Angelina Jolie, Jim Thorpe, Martin Sensmeier
Photo Credits: Neil Mockford/FilmMagic; Photofest; Barry King/Getty Images
"The danger in writing about Jim Thorpe is that the chronicler finds himself losing all restraint in an unavoidable tangle of superlatives. Yet there is almost no other way to describe the man and still do justice to him."
- Arthur Daley, The New York Times, March 31, 1953
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In an age that regularly gives us the astonishing pyrotechnics of LeBron James, Tom Brady and matinee idol Aaron Judge, comes a new biopic about Jim Thorpe, arguably the greatest athlete ever in the world. The film, according to Variety, will be co-produced by actress, director and humanitarian activist Angelina Jolie.
At the close of the 1912 Olympic Games, Sweden's King Gustav V reportedly told Jim Thorpe: “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.”
The film will be titled: “Bright Path: The Jim Thorpe Story.”
Thorpe's mother gave him the Indian Tribe name of Wa-Tho-Huck, meaning "bright path." Official records, however, list him as James Francis Thorpe.
It’s been nearly 70 years since “Jim Thorpe: All-American” was portrayed on the silver screen by Burt Lancaster, with a predominantly white cast.
In a sharp break from other productions of American Indians, “Bright Path” will be told from a Native American perspective. Thorpe will be played by Martin Sensmeier, a Native American actor who grew up learning and participating in the traditions of his tribes in southeast Alaska.
Jolie told The Hollywood Reporter,“I’m honored to be working on this project. I have had the privilege of spending time with Bill Thorpe [one of Thorpe's surviving sons] and will be listening to and guided by the Tribes and the Thorpe family in the making of this film.”
Beverly Singer, associate professor of Native American studies at the University of New Mexico, expressed optimism about the upcoming movie. “I know screenwriter Sterlin Harjo, who should not only write the story but direct it. He's that good of a Native American writer and director,” Singer said. “He would change the way films about Native Americans are made and told in Hollywood.”
The spectacular feats of multi-sport athlete Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox Indian, has been well documented. He propelled to instant fame during the 1912 Olympics, becoming the only Olympian to win gold medals in the pentathlon (fencing, shooting, swimming, riding and cross-country running) and the decathlon (100-meter dash, long jump, shot put, high jump, 400-meter dash, 110-meter hurdles, discus, pole vault, javelin and 1,500-meter run). The young, gifted athlete additionally became the first Native American to win gold medals for his home country.
The medals were stripped from him the following year (1913) by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) for violating his amateur status once it was discovered he had been paid ($2 a game, $35 a week) to play semipro baseball in North Carolina in 1909 and 1910 (Rocky Mount and Fayetteville in the Eastern League), a common practice among collegiate athletes at the time, only Thorpe used his own name instead of a fictious one.
For more than 70 years, the Olympic champion and his family relentlessly petitioned to get the medals back and to have Thorpe reinstated by the IOC, which included a written plea on behalf of the family by President Gerald Ford in 1975.
All attempts failed.
Finally, in January 1983, the IOC presented duplicate medals to Jim Thorpe's surviving family members and restored his name to Olympic glory.
Medals or not, in February 1913, Thorpe signed a three-year contract with the New York (baseball) Giants for a hefty sum of $6,000 a year (including a $500 signing bonus), the most paid to a rookie at the time. Thorpe’s signing was initiated more to attract fans to the games than for his questionable baseball skills. During his career on the diamond, he batted .252 with three teams: New York, the Cincinnati Reds and Boston Braves. During his last year in the major leagues in 1919, he batted .327. The most damaging shortcoming that hung over Thorpe's baseball career was that he couldn't hit curveballs, a rumor, many think, wrongly perpetuated by Giants manager John McGraw.
Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist James E. Doyle once asked Thorpe about his weakness for hitting curveballs. “That's a great big lie! Someday I'd like to catch up with the guy who first started that rumor and tell him off right. Whoever he is. Why, I could hit a curve with some of the best of them — that's the truth and no bragging at all — and I only wish there were records around to prove it.”
