“Onward, Haskell”

 

The idleness and rhythm of baseball were a spring rite at the federally-operated Indian boarding schools of the late nineteenth century. Played passionately by the students on fields carved out of forests, the schools used baseball as another tool to impose the federal assimilation policy to teach values of the American White society like teamwork and discipline. For the boys, it was a chance for fun, an escape from the harsh conditions. Many Native students excelled in baseball, achieving recognition and pride through their athletic prowess.

PART I. THE CEMETERY AND THE PAST

Behind a foul-smelling sewage plant, adjacent to woods and wetlands that had been sliced by the South Lawrence Trafficway, lies a half-acre cemetery abutting the campus of the Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. Buried are the remains of 103 Native American children/students who perished at Haskell from 1885 to 1943.1 Each grave is marked with a name, a tribe, an age, and little else. In that bygone era, runaways made their escape through the cemetery, woods, and wetlands toward safety. Haskell students interred here died of diseases such as consumption (tuberculosis), influenza, and typhoid, buried with their memories and little to acknowledge their journey. None went home again, individually buried with a Christian Mass in a Christian cemetery, though a portion were not Christian. Many had been subjected to the American policy of forced assimilation.

Strewn throughout are remembrances left behind by Native Americans. Spiritual symbols atop the burial sites such as the Native handmade willow dreamcatchers hung to protect the buried from evil. “I was thankful to have a beautiful place to pray. Who would I be if I didn’t fight to protect it,” said Pemina Yellow Bird in 2014 when she discovered the grounds.2 She believed, as many do, that a spirituality existed in the cemetery.

Each interred child may never have had a chance to play with new toys, thrive in their culture, grow to adulthood or even play a game of pickup baseball on a barren field. The cemetery has been vandalized and burials lost over time. In 2017 Haskell built an eight-foot iron fence around the grounds, restored vandalized stones, and gave the grounds a sense of security and protection. “We had a case of vandalism in the cemetery going back a year or a little more where an individual pulled up some of the headstones and just tossed them in the corner of the cemetery,” said Haskell spokesman Stephen Prue.3

On October 25, 2024, President Joseph Biden issued an apology to the Native American tribes and communities for the federal government’s role in operating the Native American boarding schools, including Haskell. The apology was for the forced assimilation and abuse of Native American children that separated them from their families and cultures in an attempt to eradicate their individual tribal identities.

Biden said, “[T]he Federal Indian Boarding School policy and the pain it has caused will always be a significant mark of shame, a blot on American history. It’s a sin on our [Nation’s] soul.”4 In the effort to right a wrong, the apology was a step in the process of acknowledgment and healing that was welcomed by some tribes and viewed with skepticism by others.

PART II THE HASKELL INDIAN NATIONS UNIVERSITY

As of 2025 Haskell was a public tribal land-grant university operated by the United States Bureau of Indian Affairs. The school is the only federally operated four-year university for Native American students, accepting students from all federally recognized tribes.5 The evolution of Haskell has been pockmarked with good intentions, self-determination efforts by Native tribes, and the sins of American policy.

Upon the conclusion of the American Civil War, the expansionary focus of the nation focused on the Plains and the West. The dilemma of whether to coexist with the Native American population occupied lawmakers and religious figures. What resulted was a period of American history focused on the eradication of Native American culture, lands, and independence. The US government viewed education as the best method of achieving that end with a particular focus on making Native children into “Americans.” Army Captain Robert Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School for the purpose of “civilizing” Indigenous children and implementing his theory of assimilating Indigenous peoples. His 1892 speech at the National Conference of Charities and Corrections in Denver used the wording that became the mantra of assimilation: “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”6 In 1882 Congress authorized three new boarding schools to be established in Nebraska, Kansas, and the Indian Territory7 with Carlisle as the model. Haskell was one of the three.

Congressman Dudley Haskell (1842-1883), chairman of the House Committee on Indian Affairs, was instrumental in opening a boarding school in his hometown of Lawrence, with $10,000 from Lawrence citizens to “educate” Indigenous boys and girls under the age of 10.8 He secured the legislation for the Indian school that still bears his name. Haskell was also responsible for the origins of baseball at the school. A local shoe merchant and player for the local Kaw Valleys, Haskell was known for his prodigious home runs.

