Here, via How Appealing.
Jim Thorpe, PA Has “no intention of letting him go”
Here, via How Appealing.
Jim Thorpe
Borough to Appeal Jim Thorpe Ruling because It’s Cheaper to Do So
Here, via How Appealing.
Judge Orders Repatriation of Jim Thorpe’s Remains under NAGPRA
Judge Caputo (Mid. Dist. Penn.) entered an order granting a complete summary judgment in favor of Bill and Richard Thorpe and the Sac and Fox Nation in the litigation to repatriate the remains of Jim Thorpe pursuant to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.
The judge concluded that NAGPRA applies to the remains of Jim Thorpe and to the Borough, and he also ruled that the passage of time between the enactment of NAGPRA and the filing of this case did not prevent a repatriation. This is a very significant ruling under NAGPRA, and it should be helpful to tribes in the future because it addresses and rejects some so-called defenses to NAGPRA that could be used to impede repatriation efforts.
Update w/ materials:
News Coverage of Court Fight over Jim Thorpe’s Remains
Here. An excerpt:
The case already has produced evidence that Thorpe — an athlete who piled up superlatives like so many sweat socks — must have had the wackiest funeral of all time.
Go back 59 years. At a feast on the night before Thorpe was to be buried on Sac and Fox tribal land in Oklahoma, his wife, Patsy, showed up with a hearse and police escort, loaded up the body and sped away down a dark rural road, leaving gaped mouths behind in the dust.
She put the burial rights out to the highest bidder, insisting only that the winning town change its name to Jim Thorpe.
Two worn out coal-mining boroughs in Pennsylvania took her up on the offer, though Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk may have been thinking about a name change anyway. They merged, became Jim Thorpe, Pa., and that is where the town’s namesake has been in a mausoleum since 1953.
WaPo Article on Jim Thorpe Burial Dispute
Here.
NYTs Article on the Battle over Jim Thorpe’s Remains
Here.
NYTs on American Indian Baseball
From the NYTs:
HOWES CAVE, N.Y. (AP) — Long before Jackie Robinson endured torrents of racial taunts in breaking baseball’s color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947, Louis Sockalexis had a bull’s-eye on his back.
From the day in 1897 when he first put on a uniform for the Cleveland Spiders, Sockalexis took more than his share of racial slurs.
“If the small and big boys of Brooklyn find it a pleasure to shout at me, I have no objections,” Sockalexis told The Brooklyn Eagle during his rookie season. “No matter where we play, I go through the same ordeal, and at the present time, I am so used to it that at times I forget to smile at my tormentors.”
Sockalexis figured the tormenting was just part of the game. A Penobscot Indian from Maine, Sockalexis is considered the first player of American Indian descent to make it to the major leagues. (James Madison Toy played with Cleveland a decade earlier and was said to be of Sioux ancestry, but he never publicly acknowledged his Indian heritage and his 1919 death certificate lists his race as white.)
Sockalexis’s story is one of many chronicled in “Baseball’s League of Nations: A Tribute to Native Americans in Baseball,” an exhibit on display through the end of the year at the Iroquois Indian Museum here. The exhibit features photographs and artifacts, many on loan from the National Baseball Hall of Fame in nearby Cooperstown.
“There’s never been an exhibit like this before,” said Mike Tarbell, 61, an Akwesasne Mohawk who serves as an educator at the museum. “For myself, it’s like a breath of fresh air. We’re always doing something that involves pottery or basket making or painting or sculpturing of some kind. We’ve forgotten that baseball was a part of our history as well.”
Counting the current players Joba Chamberlain (Winnebago Nation) of the Yankees, Jacoby Ellsbury (Navajo) of the Boston Red Sox and Kyle Lohse (Nomlaki Nation) of the St. Louis Cardinals, more than 50 American Indians have played professional baseball.
“We came up with a lot of cool stuff that we didn’t think we were going to find,” said the museum’s curator, Stephanie Shultes, who assembled the exhibit. “It was kind of amazing, once we started, how much there really was out there, how many of these guys that you did find out about you may have never realized before were native.”
American Indians were introduced to baseball in several ways. Lewis and Clark are said to have taught an early version of baseball to members of the Nez Perce during the explorers’ trek across North America from 1804 to 1806. And in the late 1800s, American Indian prisoners of war at Fort Sill, Okla., including the Apache warrior Geronimo, played baseball.
Turtle Talk 