Thorpe ventured into professional football in 1915 with the Canton Bulldogs in the Ohio League for an eye-popping sum of $250 a game, leading Canton to a number of championships over its chief competitor, the Massillon Tigers.
Following Canton, Thorpe played football for the Oorang Indians, Cleveland Indians, Rock Island Independents and a number of other teams before retiring at age 41 with the Chicago Cardinals in 1929.
Knowing “Bright Path: The Jim Thorpe Story” is being told from a Native American viewpoint will undoubtedly spark loud cheers from the Indian community.
Native Americans, after all, have traditionally been brutally represented in the cinema.
In her book, “Native American Son, The Life and Sporting Legend of Jim Thorpe,” author Kate Buford documents how from the very beginnings of talking pictures, Indians were demonized, depicted crudely as screaming savages, pillaging encampments, raping and scalping human prey. Buford wrote that “producers and casting directors gave little thought to authenticity in the race to turn out a product to meet the renewed demand for Westerns.”
In addition to Indians being described as riotous savages, Buford highlighted the communication skills of Indians in many Western films, which often included “grunts, a made-up Indian language and pidgin English.”
Shannon Keller O’Loughlin, executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs (AAIA), a nonprofit advocacy organization whose mission it is to improve the well-being of American Indians and Alaska Natives, certainly welcomes the new Jim Thorpe biopic being presented from a Native American point of view. “Anytime that Native Americans are shown in film, and played by Native Americans,” O'Loughlin said, “representing the human condition outside of stereotypes such as the stoic, or drunk, or mascot, or hippie, or … then we are growing up as a society.”
“All peoples,” O'Loughlin added, "should be able to control their images, their stories and lifeways. AAIA’s wish for this film is that it does not take any shortcuts, and present all parts of Mr. Thorpe’s life, not just his athletic success.”
Aside from the extent to which Indians were savagely portrayed in motion pictures, Jeffrey P. Beck, professor of English at Penn State (Harrisburg), and author of “The American Indian Integration of Baseball," recalled the unabashed racial taunts Native American athletes, including Jim Thorpe, had to absorb in the early part of the 20th century, especially professional Native American baseball players.
“Cat-calling, race-baiting, bullying and forms of out-and-out racism,” Beck said, “were commonplace. Indian athletes were expected to assimilate (and sports were supposed to be a tool for that assimilation) and to endure a fair amount of abuse on the playing field.”
Beck said that practically all Indian players were given the moniker “chief.” And most were regularly subjected to racist taunts by fans, which included Indian war cries; others yelled, “Back to the Reservation,” while still others belted out, “Dog soup! Dog soup!” a reference to some Indian reservations with a history of eating dogs.
“Another stereotype,” Beck continued, “that all Indian players had to confront was that of ‘the bad Indian,’ meaning a drunken Indian.” When Thorpe was with the Giants, the hot-tempered McGraw told him, “A young fellow like you shouldn't ever drink. Besides no Indian knows how to drink.” The way he said Indian really irked Thorpe, Beck explained. Fearless, Thorpe shot right back at his manager, questioning the Irish and their shameless reputation for the bottle. McGraw immediately snapped at Thorpe, “Don't get smart with me!”
Thorpe's friend and teammate, John Tortes “Chief” Meyers, was sometimes called “nigger,” especially from the bleachers, because of his dark skin, Beck said.
In addition to the blatant racism Thorpe faced in his lifetime, Beck hopes the film will show that despite his extraordinary athletic skill, prior to signing with the Giants, the Sac and Fox Indian played very little baseball at that high level.
John Tortes “Chief” Meyers and Jim Thorpe of the New York Giants
“I hope the film will tell that part of that story,” Beck said, “noting that in Thorpe’s friend John Meyers' words, ‘He was the greenest recruit you could imagine,’ when he started with the Giants. I think the Thorpe incident with Meyers, in which he wakes him up late at night to grieve about the loss of his Olympic medals, is an important part of the story, and it came in a context in which Thorpe bonded with Meyers as Indians playing under difficult circumstances in a tough media market.”
Angelina Jolie's “Bright Path” and the telling of the Native American experience couldn't have come at a more fitting time.