Initially known as the United States Indian Industrial Training School, Haskell opened its doors on September 17, 1884, with 22 students from the Ponca, Sac and Fox, Shawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, and Chippewa Munsee tribes. Training focused on agriculture and vocational trades such as blacksmithing, textiles, farming, and sewing in a curriculum rooted in the era’s English-only movement, enforced by corporal punishment.

The students who attended Indian boarding schools were primarily Indigenous children, often forcibly removed from their families and communities by the federal government.9 Each student who arrived at Haskell was required to stay for a minimum of one four-year term. The children arrived by train. All semblance of the children’s lives were stripped away, including clothing, photographs, toys, and keepsakes. Children were not allowed to speak their native languages. Contact with family was forbidden. The children were required to take English names.

By 1894 Haskell had transitioned from elementary education to advanced schooling, offering eight grades of “industrial training” for boys and girls.10 By 1927 the school taught both high school and postsecondary courses.

At the start of the New Deal Era in 1933, Haskell chose its first Native Indian superintendent, Dr. Henry Roe Cloud (1884-1950), a full-blooded Ho-Chunk enrolled with the Winnebago Tribe.11 With the racist language of the era, Cloud was described as a man “who rose from a bark wgiwam [sic] on the plains of Nebraska to recently become the superintendent of Haskell Institute, the largest institution of its kind.”12 Reportedly he “early showed a desire for further learning in the white man’s school.”13 Cloud was a Mason, Rotarian, Elk, and Presbyterian minister. Most importantly, he was a reformer and educator. Dismantling the assimilation curriculum and policies, he instituted a traditional style of schooling focused on arts, skills, advanced trades, and Native culture. Haskell became an Indigenous leader and advocate. In 1906 Cloud married Elizabeth Bender, a White Earth Chippewa. She was the sister of Albert “Chief” Bender, who was a Hall of Fame pitcher for the Philadelphia Athletics.14

In 1970 Haskell began offering junior-college degrees and became known as the Haskell Junior College. The college then became Haskell Indian Nations University in 1993, offering a four-year baccalaureate degree program with a mission dedicated to Indian cultural preservation, research, and education.

By 2024, Haskell offered bachelor’s degrees in Indigenous and American Indian studies, business administration, elementary education, and environmental science along with nine associate degrees. The average enrollment at Haskell is 900, with multi-tribal representation. To apply for admission, one must either be an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe eligible for education benefits from the Bureau of Indian Affairs or at least a one-fourth total degree Indian blood direct descendant of an enrolled member of a tribe.15

Athletics is a pivotal component of the Haskell community. The university competes in 11 intercollegiate varsity sports. Men’s sports include basketball, cross-country, golf, and track and field (indoor and outdoor); women’s sports include basketball, cross-country, softball, track and field (indoor and outdoor), and volleyball. Club sports include baseball; varsity baseball was dropped in 2015. The school colors are purple, gold, and white. Haskell is home to the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame.

 

PART III. HASKELL’S AFFAIR WITH BASEBALL

A passion for baseball and other stick-and-ball games has long existed among Native American tribes, who created the game of lacrosse. The Choctaw developed an ancestral form of stickball called “Ishtaboli” that has been its national sport for centuries.16 Those who attended Haskell were familiar with such games.

Many Indigenous athletes at Haskell played both baseball and football. In the first part of the twentieth century, Haskell had a dominant football program, competitive against the powers of the time like Yale, Brown, Missouri, and Creighton. After the 1931 season, the school shifted the team to a high-school status and eventually dropped football in 1938. Sport was a “serious and integral part of [Native] life and as an important developmental activity of young people.”17 At Haskell and elsewhere, Native Indian students accepted and excelled at “new” sports like baseball that were introduced to them.

A handful of Haskell baseball players briefly made it the major leagues; Jim Thorpe, George Johnson, Ben Tincup, and Louis LeRoy went to Haskell. A host of Haskell athletes also played in the minor leagues.

