Thanksgiving Sports Games
Search: “indian football”
One of the most interesting results was that the word “indian” often came up in the context of Thanksgiving sports games, either as a result of an “indian” school or a sports team named “indian” playing a game. There is a long, racist history behind the naming of sports mascots after Native Americans, which is beyond the scope of this paper. However, these types of newspaper results are still relevant in addressing whether, as time passes, Thanksgiving becomes less linked to Native Americans and instead, results in a correlation with non-indigenous representatives of Native Americans in the context of Thanksgiving.
The word “football” was a collocate with a high Stat value when searching for the word “indian.” Searching for this word by itself, there are 1600 results. When the phrase “indian football” is searched, there are only 19 instances. The word “indian” is most commonly preceded by: Carlisle, Sherman, Perris, Haskell, Genoa, and Moline. Importantly, these are names of Native American Boarding Schools located around the country. Searching for the phrase “indian game,” there are 21 results with a similar pattern: the names of specific boarding schools often precede this phrase.
The locations and dates of newspapers that reference “indian football” are as follows:
| File | City, State | Year |
|---|---|---|
| 68 | Coolidge, Arizona | 1946 |
| 144 | Maui, Hawaii | 1920 |
| 147 | Annapolis, Maryland | 1903 |
| 148 | Ypsilanti, Michigan | 1945 |
| 156 | Albuquerque, New Mexico | 1907 |
| 219 | North Lemmon, North Dakota | 1911 |
| 401 | Topeka, Kansas | 1914 |
| 440 | Hurley, South Dakota | 1913 |
| 585 | Albuquerque, New Mexico | 1906 |
| 681 | Indianapolis, Indiana | 1893 |
| 907 | Albuquerque, New Mexico | 1907 |
| 931 | Tucson, Arizona | 1901 |
| 1009 | Phoenix, Arizona | 1917 |
| 1042 | Albuquerque, New Mexico | 1907 |
| 1146 | St. Johnsbury, Vermont | 1911 |
| 1183 | Columbus, Ohio | 1897 |
| 1215 | Grand Forks, North Dakota | 1921 |
| 1312 | St. Louis, Missouri | 1902 |
The earliest date is 1893 and the most recent date is 1946. Geographically, these news articles are found in publications from Vermont to Hawaii, but a majority are from Western states, which makes sense since a few of these boarding schools are located in Western territories.
Prior to analysis, I had hypothesized that Native Americans would become further removed from the holiday as time passes since it would align with the propagation of the myth of the “Vanishing Indian”, a common motif seen throughout the corpus. I had believed that Native Americans would only be referenced in later newspapers as the name of a sports team. This is not necessarily indicated by the information available in the corpus. Since this data only extends to 1963, I cannot completely attest to these results. There are many sports teams — most prominently baseball, football, and hockey — with the word “indian” or other derogatory phrases in their name. Many of these teams were formed between the late 19th century and early 20th century, within the time frame of this corpus. Since the newspapers were refined by the search term “thanksgiving indian”, it is possible that either these teams rarely played a Thanksgiving game or the Chronicling America database does not include a significant number of sports pages.
Yet still, it is incredibly interesting to see how sports became a part of Thanksgiving, which is seen by the increase in the number of newspaper articles that mention the phrase “thanksgiving football” over time. Importantly, this also highlights how Native Americans were able to continue to survive and thrive in Western settings: these boarding schools existed for the sole purpose of destroying indigenous language and culture and yet, indigenous students were able to navigate this forced assimilation and succeed in Western sports. The contexts for the phrase “indian football” often mention the considerable number of fans that attended these games. Thus, even though these games were not inherently political, the continuing presence of Native Americans was still illuminated by the fact that the hundreds of thousands of people in attendance were aware of indigenous existence, effectively countering the “Vanishing Indian” myth.