In January, the Cleveland Indians announced they would discontinue using the Chief Wahoo logo at the end of the 2018 season. Many considered the logo (a cartoonish caricature of a Native American smiling ear-to-ear) to be racist and at odds with the socially progressive era of the 21st century.
Asked what Jim Thorpe would have thought about the Chief Wahoo controversy, Jeffrey P. Beck, said, “I think Thorpe would have recognized in the Chief Wahoo logo the same kind of racism that his generation faced on the baseball field.
“He also would have likely known,” Beck explained, “that the 1915 Cleveland team voted to change its name to Indians in part because of the success of Louis Sockalexis, the first Indian star in the major leagues who played briefly with Cleveland in 1897-98. Thorpe, I think, would be glad that the Wahoo caricature is gone, but still want Sockalexis to be remembered.”
According to a study by Stephanie Fryberg, American Indian psychologist at the University of Washington, “American Indian mascots are harmful not only because they are often negative, but because they remind American Indians of the limited ways in which others see them. This in turn restricts the number of ways American Indians can see themselves.”
Another slice of the upcoming film many hope will not be overlooked is Thorpe’s schooling at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.
Specifically, Michael E. Roberts, president and CEO of First Nations Development Institute, wishes the film underscores the ruthlessness and racism of the founder of the Carlisle Indian School, General Richard Pratt, whose most famous quote on assimilation was “Kill the Indian: Save the Man,” which opened up a process in which Indian children were unconscionably taken from their homes to assimilate them into American society.
“This very act,” Roberts charged, “is the epitome of one of the acts of genocide: Genocide by forcibly transferring children. There are few fond memories of the boarding school process among those who survived it. The physical, emotional and sexual abuse of Indian children at boarding schools is well chronicled. Thorpe himself ran away from Haskell Institute in Kansas several times.”
In addition to being uprooted from their homes, American Indians had other obstacles to overcome, especially at the federal level.
“During Mr. Thorpe’s era,” Shannon Keller O’Loughlin explained, “Indian Tribes were being terminated, and Indian people were being removed from their homelands and relocated to the cities where they were promised jobs — but jobs never came. Federal attempts to assimilate Tribes and eradicate the ‘Indian problem’ was the paramount federal policy of the 1950s.”
In 1953, the year of Jim Thorpe's death, Congress terminated federal recognition and assistance to more than 100 tribes. Public Law 280 imposed state criminal and civil jurisdiction on many tribes in California, Minnesota, Nebraska, Oregon and Wisconsin. The law imposed financial hardship on many tribes, resulting in the loss of millions of acres of valuable natural resource land through tax forfeiture sales. Federal policy emphasized the physical relocation of Indians from reservations to urban areas.
It wasn't until the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978 was passed that American Indian children were able to be placed with extended family members, other tribal members or other Native American families for foster-care or adoption purposes. The law additionally protects the tribes' interest in retaining custody of their children.
The final complicated piece to the Jim Thorpe saga, which many hope will be retold in the upcoming movie, centers on the tug-of-war with family members over his final resting place.
Jim Thorpe’s third wife, Patricia, wanted her husband buried near his home in Prague, Okla. But when the state declined to erect a monument in his honor, she accepted a financial offer from the town of Mauch Chunk, Pa., to move his remains there where a monument would be built over his grave. The town subsequently renamed itself Jim Thorpe in 1954.
According to published reports, Patricia Thorpe stormed in with the police and a hearse and took his body away in the middle of the funeral ceremony, whisking it away to Pennsylvania to be buried.
Thorpe's sons having been fighting for decades to have their father buried back in Oklahoma, on his native soil. In keeping with tribal culture when someone is not buried in the land of their family, “the soul wanders.”
Despite all his Olympic glories and magnificent displays of athleticism on the baseball and football fields, Thorpe didn’t lead an easy life. His twin brother (Charlie) died when he was 9; his mother (Charlotte View) died of blood poisoning before he was a teenager. And his father (Hiran), known for his volcanic temper, often beat his young son. Another tragedy was the death of his son from polio at age 3 following his marriage to Iva Miller (1913).