While Native American baseball players did not face “official” segregation as did African American players, the arrival of Native Americans into professional baseball was marked by racism, hazing, and hostility. The common practice of racially tinged nicknames like Chief or Injun marked Native athletes as different. The number of Native Americans playing major-league baseball ebbed after World War I, reviving only recently.18

The words that Cahuilla Band John Tortes Meyers, a former New York Giants catcher, wrote about his teammate Jim Thorpe can be applied to any Native players in any sport: “It would be false modesty on my part to declare that I am not thoroughly delighted with the fact that my race has proven itself competent to master the White man’s principal sport.”19

Haskell student Isaac “Ike” Kahdot (1899-1999) mastered the game to become a major leaguer in 1922. Kahdot grew up in Georgetown, near present-day Konawa, Oklahoma. A Potawatomi Indian, he attended Sacred Heart School as a little boy. He was mistreated: “I didn’t like the priests, so I ran off every chance I got.”20 Accusing him of smoking “tobacco,” the priests whipped him as punishment. He attended the Friends Mission School, then his father enrolled him at Haskell. He excelled at baseball. He told the Tulsa World in 1993, “My dad give me a bat and a ball and a glove when I was growing up. And I always had that with me. We had an Injun team when I was a young kid, and my dad wanted me to play ball on it.”21 When he finished high school, Kahdot advanced in the minor leagues before Cleveland acquired his rights from the Coffeyville, Kansas, team he played on.

As a shortstop and third baseman, Kahdot had a brief stay with the Cleveland Indians, from September 5 to 21, 1922, appearing in four games with two at-bats and no hits. In his first game, on September 5 against the St. Louis Browns, Kahdot came in to run for player-team manager Tris Speaker in the sixth inning. His final appearance in the major leagues was on September 21 in a 15-5 loss to Boston.22 Speaker had Kahdot come into the game in the eighth during the blowout loss, substituting for Larry Gardner at third. He faced Jack Quinn and went 0-for-1, flying out to left in the bottom of the eighth. He had a putout and an assist executing a double play.23

Upon the completion of the 1923 minor-league season, Cleveland wanted Kahdot to play for its Grand Rapids minor-league team, where the Indians sent their top prospects. Kahdot lived in Kansas and “had a new wife, and a possible major league career didn’t seem worth the move.”24 He paid the Indians $2,500 to release him from his contract.

Kahdot played baseball for 15 years in several minor leagues until 1935.25 Then he was a derrick man, driller, and rope choker in oilfields until 1958, when he went to work at Tinker Air Force Base until his retirement in 1969.26

In 1993 Tulsa World wrote that “‘Chief’ Kahdot’s only mark on the major leagues may have been but a line in four box scores. But his journey from a small community before statehood through the major and minor leagues, touched a part of the game, and America, that has long been forgotten except in history books.”27 He lived to almost 100 and was the oldest living major leaguer when he died in Oklahoma City on March 31, 1999.

Khadot’s solitary reminder that he was a major leaguer, other than memories, was a memento he received: a brand-new Reach baseball signed by his Cleveland teammates and treasured until his death.28

PART IV. HASKELL BASEBALL STORIES

APRIL 15, 1901

Haskell’s 1901 season began with a 5-5 tie with the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Haskell jumped to a 5-0 lead with four runs in the first and a run in the second. The contest “was devoid of features of great interest and would have been won by the Indians had they not got badly rattled and allowed the university boys to run five scores on errors.”29 The bottom of the ninth was not played “as the university boys thought they had won the game, and left the field.”30

SEPTEMBER 4, 1903

During the 1903 season, the Howard (Kansas) Courant wrote several colorful statements about the Haskell baseball team, reflecting the period’s simplistic attitudes toward Native Americans: 1) “They are a peaceable lot of braves, those Haskell boys, and they play fast ball.” 2) “There is nothing especially aboriginal about the names of the Haskell Indian boys as they appear on the hotel register.” 3) “Lots of ball players could learn good manners of the noble red men from Haskell.”31

APRIL 18, 1905

An Oneida Indian, Chauncey Archiquette (1877-1949) was a unique athlete. It was announced that “the Indian star football half-back and base ball man, has left the Haskell Institute and has followed the two more of the best athletes Haskell ever had.”32 He left the school on April 17, 1905, to “join Green’s Nebraska Indian base ball team.”33 He followed Chas. Guyon and Joe Rapp to Green, both of whom had played with Archiquette on Haskell’s baseball and football teams. Archiquette, who graduated from high school at Carlisle before attending Haskell, was a popular figure who “won many honors for the Indian institute[,] and the people of the town as well as the students of Haskell dislike to see him go.”34 At Haskell, Archiquette was the baseball team’s catcher and leading hitter.

