Choice Review
In this concisely drawn work, Bloom explores the impact of sports at boarding schools designed to educate Native Americans. Focusing on the period from about 1879-1960, the author contends that such institutions introduced their own brand of organized sports "to erase Native American culture and history from memory." Initially intended by the federal government to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream society, the boarding school system ushered in the establishment of the Carlisle Indian School and the Haskell Institute in Kansas; both, for a time, became athletic powerhouses. However, there as elsewhere, ambivalence characterized the determined campaign to spread the gospel of athletic competition. Sports could be viewed as a repository for "manliness, virtue, and nobility," but also fertile ground for "decadence, corruption, and dishonesty." During the 1930s, short-lived reforms allowed for reinvigorated Indian pride. There is an interesting look at female physical fitness and efforts to instill "passivity, sexual restraint, and domestic femininity." Also included is a section drawing on narratives that speak to boarding life experiences; the accounts emphasize the positive impact of sports while castigating boarding schools in general. Recommended for undergraduate and graduate students. R. C. Cottrell California State University, Chico
Library Journal Review
When people reflect on the Native American boarding-school experience today, images of repression often predominate, perhaps shared with a remembrance of the star power of Indian athletes such as Jim Thorpe. Bloom, an independent scholar and author of A House of Cards: Baseball Card Collecting and Popular Culture, discovered by interviewing graduates of these programs and examining the oral history records that life in a boarding school environment cannot be so easily categorized. The sports programs at places like the Carlisle Indian School or the Haskell Institute helped level the playing field for Native athletes and their fans, proving that when given an opportunity to excel they were equal to or better than their non-Native adversaries. This book makes it clear that there is no single Native American experience and that boarding schools affected different students differentlyÄsometimes, through athletics, providing a sense of pride. For academic and specialized collections.ÄMary B. Davis, Huntington Free Lib., Bronx, NY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.