The Real All-Americans: The First All-American Indian Football Team

The Carlisle Industrial School for Indians, the first of its kind, was founded by Richard Henry Pratt, who thought he should "civilize" these indigenous children of America by taking them away from their parents and placing them in military-style boarding schools. The before-and-after image of Tom Torlino shown here is an example of the dramatic changes the students endured.

Some of the school's students wanted to form a real football team that competed on the national level. This all-American Indian team went on to become the football powerhouse of the nation.

Titles About Carlisle Industrial Indian School

Sally Jenkins' The Real All Americans: the Team That Changed a Game, a People, a Nation tells a remarkable story of a dark past. Founder Richard Henry Pratt granted the students' request for an official competing football team. What the team lacked in numbers, poundage and experience, they made up for in strategy, innovation and speed. While having to adapt to an alien world, they were also beating the Ivy League teams on a playing field that was far from level. They were winning with intelligence and skills, rather than the customary brute force of the time, thus changing the game. Sally Jenkins brings the characters to life in this must-listen author interview.

The Real All Americans is also available as an audiobook CD.

In, Carlisle Vs. Army: Jim Thorpe, Dwight Eisenhower, Pop Warner, And The Forgotten Story Of Football's Greatest Battle, Lars Anderson tells the engrossing tale and provides the political context for this pivotal game.

To focus more on the school, read Indian School: Teaching the White Man's Way.  Michael L. Cooper lets less athletic students tell their own stories: Zitkala-Sa wrote, "Like a slender tree, I had been uprooted from my mother, nature and God."

In White Man's Club: Schools, Race and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation, Jacqueline Fear-Segal covers the beginning of the Indian boarding schools to 1900 and has complete chapters on the most prominent individuals.

The documentary film In the White Man's Image tells the story of the attempt to assimilate these indigenous peoples of the Americas into white culture by educating them at special schools such as the Carlisle School.

Find more suggestions about these boarding schools in my American Indian Boarding Schools: Assimilation through Education booklist.

Online Resources

Radiolab has gathered an amazing collection of before-and-after pictures of the Carlisle football team in Before and After Carlisle and Carlisle Football. In this case the pictures are worth more than a thousand words. You can also listen to their programs on the team and the school.

Read "Jim Thorpe," a profile in Native Peoples of one of the best athletes America has produced. Besides playing at Carlisle, he also played professional football, baseball and basketball. He won Olympic gold medals, which were taken back after his professional work had been exposed.

Additional information is available in Yale University's Complete Richard Henry Pratt Papers and Dickinson College's Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.

"If the Great Spirit had desired me to be a white man he would have made me so in the first place. He put in your heart certain wishes and plans; in my heart he put other and different desires. Each man is good in the sight of the Great Spirit. It is not necessary, that eagles should be crows."  Sitting Bull (Teton Sioux)