In the fall of 1898, an impressionable 11-year-old Sac and Fox student watched the Haskell football practice in awe of Archiquette. He told himself, “I’m going to be as tough as Chauncey.”35 Archiquette asked the scrawny kid if wanted to play football and whether he wanted a football. Together, they went to the Haskell harness shop. Archiquette made him a makeshift football to play with. Thus began Archiquette’s mentoring of Jim Thorpe; they played football and baseball together at Haskell.36

Archiquette played football and baseball on barnstorming squads and later worked as a clerk for Carlisle in the book department and then went in 1906 to the Osage Indian Agency, for whom he worked until his retirement in 1942.37 The agency described Archiquette as a member of a musical quartet and “as one of the most competent men around the agency.”38

Archiquette was an American Olympian at the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games. He participated in Haskell’s two football games at Francis Olympic Field as part of the demonstration event of American football at the 1904 Summer Olympics.39

MARCH 31, 1909

Spring was dawning on the Haskell campus and baseball coach Maurice Kent thought his was going to be one of the best teams in the region.40 During the previous two seasons, “the Redskins through indifferent management, allowed the team to take the toboggan.”41 Most of the games were taking place “on the opponents’ diamonds … because the Indians couldn’t make expenses when they bought visiting teams” to Haskell.42 In past seasons, there was little interest in the baseball team and there “seemed to be little enthusiasm among the Haskell students. This year, “Kent proposes to stir up enthusiasm.”43

AUGUST 23, 1910

A death resulted from a game against Lecompton. Haskell’s Henry Rigert was badly injured playing his first game for a “Cherokee Indian ball team.”44 A star football and baseball player, Rigert attempted to slide into home plate when he “struck his head against the catcher’s knee, paralyzing him from the neck down.”45 Rigert was “conscious, … awaiting death realizing that there is scarcely one chance in a thousand for his recovery. …”46 Two doctors who treated Rigert concluded that he suffered “a dislocated vertebra pressing on the spinal cord.”47 In early September, a press article noted that Rigert “was killed at a baseball game.”48

MAY 7, 1915

Played in Emporia, Kansas, the Haskell Indian team defeated State Normal 6-2 on Normal’s home turf. Haskell’s lefty pitcher Delorme scattered three hits “while the Indians connected with nine of the Norman’s twirler’s offerings.”49 The field conditions were poor and as the players fought the muddy grounds and “the bunting in which the redskins indulged brought a victory.50 The fifth inning was “when the Indians annexed half their runs.”51

MAY 17, 1916

Haskell was about to play the Kansas Aggies in Manhattan when the team suffered a serious blow. Its 1916 prospects declined dramatically as it “received a serious bump by the ‘withdrawal’ from school of Pitcher McCloskey and Catcher James White Bull.”52 The school superintendent announced that the two Sioux Indians went back home to “Dakota.” Rumors circulated among the student body “that the two have gone to join an Indian baseball team which will tour the middle west this summer.”53 The duo were “an interesting feature of the game this spring has been their native talk which they pulled as battery mates.”54 According to their teammates, the pair “intend to tour the country with an Indian baseball aggregation.”55

SEPTEMBER 21, 1918

Like all parts of the country during World War I, “every Indian at Haskell engaged in war work.”56 Out of 832 students enrolled, 141 were registered for the draft; 325 graduates and current students ended up in the armed forces, and “one Haskell boy has been reported as a casualty.”57 The Miami tribesman and former Haskell baseball player Sandy Timothy “now holds the championship for hand grenade throwing in a Georgia cantonment.”58 In a photograph in full uniform, Timothy demonstrated his grenade-throwing form in an advertisement for Americans to “buy bonds till you sacrifice” since “backing up the Brave is the noblest duty of an American today.”59

APRIL 8, 1925

John Thomas Levi (1898-1946) was a major-league outfield prospect with a rare mix of power and speed.60 Considered the school’s greatest recruit, Levi graduated from Haskell in 1924. Levi was awarded more letters than any other student who attended Haskell up to that time.61

