Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, A Nation.

Jenkins, Sally. Real All Americans: The Team That Changed a Game, a People, A Nation.
Doubleday see Random,2007. 343p $24.95 978-0-385-51987-8

The saga of the Carlisle Indians is a triumphant example of an underdog excelling under all odds. And again it was the football field that provided the opportunity for greatness.
The author has written a truly inspirational story about the Native Americans and how they coped with the diminishing of their culture and traditional lifestyle. It was an era of change. It was also a time of intense feelings as the Native Americans had to adapt to the “white man’s” ways just twenty-two years after the Battle of Wounded Knee. America’s focus also changed from fighting wars in the American West to challenges of the gridiron as the American Football Association’s establishment in 1876.
On 11/9/1912, the Carlisle Indian football team faced the Army team in a game that changed not only the game of football but also the way the American people looked at Native Americans. The Army had an impressive team (including an outstanding halfback, Dwight D. Eisenhower) that played a particularly brutal style of football. The Carlisle team was small but quick (coached by “Pop” Warner and included their star runner, Jim Thorpe) and utilized trick plays, fakes, and breath taking speed of their Olympian runner. The Carlisle Indians did not just want to win the game; they wanted to win in a particular way that showed what they could do on an equal plating field with the “palefaces”. The NYT favored them with a public compliment: “One of the most spectacular aggregations of football players, especially in the backfield, ever assembled.”
In reading this book, you will enjoy the humor and sympathize with the inadequacies of the past. You will also gain an additional insight into the turmoil of the American West and what it meant to the Native American culture. LM