More Than a Game:
The Carlisle Indians Take to the Gridiron,
1893–1917

David Wallace Adams

When students at Carlisle Indian School asked to play football, Superintendent Richard Pratt agreed, believing that the sight of Indians competing against the best college teams in the country would advance the school's assimilationist vision. But as this essay makes clear, Pratt was unable to control the meaning that journalists, spectators, and players read into Indian-white football.

Sometime in 1893 more than three dozen young men crowded into the office of Richard Henry Pratt, superintendent of the Indian school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, for the purpose of making an impassioned request: they wanted to play football. The background to the situation Pratt knew only too well. Once before he had sent an Indian team onto the gridiron, but when one of his players broke his leg, Pratt suspended the program. And now this new appeal. The group had selected their most eloquent spokesman to make their case. "While they stood around my desk, their black eyes intensely watching me," Pratt later remembered, "the orator gave practically all the arguments in favor of our contending in outside football . . . and ended by requesting the removal of the embargo." After listening to the group's plea, Pratt relented. He would allow a resumption of the football program, but only on two conditions: that the Indians always play fairly and never slug an opponent, and that they whip the best football teams in the country. The group readily agreed to both conditions. So began the Carlisle Indians' legendary 24-year-long struggle on the gridiron.1

1

Pratt had his own reasons for supporting the delegation's appeal. As founder of Carlisle Indian School in 1879, Pratt was a central figure among the humanitarian reformers who sought to solve the "Indian problem" by a policy of forced acculturation, with schools playing a pivotal role in the process. Pratt's approach to the Indian question began with a simple proposition: culturally, Indians were savages, and as such, their days were numbered. The doctrine of civilized progress and the reality of white expansion and settlement meant that reservation Indians must either adopt the ways of whites or suffer eventual racial extinction. Pratt's special role in the reform cause was to demonstrate the potential of off-reservation schools as instruments for accomplishing the Indians' cultural transformation. Convinced that the source of Indian savagery was environmental rather than genetic, Pratt believed that the work of civilizing Indians could only be carried out if they were removed from the influences of reservation life for a period of five years or more. Pratt's philosophy would always be, "to civilize the Indian, get him into civilization. To keep him civilized, let him stay." Pratt believed that only through a regimented program of military discipline, academic instruction, industrial training, and civilized living conditions, could Indians internalize and appreciate the white man's civilization, and in the process shed their tribal heritage.2

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