A full-blooded Arapaho, Levi was an elite athlete with a great talent not only in baseball, but in football and track as well.62 Jim Thorpe called Levi “the greatest athlete I have ever seen.”63

A leg injury playing baseball quashed any desire to be like his hero Thorpe and fulfill his potential as a decathlete in the 1924 Paris Olympic Games. On December 1, 1924, “the charging buffalo” signed a contract with the New York Yankees based on reputation, since the Yankees scouts had never seen him play.64 The Yankees believed Levi could “approximate the style of Bob Meusel, the Yankees’ left fielder.”65

Levi played with the Yankees during the 1925 spring training and joined them on a barnstorming trip. On April 8, the Yankees boarded a players’ train in Nashville to Asheville, North Carolina to continue their money-making tour. Babe Ruth, though not feeling well physically, had been playing in the games. On the train, Ruth complained of chills, fever, and a headache. The trainers gave him medicine to relieve his symptoms, but it did not work. The train arrived in Asheville and as Ruth climbed off the train, “he collapsed in the arms of John Levi, the Haskell Indian.”66

Yankees manager Miller Huggins never offered Levi an opportunity in spring training to demonstrate his skills. Levi was sent to the Harrisburg Senators of the Class-B New York Penn League on April 14 for further “seasoning.” Levi became homesick for his people and never made it the majors, playing through 1930 for low-level minor-league teams and also played professional football.67 Levi was an assistant football coach at Haskell for 10 years and was head coach in 1936, going 0-7-1.

In 1946 Levi was employed in a Denver packing house at 70 cents an hour.68 On January 22 the Denver police found him mortally wounded in a hotel room. A newspaper account said that during a heated argument, Fannie Stabler stabbed Levi with a six-inch knife as she tried to leave. Levi slapped her when she screamed at him, “[T]ake your hands off me or I’ll kill you.”69 Levi died at Denver General Hospital within an hour. Stabler was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.70 At the time of his death, Levi was divorced from his wife Helen who was living in Wahpeton, North Dakota, with a son and daughter.71

During a 2012 interview about his father, Levi’s son, John Jr., observed that whenever visiting Haskell, “I feel his spirit and Haskell means an awful lot to our family. … I’m proud to have his name. …”72

APRIL 23, 2000

Once a Haskell baseball pitcher, William Mehojah (1917-2000), the last full-blooded Kaw Indian, died at 82 on Easter morning, April 23, 2000, of lung failure.73 In the seventeenth century, about 2,000 Kaw flourished on the Plains.74 “The reality of being the last full blood to me is sad and lonely,’’ he said in the Kaw newsletter in 1997.75 As a child he had spoken his native language with his father, Jesse, losing the skill after Jesse died in 1935. However, he always understood his people’s language.

Born in 1917 on a land allotment in Washunga, Oklahoma, Mehojah received an associate’s degree in business administration from Haskell. His mission in life was to help Native Americans.76 “He was a living treasure,” said his son William Mehojah, Jr., “because he represented a people that have been eradicated.”77 His mother decided he needed to go to college so “he could work in an office somewhere,” her son recalled.78

Mehojah served in the Army in World War II and later worked for the Veterans Administration’s regional office in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and then for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1964 he became the superintendent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Turtle Mountain Agency in Belcourt, North Dakota.79 He retired in 1976.

In 1987, Mehojah was elected Chairman of the Kaw Nation for a three-year term.80 In 1995 Haskell named him alumnus of the year. “He spoke to the graduating class in his simple, measured way and from his heart,” his son said.81 Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating proclaimed August 6, 1999, as William A. Mehojah Day. Fredericka Mehojah, his wife of 57 years, said he was an avid golfer and had always been a good athlete.82

V. CONCLUSION

The Indian Boarding Schools began in 1819 when Congress appropriated the funding under the Indian Civilization Act of March 3, 1819.83 The peak enrollment for Indian Boarding Schools occurred in the 1970s.84 The schools exist to this day. The landscape changed after 1933 when the tribes increasingly had more say over the schools and students were no longer forced by the Federal government to go to boarding schools.

