Fox ceremony that was his

wish and he expressed it to all sorts of family members, to friends, to wives. And that was his plan. He was always going to go home. She put him on ice. She kept buying ice, putting ice inside the casket, draining the casket, driving around. She drove to Pennsylvania. She, I guess, had in her mind that people there would like to pay her for his body. They offered her money and she made a bargain with them that they would change the name to Jim Thorpe. They would build a mausoleum for him and happiness would reign. And on the side of the highway, as you're entering Jim Thorpe,

Pennsylvania, is a mausoleum. And it's not in very fine taste. It's a little garish. But I'm sure it attracts the casual tourist who's passing by and makes them wonder, oh, what's that? So he's a tourist trap. The appropriation, not just of Jim Thorpe's name, but of his actual body, his physical remains, is so obviously a

violation and a sickening one. You have to wonder how or why people didn't see that. But then think about the backdrop. Think about American sports and the racist tradition of derogatory Native American mascots and team names. I'm not going to say them, but you know what I mean? Suzanne Harjo, who's Cheyenne and Hidalgi Muscogee, has been leading the fight against them for decades. She says that those names have genocidal histories that are often hiding in plain sight. Like, for example, the practice of paying bounty hunters to kill Native people and accepting, as proof of death, their literal skin. In the nation's very capital, the NFL team had one of those names. And Suzanne led the fight that finally got them to change it to the Washington commanders, but not

until 2022. It was inevitable that the name would be changed. It was just a matter of when. It wasn't a matter of fifth. Yeah. And along the way, we've changed over 2 ,000 of them. 2 ,000 names of mascots of sports teams, you mean? Absolutely. Or other kinds of names as well. Wow. At the elementary junior school, the middle school, high school, community college, level universities, colleges. Let me ask about your role in this. You have been an activist for more than 50 years. Why are these changes happening now after all these years? Well, because we're still here, we were supposed to be dead, gone, buried, forgotten. But because we're still here, it's kind of a bur under everyone's saddle. And at some point, you just can't ignore living human beings who are saying, we have these treaties.

And we've kept them. And you haven't. We have been moved. We've been pushed around. And at some point, everyone has just said, enough's enough. We're not going to do this anymore. Because we. Have had really strong ancestors who have. Given their lives. So that we could be here. And really strong ancestors who have made us the people we are, who are here. I'm saying, do this. Don't let them do that. Be this kind of person. Be this kind of human being. Don't accept this kind of treatment. And when you grow up with grandparents and parents and aunts and uncles who are talking to you in this way, you understand that it's on you.

In this long struggle for native rights, there is such a sense of generations holding hands. Of messages and lessons passed down. And you can see that happening again today with the story of Jim Thorpe, with the way he's re -emerging as a hero and role model for a new generation of native activists and artists, like the hip -hop artists Tall Paul. Let's go back to Charlottesman Rokane's conversation with him. Do you remember that first time in the library where you sort of reading or saw a picture, that famous picture of Jim Thorpe in the Olympics? What was like the first time you were like, oh my god, this guy is Native American, and he's a great athlete. Yeah, so I was living in this small town at the time called Red Bull Falls with my family and I was down in the library in the school and I was doing some research and I was doing some digging

and I found this book on Jim Thorpe. And I'm like, okay, he's Olympic gold medalist and it fell Hall of Famer, played Major League Baseball. All right, I'm gonna look into this guy, you know, and I started doing a lot of research on him at that point, but it just felt inspiring to me, you know, because I had never heard of him before. Nobody ever told me about him. I just kind of had to figure out about him myself and it was powerful to find out that there was somebody out there like that who represented us. Kick back in my time machine, reminiscing everything was so promising. Sibles let me win, so I will feel like I was king. Cut the fish and ran it in, then I was high as he. Who's kneeled down when I'm crying about the sky to me. Like God, the grid, I jump out my high as B. I fell in love with the sport when I was high as knees. Then I learned the Jim Thorpe and I knew I could beast. Blow off and get the paper like him, shock a piece. Go up to snake a ball on your like my sub -flee. Show up, I'll be shown up because I've got to peace. That was the Jim Thorpe effect in my philosophy. I'm curious about you though before we kind of go

