The part of the Jim Thorpe story Hollywood forgot
Stefanik rhetoric arguing every Dem is a liberal out to destroy America continues
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The story Hollywood told in its 1951 movie Jim Thorpe - All-American"is inspirational and heartbreaking at the the same time.
A Native American kid straight off the Oklahoma reservation finds college football stardom, then goes on to win two Gold Medals in the 1912 Olympics, only to be stripped of them when his amateur status is questioned.
You know that part of the story.
You may even know how Thorpe was a troubled kid who kept running away from school on the reservation until his father finally sent him off to boarding school in Pennsylvania.
It's the part of the story I never questioned.
Knowing now what I know can I question how a poor Indian family managed to ship off a troubled son to the far away Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1904.
But here is a missing part of the puzzle.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania was the first government-run boarding school for Native American children with the goal of assimilating them into white culture by removing them from their families.
Beginning in 1879 with Carlisle, the U.S. government forced thousands of Native American children to attend "assimilation" boarding schools throughout the county, including three in Buffalo, New York and one in nearby Castleton, Vermont.
The Carlisle Industrial School that Thorpe attended was one of 150 or so schools around the country.
The belief was the only way to get American Indians to adopt western culture was to take their children away and raise them in white culture. The Native American children were forbidden from using their own language or practicing anything to do with their religion or culture. They were given new names, clothes and haircuts and told to abandon their way of life because it was inferior to the white way. Many of the children never saw their parents.These boarding schools were later found to be rampant with physical and sexual abuse of the children.
That never made it into the Jim Thorpe movie.
What we saw was Pop Warner turning Carlisle into a national collegiate football power and making Jim Thorpe a gridiron star before winning Olympic gold.
This past week, the federal government's ongoing investigation into the boarding schools expanded the number of children known to have died in the boarding school system to nearly 1,000 at 74 different sites. Twenty-one of those sites had unmarked graves.
On Aug. 7, 2017, the U.S. Army began exhuming the graves of three children at the Carlisle Industrial school, Thorpe's school from 1904 to 1912.
After a three-year investigation, the federal government accepted responsibility for creating a system of more than 400 schools in 37 states and the Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland said the U.S. government should issue a formal apology and seek ways to make things right.
"The federal government, facilitated by the department I lead, took deliberate and strategic actions through federal Indian boarding school policies to isolate children from their families, deny them their identities and steal from them the languages, cultures and connections that are foundations to Native people," Secretary of Interior Deb Haaland said in a statement.
"I think the worst part of it was at night, listening to all the other children crying themselves to sleep, crying for their parents and just wanting to go home,” said one unnamed participant from Michigan who experience the boarding schools.
Another participant in the investigations described how her sister, now a grandmother, still could not sleep in the dark and would wake up screaming when the light was turned off because she had been routinely locked in a closet as a young girl.
I was unable to find any record of how Thorpe responded to his assimilation at Carlisle. He eventually made a living as a professional athlete and in 1950 The Associated Press voted him the greatest athlete of the first half-century.
The boarding school report calculated the government spent some $23 billion in today's dollars from 1871 to 1969 on the boarding school system and believes an equal amount should be spent rebuilding the families and communities it destroyed.
I don't see how that is possible.
Among its recommendations were to find remedies to any present-day impact; establish a national memorial to acknowledge the boarding school system existed; return remains of children to their home lands; give the boarding school sites to tribes; and invest in further research to discern the economic impact to the present-day Indian families.
It is a mea culpa you probably have not heard about before.
Considering our country's past neglect on Indians issues, it is hard to believe anything will be done this time either.
Thorpe died destitute at the age of 65 in 1958.
His third wife sold his remains to a small town in Pennsylvania where they promised to build a monument to him in exchange for financial considerations to her.
Once again Jim Thorpe was shipped across the country without his consent to a culture he did not ever really know.
The monument site is impressive and contains his tomb and two statues of him while recounting his life story. There was no mention of the boarding school assimilation project.
The town eventually changed its name to Jim Thorpe and remains that to this day even though he had never been there.
This is "rhetoric"
It did not take Rep. Elise Stefanik long to weigh in on Kamela Harris' choice for a running mate on social media:
"Tim Walz supports defunding the police and flooding our cities with illegal immigrants. Together with Kamala Harris he will push for the most destructive and radical Far Left Democrat policies America has ever seen and destroy our nation as we know it."
That is a classic example of political rhetoric: "Language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content."
That fits Rep. Elise Stefanik's regular postings on social media.
Here is another way to look at Walz's record from columnist Heather Cox Richardson:
"Strong tax revenues and spending cuts gave the state a $17.6 billion surplus, and the Democrats under Walz used the money not to cut taxes, as Republicans wanted, but to invest in education, fund free breakfast and lunch for schoolchildren, make tuition free at the state’s public colleges for students whose families earned less than $80,000 a year, and invest in paid family and medical leave and health insurance coverage regardless of immigration status."
is that really the type of initiative that Stefanik believes will "destroy our nation?"
Walz responded this way:
"Kids are eating and having full bellies so they can go learn, and women are making their own health care decisions, and we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness…. The fact of the matter is where Democratic policies are implemented, quality of life is higher, the economies are better…educational attainment is better. So yeah, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we're working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance. So if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.”
Book ban takes hold
Utah passed a law last year that if any three school districts found a book objectionable, the book would be banned in the entire state. The law went into effect on July 1.
According to an analysis of by the Salt Lake Tribune, at least 36 books have been flagged by three or more Utah school districts for various reasons, but none met the criteria set by the law.
Thirteen books did qualify for the state ban. The law states that schools must be “protecting children from the harmful effects of illicit pornography over other considerations."
But here is what really caught my eye. The New York Times reported that "Any materials that include a description of sex or masturbation would run afoul of the new rule."
I found that curious. Do the state officials in Utah believe that adolescents are learning how to masturbate from books? My own personal experience - granted it was years ago - was I didn't need the help of a book.
Another happy subscriber
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Journalism not dead
While earlier this week there was news that Axios and the Tampa Bay Tribune were engaging in layoffs, the New York Times reported it had gained 300,000 new digital subscriptions in the second quarter of this year.
That's a good sign for journalism.
The Times now has 10.8 million subscribers with some 10.2 million of them digital only. Digital journalism can be successful and that benefits us all.
The Mann in Paris
Former North Country Public Radio reporter Brian Mann has been in Paris for the past two weeks providing Olympic coverage for National Public Radio.
NCPR's David Sommerstein caught up with Brian this week to find out what the Olympic experience was like, especially after previous assignments covering the war in Ukraine.
Ken Tingley spent more than four decades working in small community newspapers in upstate New York. Since retirement in 2020 he has written three books and is currently adapting his second book "The Last American Newspaper" into a play. He currently lives in Queensbury, N.Y.
Sedition Stefanik hasn’t changed her tune. She is still thinking that her MAGA rhetoric will help her achieve her goal. Attacking Walz , in my opinion, is a mistake. Improving the lives of Minnesotans is a good thing. What has Miss Harvard done to improve the lives of the people of NY21? I can’t think of a single thing!
The schools like Carlisle are an ugly stain on our history. Slavery, the Japanese internment during WWII, treatment of our indigenous population, redlining and other common and acceptable practices against specific groups were and are abhorrent practices. We see it today applied to voting rights, housing, inferior schools, lack of proper medical treatment, within our legal and penal systems. Racists will always find a way to mistreat those considered inferior. Unfortunately, racism is alive and well in today's society; more subtle, perhaps, but still practiced.