The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 – called the “Indian New Deal” – attempted to improve the lives of Native Americans as it halted the policy of forced assimilation and promoted greater tribal self-governance.85 Led by Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier (1884-1968), it was an era of advocating for tribal rights, preserving Native American cultures and traditions and ending the policy of forced assimilation.

Boarding schools like Haskell were created as an instrument to “‘whiten’ Native Americans and supplant their culture and language with American ideals and English.”86 Countless Native Americans were forced to attend the boarding schools, forbidden to speak their native languages, forced to renounce native beliefs and to abandon their native identities.87 History may never fully account for what the students who played baseball and other sports for Haskell – all the students- suffered due to the assimilation policy of the federal government.

From its creation as boarding school designed to erase all vestiges of Native American life, Haskell has come to be a beacon of such life and in the vanguard of research, preservation, and celebration of Native American culture and history.

Since its beginning, the insatiable appetite for achievement in sports like baseball has been strong at Haskell. Each year, as spring marches onto the campus, the traditional sounds of the game are still heard from the Haskell club baseball team.

LUIS A. BLANDÓN JR., a Washington, DC native, is a pro- ducer, writer, and historical researcher. He has garnered numerous awards, including three regional Emmys and Edward R. Murrow Awards. He served as the principal researcher for several authors recently The Mysterious Mrs. Nixon: The Life and Times of Washington’s Most Private First Lady by Heath Hardage Lee. Luis has a Masters of Arts in International Affairs from the George Washington University.

 

Acknowledgments

With deep gratitude to my wife, Teri, for putting up with the author.

Much thanks and appreciation to noted and award-winning Native American Indian historian Dr. Edward Angel, for his review of this essay and consultations offering his expert opinion and advice.

 

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Haskell University, the Kaw Nation, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, the National Museum of the American Indian, Library of Congress, The Archival Collection of Gustavus Elmer Emanuel Linquist Native American Papers in the Missionary Research Library Archives at the Burke Library, Columbia University, National Archives and Record Administration, the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs, the National WWI Museum and Memorial, baseball-reference.com, retrosheet.org, mlb.com, and youtube.com.

 

Notes

1 For more information about Haskell Cemetery, including a list of the 103 buried there, see https://www.haskellhistory.com/cemetery. In addition to the 103 marked graves in the Haskell Cemetery, there are eight individuals who are believed to be buried there, but whose graves are not marked.

2 Brenna Daldorph, “US Freeway to Pave over History of Native American Suffering,” france24.com, January 28, 2014. See https://www.france24.com/en/20140128-us-freeway-pave-over-history-native-american-suffering, accessed November 26, 2024.

3 “Haskell Installs New Fence Around Cemetery After Vandalism,” Lawrence (Kansas) World Journal, January 2, 2018. See https://www2.ljworld.com/news/2018/jan/02/haskell-installs-new-fence-around-cemetery-after-s/, accessed November 26, 2024. Efforts began in 2024 to clean each headstone, replace the faded historical marker and discover more about the lives behind those interred.

4 National Council of Urban Indian Health press release: “President Biden Formally Apologizes for Federal Government Involvement in Indian Boarding Schools,” October 28, 2024. https://ncuih.org/2024/10/29/press-release-president-biden-formally-apologizes-for-federal-government-involvement-in-indian-boarding-schools/, accessed May 15, 2025.

5 The Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute in Albuquerque, New Mexico, a two-year college, is the other federally operated institution. Native American tribes also operate 35 colleges that received federal funding.

6 Carlisle Indian School Digital Resources, “‘Kill the Indian in Him, and Save the Man’: R. H. Pratt on the Education of Native Americans,” https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teach/kill-indian-him-and-save-man-r-h-pratt-education-native-americans, accessed May 16, 2025.

7 The Indian Territory became the State of Oklahoma on November 16, 1907.

8 Natalie Vondrak, “Haskell Institute: The Roots From Which We Bloom 1884-1930),” Watkins Museum of History online exhibit. https://www.watkinsmuseum.org/online-exhibits/haskell-institute-the-roots-from-which-we-bloom-1884-1930/, accessed November 6, 2024.

