The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

By Matthew Bentley and John Bloom
University of Nebraska Press (2022)
242 pages

Review by Ryan Winn

When Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt stated his school’s goal for its students was to “kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” he was referring to his pupils adopting the Victorian ideals of “civilized” manhood. Paradoxically, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was best known for its football team—a violent team game that was in many ways the antithesis of the “virtues of self-sufficiency, self-control, and individualism.” Matthew Bentley and John Bloom’s study exposes the contradictions at the heart of Carlisle’s articulated mission, revealing how the school’s imposition of culture was as contradictory as it was culturally elitist. Divided into three sections, the book examines the school’s ideals for gender roles, the rise of its celebrated “athletic manhood,” and finally the unfolding of a congressional investigation that illuminated the specifics behind the accusations that school administrators were “‘uncivilized,’ unmanly, and incompetent” in their stewardship.

Considering that Carlisle first opened its doors within a decade of when the federal government sought to tear apart tribal landholdings through the Dawes General Allotment Act, the lens of individual “manhood” proves fruitful for Bentley and Bloom’s text. At the core of its educational doctrine, Carlisle preached a mantra aimed at uprooting generations of tribal cultural connections based upon communal mindedness. In its place, students were taught the virtues of a myopic focus on selfishness, as “male students had to learn to internalize [a] separate, strictly binary gender role, and learn to respect individual property, in order to be respected as men.” As Bentley and Bloom convey, “Carlisle’s founders convinced themselves that masculine men needed to be ‘civilized,’ and women needed to be their ‘civilizing’ influence.”

It was not success in the classroom, but rather on the gridiron that brought the school fame and begrudging respect. The authors note that “Ivy League universities had turned football into a popular sensation by performing their own masculine ‘savagery.’” Bentley and Bloom also highlight the diametric opposition in Pratt’s thinking that “if students could behave in a controlled gentlemanly fashion on the field during a physically brutal football game, he could demonstrate that Indigenous people could become ‘civilized’ men.” Although the team’s success on the field was undeniable, at times the opposing fans and national press responded with barbaric slights and overtly racist dismissals.

While those who have studied boarding schools will not be surprised by the success of Carlisle’s lauded athletes or the shameful horrors of its instruction, Bentley and Bloom offer readers a rhetorical means to critique both the mission and methodology that drove the school whose name is now synonymous with generational trauma.

Ryan Winn, PhD, is a member of the liberal studies faculty at the College of Menominee Nation and a columnist for the Tribal College Journal.