further with Jim Thorpe. What is your story? Like what's tall Paul's story? How did you end up being a MC making album about Jim Thorpe? What's your path? Yeah, so I was born and raised in this soft mini app. There's just a little bit of my backstory. You know, grew up, didn't really know my dad too much. See some pictures of me sucking on his toes when I was like one or two years old. But that was the extent of my knowledge of him. Like I didn't really know of his existence beyond these funny pictures I've seen. Met him a little bit later in life by nine years old. Wasn't the greatest experience. I do know him now and we have a good relationship but just kind of preface him with that history and then growing up bouncing all over the place as a youth with my mom and my brothers and sister through foster homes, through women's shelters because my mom had been in some abusive relationships. Just that was kind of my background. I kind of grew up in a negative situation. But I always made the most of it with my friends. We would get out and play big games of football and I fell in love with football, which is how I found out about Jim Thorpe.

And then as I got older, about 14 years old, I started rapping. You know, I started freestyleing from my friends and started writing little raps because I was watching MTV Music Video's 106 in Park freestyle Fridays on BET. So I started getting some exposure to hip -hop and rap. Had some struggles with like alcohol for like five, six, seven years. And then I got sober. And I needed something to pick up. And I had all that free time open now. So I was like, all right, well, I'm going to try this rap thing out because it's something that I've always been. Something I consider myself to be good at. So I started rapping. And I got some beats from local producers. Got some studio time. Got into the whole hip -hop thing. And as I progressed the world, I was like, well, you know, I connected back to Jim Thorpe. And I made a song about him back about five years ago. And I just think it's important to push his legacy if I can attach him to something like hip -hop. It'll do a lot to make people know about him. All I hear about his cheese, but they're all on the seats, man.

I wish I could have seen you played ball on TV. I wish that you would see the same note or by you, the mass media has given not his other athletes. I just needed someone great to look like me. Jim Thorpe, you could be my Muhammad Diadli afflicted with addiction. Alcoholic like pee. No submitting both spitting up in colors like geez. My focus is not there. We probably both got beats. You're the star of R .B. I'd skip the smoked trees when I finally got sober. I became an MC. Messing up on stage because I care what people think. I needed you on fluents. I don't care what people think. See, for me to feel great, man, I needed that drink. Graduate white and schooling flush the lick down the sink. Now I gotta be you for kids who want to be me. Woo! Damn, I mean, that's it. Right? That's what this interview is totally about. That's what your album is about. I mean, now I gotta be you for kids who want to be me. You're the legacy of Jim Thorpe. Right? I mean, that's how it works, right? Yeah, I think that is how it works. You know, the so -called passing of the torch. And so are all of the other people out there in the native community who are doing big things. We are the legacies of our ancestors and

elders who did great things before us, for sure. Coming up, the legacy of Jim Thorpe and the legal battle to repatriate his remains. I'm Ann Strainchamps, and this is to the best of our knowledge. From Wisconsin Public Radio and PRX. You know,

I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean, I mean Sorry about that. Our story of Jim Thorpe continues the story of Olympic gold medals one and blogs of an incredible career in professional baseball and football. which inevitably came to an end. In his later years, Jim Thorpe struggled to find work. Coaching jobs he dreamed of somehow never materialized. He had stances of bouncer, security guard and ditch digger. And he finally wound up in Hollywood, mostly playing American Indian chiefs in Westerns. He did get to see a biopic made of his life, starring Bert Lancaster. I think you can do it right now. Just give me that ball.