9 The federal government used various methods to bring/lure Native children to the boarding schools: a) forced attendance: In many cases, government agents would forcibly remove children from their homes and reservations to attend these schools; b) government pressure and coercion: Federal agents were responsible for gathering children and getting them to schools using tactics like withholding food or other vital supplies from parents who resisted sending their children; c) seizure by authorities: If parents were unwilling to comply with the demand to send their children to boarding school, the police were sent to seize the children; d) compulsory attendance laws: Congress in 1891 made it mandatory for Native children to attend school, giving federal officers the authority to forcibly take them from their homes; e) families choosing to send children (often out of necessity). Some Native parents chose to send their children to boarding schools because there were no other educational options available in their tribal communities. Research released in February 2025 by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition says there have been 526 Indian boarding schools in the United States. See https://boardingschoolhealing.org/list/, accessed June 30, 2025. By 1900 there were 20,000 children in Indian boarding schools. By 1925, this number had more than tripled, reaching 60,889 children, according to the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. By 1926, over 80 percent of Indigenous school-age children (more than 60,000) were attending federal or religiously run boarding schools. See “US Indian Boarding School History,” National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, https://boardingschoolhealing.org/education/us-indian-boarding-school-history/, accessed June 30, 2025.

10 Keith A. Sculle, “The New Carlisle of the West: Haskell Institute and Big-Time Sports, 1920-1932,” Kansas History, Autumn 1994, Vol. 17, No. 3, 195.

11 Dr. Cloud was the first full-blood Native American to attend Yale University. He graduated with a bachelor of arts in psychology and philosophy from Yale College in 1910 and earned a master of arts degree in anthropology from Yale University in 1914.

12 Associated Press, “Indian Climbs From Tepee to Exalted Office,” Washington Post, August 13, 1933: 10.

13 “Indian Climbs From Tepee to Exalted Office.”

14 “Indian Climbs From Tepee to Exalted Office.”

15 The verification of tribal enrollment can be presented by one of the following means: a) Student is an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe. Provide an official Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB) card or other official tribal enrollment information with the student’s name, other identifying information such as date of birth or social security number, and an enrollment (membership) number from the BIA agency or federally recognized tribe. b) Direct descendant of an enrolled member of a tribe eligible for BIA education benefits. Provide official documentation of at least one-fourth degree Indian blood descendant of an enrolled member of a federally recognized tribe eligible for BIA education benefits, signed by the appropriate BIA agency or federally recognized tribe.

16 Ishtaboli served as a social and diplomatic tool for the Choctaw. The Tribe used the game to train their warriors. “Stickball,” Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. See https://www.choctawnation.com/about/culture/traditions/stickball/, accessed June 7, 2025. Jeffrey Powers-Beck, The American Indian Integration of Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 17.

17 David Oxendine, American Indian Sports Heritage (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 181.

18 In 2014, there were only three active non-Hispanic Native American players in the major leagues: Joba Chamberlain (Ho-Chunk/Winnebago), Kyle Lohse (Nomlaki), and Jacoby Ellsbury (Navajo). See Vincent M. Mallozzi, “The American Indians of America’s Pastime,” New York Times, June 8, 2014: SP11.

19 Charlie Vascellaro. “The Real Indians of Baseball,” NMAI Magazine, Summer 2012, Vol. 12, No.2. See https://www.americanindianmagazine.org/story/real-indians-baseball, accessed November 18, 2024.

20 “‘Chief” Kahdot – A Real Cleveland Indian,” Potawatomi Nation, October 20, 2021, https://www.potawatomi.org/blog/2021/10/20/chief-kahdot-a-real-cleveland-indian/, accessed December 3, 2024.

21 Burl Spencer, “‘Chief’ Was an Indian in Ruthian Age of Dreams,” Tulsa World, September 22, 1993: Sports-1.

22 See box score in https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SLA/SLA192209050.shtml/.

23 See box score in https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1922/B09210CLE1922.htm/.

24 Burl Spencer, “Oldest Living Cleveland Indian Remembers the Good Year: 1922,” Tulsa World, September 22, 1993: Sports – 6.

25 “‘Chief’ Kahdot – A Real Cleveland Indian.”

26 C. Richard King, Native Americans in Sports (New York: Routledge, 2015), 167. Burl Spencer, “‘Chief’ Was an Indian in Ruthian Age of Dreams.” Tinker Air Force Base is in Oklahoma City.

