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21 Cards in this Set
- Front
- Back
Athletics
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Indian players, like other Indian performers, carried with them specific tribal histories and general Indian histories that rendered their experiences unique.
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Athletics
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Athletic competition provided an entree into American society--a chance to beat whites at their own games, an opportunity to get an education, even at its most serious, an occasion for fun and sociality.
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Athletics
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Intercollegiate sports evolved into a crucial signifier of masculine, class, and race identities.
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Athletics
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Unlike blacks, Indians had long been enmeshed in the discourse of American assimilation. "Giving the indian a chance" was a culturally appropriate move, a shouldering of the white man's burden.
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Athletics
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Indians were harassed in athletics for being Indian. "Chief."
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Athletics
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Indian athletes, especially those who helped a team win, could receive a surprisingly genuine welcome in many quarters.
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Athletics
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In the early twentieth century's connection with cultural primitivism, Indians could be objects, not simply of racial repulsion, but also--as they reflected nostalgia for community, spirituality, and nature--of racial desire.
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Athletics
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Viewing Indian bodies displayed on the diamond, spectators naturalized the meanings that they had imagined for Indian difference, placed them in the specific historical moment of modernity, injected them with value, and then used their own rhetoric to spice the stew of melting-pot America as it was blended in athletic performance.
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Athletics
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Successful performances affirmed assimilation, social evolution, successful Christianization, and evolving forms of ongoing domination.
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Athletics
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The idea of sportsmanship proved that Indians were becoming like whites. Becoming manly meant becoming white.
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Athletics
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Sometimes, modern American society valued them all the more for NOT becoming white, for continuing to embody a primitivist virtue that still looked like racial difference.
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Athletics
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Indians athletes were often expected to reflect white cultural understandings of Indianness back to their predominantly white audiences...
Indians were expected to "Play Indian." |
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Athletics
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White people thought Indians were all wild men.
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Athletics
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Sports served as a meeting places for transformation and persistence; for distinct, even mutually exclusive Indian and white interpretations; and for shared understandings.
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Athletics
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Indians were able to move more confidently in non-Indian society.
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Athletics
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After WWII, a new push to terminate tribes and force Indians to become white and modern helped close the primitivist windows of opportunity that had opened during the first half of the century.
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Athletics
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After WWII, Indians were then viewed as backward rather than pure and primitive.
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Athletics
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Indian political thought began turning away from integrationist models that had undergirded cross-cultural athletics and toward a renewed emphasis on autonomy and distinctiveness.
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Athletics
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In other words, the entire cultural, social, and economic system that had supported Indian athletes in the early twentieth century had been transformed in ways that almost completely shut them out.
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Athletics
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Sports became a critical part of the expectations haunting American culture during the early twentieth century-and no less critical to an unexpectedly modern inter-Indian cultural system.
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Athletics
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The memory of Jim Thorpe's body carries with it a whole host of expectations about Indian primitivism and modernist balance, ability and inability, history, education, physicality, and character---making Thorpe and anomaly.
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