Description
To Show What an Indian Can Do: Sports at Native American Boarding Schools is a slim volume that examines the role of sports activities and Native America students who attended boarding schools (residential schools). The conflicting agendas of boarding school administrators and the Native students who were forced to attend are discussed in the text. The author examines the ways administrators and teachers worked to assimilate the students in the first chapter. Sports activities and their conflicting roles and meanings are examined in the next chapter. Additional chapters look at the development of Pan-Indian pride in athletics during the 1930s. Chapter four deals with ideas about sport and physical activity and their effects on female students from the perspective of educators and administrators as well as students. The most fascinating and important chapter is the final one that makes substantial use of first-person narratives by students who attended these boarding schools and their perspectives on the importance of sports and athletics in their education and boarding school experience. The book contains 20 archival photographs of boarding school athletes. Many however are not individually identified. While the value of this book may be limited to readers interested in boarding and residential school experiences, those scholars and students interested in the role of sports and Native Americans will find this volume useful.