I procrastinated recently by playing a Sporcle quiz which asks you to name the ten winningest schools in college football in each of the sport’s fifteen completed decades. It’s an interesting exercise—I’ll try to leave out spoilers, in case you want to play, but my sensation, many a time as I got to the phase of my guessing where I was just listing current Division I schools, was a taken-aback realization that at one point, (insert currently mediocre/bad program) was among the nation’s most successful, even over a ten-year stretch. When the six allotted minutes finally ran out, it was fun to see which programs hadn’t even crossed my mind.
With many of the programs I hadn’t guessed, I at least knew the school existed, or in the case of one specific liberal arts college had a vague idea of the school. Two, though, stood out.
Whoever made the Sporcle quiz (“HoosierDaddy” is their account name on the site) chose to include both the name of each school and that school’s team nickname in the answer—“USC Trojans,” “Texas Longhorns,” “Alabama Crimson Tide.” The two which stood out, then, stood out in part because of their nicknames: “Carlisle Indians.” “Haskell Fighting Indians.”
I should probably have heard of Carlisle. Jim Thorpe played there. Pop Warner coached there. In those early days of college football, when the Ivies were king and even Notre Dame had yet to rise, Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a national player. In 1912, they went 12-1-1, beating Syracuse, Pitt, Army, and Brown while losing only to Penn and playing a schedule the last ten games of which were solely on the road. The team was never named a national champion—national championships weren’t awarded at the time they played (the school was closed in 1918), and even those backward-looking championship designations never named Carlisle the best—but they finished with one loss four separate times in Warner’s eight-year tenure, playing consistently against some of the best programs of the day (including a 1912 Army team which featured Dwight D. Eisenhower).
Haskell, meanwhile, still exists. It’s named Haskell Indian Nations University, it’s in Lawrence, Kansas (making it the only school from Lawrence to appear on the aforementioned Sporcle quiz), and it was among the sport’s western powers in the 1910’s, playing multiple games against Texas, Texas A&M, Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State), Notre Dame, and others of their ilk. It lacks the name power Thorpe and Warner give Carlisle, but it, like Carlisle, competed with the best, and it, like Carlisle, won a whole lot of games.
The schools are and were, as you would imagine, products of their times. Each was founded in an era when the federal policy towards Native Americans was one of forced assimilation, and while Haskell has evolved with the eras, Carlisle didn’t get that chance. Carlisle does seem to hold more sway in the game’s history. Among other things, there’s a 2007 book on the program. But the legacy of neither is commonplace knowledge, and while I suppose that’s natural—it’s been one hundred years since Carlisle played a game, and we aren’t talking about those Lafayette College teams of the 1880’s, 1890’s, and 1900’s—it’s a little sad. No offense to Lafayette, but Carlisle and Haskell are quite a story. A complex story, too. And one that reflects things back upon ourselves, our present selves, here today. In how we tell their story, and how we don’t, and how foreign they seem in this grand American institution that is college football. Foreign. Them. The Native Americans.
