Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team

Exploitation is the practice of treating another person or people unfairly in order to benefit from them. Exploitation of Indigenous peoples in the United States is a prevalent theme throughout Undefeated because Sheinkin foregrounds the historical context of Thorpe’s story in which white America actively discriminated against Indigenous people and sought to wipe out Indigenous culture.

Thorpe and his teammates on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School football team proudly represented their school and made the sacrifices that serious athletes make to focus on their training. It is up for debate, though, whether Pratt and Warner, both of whom benefitted from the team’s hard work and sacrifice, actually had the best interests of their Indigenous students in mind when they pushed them to play more games and beat the highest caliber of competition from schools like Harvard, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania. Pratt’s goal was to prove that his school could civilize its students, and he saw the team’s victories as a reflection of his success in stripping them of their Indigenous traits rather than as the result of their intrinsic talents, skills, and capacity for hard work. Pratt’s school received increased revenue from ticket sales and attention from major press organizations. With his paternalistic attitude toward Indigenous people, Pratt had no problem using his students to promote his values and reputation as an educational reformer. The legacy of the Carlisle Indian School attests that it did far more harm than good for its students and their families, but Pratt never questioned the ethics of his method.

Though Warner went on to have a stellar coaching career, his real fame began when he became the coach of the winning Carlisle Indian School football team. The fact that Warner left the school and came back to coach Thorpe suggests that he believed his team’s performance would reflect on his career and his legacy, and he only wanted to coach the team if they were going to win. Warner had what he called “football intelligence,” which is demonstrated in the plays and other innovations he invented for the game while coaching the Carlisle Indian School football team. He was, however, only able to coach his team to the degree that he could because of the high caliber of players and individuals he had wearing his school uniform. While the wins certainly benefited Thorpe and his teammates, Warner’s demands often pushed them past exhaustion, and they, rather than Warner, bore the blame for their losses. In this light, it becomes possible to see Warner as exploiting the team for his own benefit, as the years went by and the school became stronger in football and more well-known across the nation.

Warner was paid $4,000 per year (roughly $120,000 in 2023) to coach the Carlisle Indian School football team, an unbelievable amount during that time in the United States. Before arriving at Carlisle, Warner had squandered any small sums he’d made from coaching when he gambled. It can’t be known for certain, but Warner may have not wanted to risk his position by defending Thorpe when he was accused of illegally playing semi-professional baseball and lying about it to compete in the Olympics. Both Warner and Friedman claimed to have known nothing about Thorpe’s summer baseball playing though they were well aware that he, like many other college athletes, played semiprofessional baseball in the summer. It is possible to say that they hung Thorpe out to dry to protect themselves, their salaries, and their reputations.

Instances like these, among many other instances throughout the book, point to the very real aspect of early 20th-century American racism and exploitation. Though the Carlisle school was supposed to prepare its students to enter the mainstream American workforce, its graduates continued to face racism and, thus, unemployment because white society was still too racist to hire them as skilled workers. In their paternalism, neither Pratt nor Friedman saw society as the problem; they only intensified efforts to strip Carlisle’s students of their Indigenous traits, believing Indigenous people were intrinsically flawed rather than subject to an unfair system.

Outside the school, exploitation of Indigenous people determined when and if they could be considered American. At the time, Indigenous people were not considered American citizens though Thorpe competed in the Olympic games as an America, representing the United States. In reality, he was considered a ward of the state. He was free to compete and win gold for the United States, but he could not claim American citizenship because the government would not grant it to him, or any other Indigenous people, for many years to come.