Working sway, training to go to the Olympics. For what? But by then he had slipped into alcoholism, and he died destitute in 1953. At which point, as we heard, his third wife shows up at the funeral, kidnaps his body and sells it to a small town in Pennsylvania for use as a tourist attraction. There are just aren't words. Jim's children and the sack and fox nation took the town to court and demanded his body be returned to his homeland for a traditional burial, as he requested. How did the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, respond? This is Suzanne Harjo again. Like stuck pigs. We have no intentions of letting him go. There's no reason for it. They really did not respond graciously at

all. They said, he's ours. We bought him fair and square. And has the town made money off of this as far as you know after all these decades? I do not know. I would imagine they have, because they fought tooth and nail to keep him there. He's their trophy. This is a time dishonored practice in America taking native body parts and bodies and capturing them and somehow parading them. But I know that after a lot of our massacres and our people were mutilated and we're still recovering parts of our relatives, our ancestors, from this kind of practice. You said this is a big deal, this whole story of the push, the move, the campaign, to return Jim Thorpe's remains to tribal lands in Oklahoma. Why is this such a big deal about Jim Thorpe

in particular? Until 1989, when we got the repatriation laws that we started working on in 1967, by the way. We were considered under law the archeological resources of the United States of America. And we wanted to change that. We wanted to humanize ourselves like the rest of the world. We've had the horrors of grave robbing and of people being taken out of their graves after being freshly buried and being beheaded. And then their bodies just left there. I mean, that happened under the color of law, under the Indian Cranius study of the US Army Surgeon General of the late 1800s. I mean, there's a whole raft of

army officer reports, written reports in the national anthropological archives. One of them said, I waited until the cover of darkness, until the grieving family left the grave side, exhumed the body and decapitated it. Now, what they would do is take the head, measure the skull, weigh the brain, and then dip the whole thing in the long eye. Wow. Note the measurements and send it as freight to Washington to the Army Surgeon General or depending on what year it was to the Army Medical Museum and the Smithsonian. Imagine the people coming back to that grave side the next day and finding their beheaded, headless loved one outside the grave. I mean, what would you think? Oh, it's absolutely heart... I mean, it's so horrible, you can't even imagine

that. It's like a scene from a horror movie, except it really happened. America's genocidal war against indigenous people is one of history's worst atrocities. On a scale so massive, it's hard to wrap your mind, let alone your heart around. That's why David Marinus wanted to write Jim Thorpe's biography because he told Shannon sometimes it's the small details of history that can open up a bigger truth and help you take it in. For example, I knew that he went to the Carlyle Indian Industrial School but I didn't really know the story of what those boarding schools did. The first set of Native Americans who went there were Lakota Sioux. These kids thought they were going there to die to show their bravery. And many of them did, in fact, and when I'm doing a book, I'm always looking for those moments that sort of history washes over me. And that happened at Carlyle when I went to what is still the cemetery there for those Indian children

and there are 186 of them still there. So the cemetery is there and you can read their names on the... Absolutely. You know, sometimes it's the name that the school gave them and sometimes it's their native name. Only in the last several years have some of those children been repatriated to their homelands. It's run by the U .S. military now. It's the Army War College and for decades, the war college was not allowing that but now finally, some repatriation is going on and some of the children are being repatriated to their homelands. Which is all Jim Thorpe's family is asking for for him for his body. The public, the world had Jim Thor all his life. He was a public figure and the family just had one role and that was at the end to carry out his wishes and to do it

in the way that he would have been proud to have done for someone else. The battle to reclaim Jim Thorpe's body has a long legal history. His family won the right to get his body back in a U .S. district court but a federal appeals court sided with the town and reversed the decision. The Thorpe family petitioned the U .S. Supreme Court but it refused to hear the case. And so now, the only way Jim Thorpe's body will ever be returned to his homeland is if the town of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania does so voluntarily. What do you think will happen? Let me do think Jim Thorpe's remains will eventually return to Sac and Fox travel lands? I do. I do because great things can't happen in that spot. You're talking about the people in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. I am. I think at some point the younger people are going to say,