After his professional career, while fighting for greater emancipation for American Indians, including self-determination, he faced mounting financial hardship, and lapsed into heavy drinking, the reason, many say, was over two failed marriages.
Just two years before his death, it was reported he was a charity case in a Philadelphia hospital, where he had undergone surgery for removal of lip cancer.
In 1950, an Associated Press poll voted Thorpe the outstanding male athlete of the first half of the 20th century, far ahead of Babe Ruth, Jack Dempsey, Ty Cobb, Bobby Jones and Joe Louis. Of the 393 votes, 252 named Thorpe first; 45 named him second; and 29 third.
Despite his shortcomings, he’ll forever be immortalized as the greatest athlete the world has ever seen.
As novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “Show me a hero, and I'll write you a tragedy.”
— Bill Lucey
May 23, 2018
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Native American Facts and Figures
- The Navajo Nation would be the 42nd-largest state in the Union. The Navajo Nation is larger than each of the following states: Maryland, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Hawaii, New Jersey, Connecticut, Delaware and Rhode Island.
- 19 Tribal Nations are larger than the state of Rhode Island.
- 12 Tribal Nations have a land base larger than the state of Delaware.
- 229 Tribes are in Alaska.
- There were 334 federal- and state-recognized American Indian reservations in 2010.
- 567 tribal nations are located across 35 states and within geographic borders of the United States; each tribal nation exercises its own sovereignty. Each of the 567 tribal governments is legally defined as a federally tribal recognized nation.
- In 2010, 5.2 million people (or 1.7 percent of the U.S. population) were identified as American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) alone or in combination with other races, while 0.9 percent identified as AI/AN alone.
- While the overall U.S. population grew about 9.7 percent between 2000 and 2010, the percent of the U.S. population identifying as American Indian/Alaska Native (AI/AN) alone or in combination with other races, grew 27 percent since the 2000 census.
- The median income of AIs/ANs households is $35,062. This compares with $50,046 for the nation as a whole.
- Native peoples and governments have inherent rights and political relationships with the U.S. government that does not derive from race or ethnicity. Tribal members are citizens of three sovereigns: their tribe, the United States and the state in which they reside. They are also individuals in an international context with the rights afforded to any other individual.
- Native people in Maine did not receive the right to vote in national elections until 1954 or in state elections until 1967. Native people in Colorado faced literacy test requirements and were some of the last to be enfranchised in 1970.
- 66 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives are eligible and registered to vote.
- 22,248 AIs/ANs were serving in the military as of March 2012.
- On the reservations, 39 percent of Native people are in poverty — the highest poverty rate in America.
- According to the BIA Labor Force Report, Indian joblessness is about 49 percent with unemployment at 19 percent for Native people on the reservations.
- As of 2012, small and moderate gaming operations made up 56 percent of Indian gaming. In total, nearly 240 tribes across 28 states operated 420 gaming establishments representing a $27 billion industry. Many Indian tribes are using gaming revenues to fund economic development activities on reservations and more effective provision of tribal government services, including health services, early education programs and language and cultural preservation activities.
- The Indian Self-Determination Education and Assistance Act of 1975 allowed Tribes to contract with the federal government, so Tribes could run their own health, education and other programs.
- The Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was passed in 1988 — though a compromise of inherent Tribal sovereignty to regulate Class III gaming, requiring a compact with States, and the fact that the IGRA has created the most complex regulatory scheme for gaming, the Act’s purpose is to support Tribal gaming to develop self-determination and strong Tribal governments. All revenue for Tribal gaming is legislated to support only Tribal programs. (Whereas corporate gaming supports a corporation’s interests and not the public.)
- The NMAI Act (1989) and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990) support the protection of graves, and repatriation of ancestors, burial items, sacred objects and objects of cultural patrimony on federal or tribal lands, and in control of federal agencies or museums. AAIA was involved in developing this legislation and continues to be a part of its effective implementation today.
— Researched and compiled by Bill Lucey
May 23, 2018
Source: National Congress of American Indians; Association of American Indian Affairs (AAIA)