I don't know what our parents and grandparents and their parents were thinking, but we can still be Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, but we don't have to hold on to his remains. Why do we have to hold him like he's a prisoner of war or trophy? The thing that I find so I don't know, remarkable about this history that you're describing is you've been working on these issues for years for decades. You keep going. You don't give up, even when things probably look kind of hopeless. And I guess I sort of wonder, you know, where how do you manage to carry on and keep fighting to restore your rights and the good name and all of that? Well, it's my job to be optimistic. I'm Cheyenne and Hidalgi Miscoke and for the Cheyenne people an instruction was provided to the people as a whole that the nation shall be

strong so long as the hearts of the women are not on the ground. And what that means is that we have a job to be optimistic. We have a job to do a job to get things done and to believe that it will be done eventually because we're going to work to make it so. . . . . . . . . . . issue that I dealt with as a biographer, is this

a tragedy? And I decided that there were tragic elements to it, but that it wasn't. It was a story of perseverance. You know, how do you judge a life? How do you view a life? My late brother used to say that life is a series of sensations. And I sort of understand that. And forb had some fabulous sensations throughout his life. So that's not tragic. I mean, you just think about all the people he encountered in his life. Starting with playing football against Dwight Eisenhower, with Omar Bradley on the bench, going to the Olympics with George S. Patton, playing baseball with Christy Mathieson, traveling the world with Hall of Famers, Trist speaker, and Sam Crawford going out to Hollywood and acting with Bob Hope and being in a movie directed by Michael Cortez, who directed Casa Blanca and having Bert Lancaster play him. I mean, I think he had a lot of amazing sensations in his life and also some very difficult periods. And

he did struggle with alcohol. He had seven children, three wives, often didn't see his children as he was traveling around the country. So there were some elements of tragedy to it, and also some amazing unparalleled sensations. Jim Thorpe means to me that phrase we call indigenous excellence, embodying the human spirit in all our flaws, but still being legendary and great, and not allowing all the things that go against us in life to tear us down and stop us from being our greatest version of ourselves. That's what Jim Thorpe represents to me. I think for such a long time, native people and native communities have been defined by our deficiencies. We're poor, you know, we're. If you look at educational attainment, we're at the bottom of the list.

There's always somebody trying to take our land or our children, or it's always what's wrong with us. And over the past 20 years, I think as treaty rights have been asserted successfully in courts, and there's been this renewal of culture and language, especially in Native America. I think people are starting to understand that, yeah, we've got generational trauma, but generational trauma didn't help us survive. We survived because of generational joy and ingenuity, and innovation, and achievement, and I think there's probably nobody that better describes that than Jim Thorpe. I'm Ma

'am Strang champs and this is to the best of our knowledge. I'd like to thank our guests today for sharing their knowledge and their hearts. rapper tall Paul's album is called The Story of Jim Thorpe. Go to Spotify and check it out. Tall Paul is an initienabe and an idea hip -hop artist enrolled in the Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota. Biographer David Marinus, author of a path lit by lightning, The Life of Jim Thorpe. Activist Suzanne Shone Harjo is the recipient of a 2014 presidential medal of freedom. She's Cheyenne and Hidalgi Muscogee and Professor Patti Low, director of the Center for Native American and Indigenous Research at Northwestern University. She's a member of the Bad River Band of Lake Superior, Ojibwe. To the best of our knowledge comes to you from Wisconsin Public Radio. Charles Monroe Kane produced The Sour, with help from Angela Batista, Shannon Henry Clyber, and Mark Rickers. Our technical director and sound designer is Joe Hartke, with help from Sarah Hopewell.

Additional music this week comes from Tall Paul, Randy Wood, Superman, Ketsa, and Audio Resout. Archival audio from Robert W. Wheeler and the Smithsonian. Steve Paulson is our executive producer and I'm Anstrung champs. If you heard anything in today's show that mattered to you, I hope you'll share it. Be well and thanks for listening.