27 Burl Spencer, “‘Chief’ was an Indian in Ruthian Age of Dreams.”

28 “‘Chief’ Kahdot – A Real Cleveland Indian”; “Oldest Living Cleveland Indian Remembers the Good Year: 1922.”

29 “The Game at Haskell,” Lawrence Daily World, April 16, 1901: 3.

30 “The Game at Haskell.”

31 “Clippings,” The Indian Leader (Lawrence, Kansas), September 4, 1903: 2. “Base Ball Talk,” Howard (Kansas) Courant, August 28, 1903: 1.

32 “Archiquette Leaves Haskell,” Topeka (Kansas) Daily Herald, April 18, 1905: 1.

33 “Archiquette Leaves Haskell.” Green’s Nebraska Indians was early pro all-Indian touring team for which Archiquette played as a catcher.

34 “Archiquette Leaves Haskell.”

35 Lars Anderson, Carlisle vs. Army: Jim Thorpe, Dwight Eisenhower, Pop Warner, and the Forgotten Story of Football’s Greatest Battle (New York: Random House, 2008), 91.

36 Anderson. Jim Thorpe attended and played baseball, track and field, and football for Haskell before going to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

37 “C.E. Archiquette, Early Grid Star, Dies in Claremore,” Tulsa World. March 13, 1949: 80.

38 “C.E. Archiquette,” Osage Journal and County News (Pawhuska, Oklahoma), December 17, 1926: 29.

39 “Chauncey Archiquette,” olympedia.com, https://www.olympedia.org/athletes/892472, accessed May 18, 2025.

40 A University of Iowa football star in 1905 and 1906, Kent was also Haskell’s football coach. See “Haskell Athletics: Indian School Has Got an Instructor from Iowa,” Lawrence Daily Gazette, February 14, 1908: 2.

41 “Will Have Good Nine,” Leavenworth (Kansas) Post, March 3, 1909: 3.

42 “Will Have Good Nine.”

43 “Will Have Good Nine.”

44 “Indian Hurt in Ballgame,” Topeka State Journal, August 25, 1910: 7.

45 “Indian Athlete Will Die,” Leavenworth Post, August 25, 1910: 1.

46 “Indian Hurt in Ballgame.”

47 “Indian Hurt in Ballgame.”

48 “Intercollegiate,” Bethany Messenger (Lindsburg, Kansas), September 9, 1910: 6

49 “Beat Normalites,” Leavenworth Daily Gazette, May 8, 1916: 3.

50 “Beat Normalites.”

51 “Beat Normalites.”

52 “Gone to Join Indians,” Lawrence Daily Gazette, May 17, 1916: 1.

53 “Gone to Join Indians.”

54 “Gone to Join Indians.”

55 “Haskell Baseball Team Weakened, Stars Quit,” Topeka Daily Capital, May 18, 1916: 11.

56 “Every Indian at Haskell Engaged on War Work,” Lawrence Daily Journal-World, September 21, 1918: 2.

57 “Every Indian at Haskell Engaged on War Work.”

58 “Every Indian at Haskell Engaged on War Work.”

59 “Are You With Us?” Lawrence Daily Journal-World, October 12, 1918: 2.

60 Levi was born on June 14, 1898, in Arapaho Indian country in the Bridgeport Territory (now Oklahoma).

61 “John Levi,” Kansas Sports Hall of Fame. See: https://www.kshof.org/team/john-levi, accessed May 15, 2025. Levi graduated from Chilcco (Oklahoma) Indian School in 1917. He arrived at Haskell in 1921. “Skee” was Levi’s nickname while he was at Haskell.

62 Levi was a first-team Walter Camp All-American in 1923 as a fullback.

63 Kansas Sports Hall of Fame. Levi was posthumously indicated into the American Indian Athletic Hall of Fame (1972), the Oklahoma Athletic Hall of Fame (1973), and the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame (1975).

64 “Flashback Friday: John Levi,” Haskell Athletics, https://www.haskellathletics.com/article/134.php, accessed August 22, 2022.

65 “Yanks Sign John Levi, the ‘Charging Buffalo,’” Washington Post, January 1, 1925: S1.

66 “Ruth Is Laid Up with Grip,” Washington Post, April 8, 1925: 17.

67 Levi played in Harrisburg in 1925-26. He also played in the Class-A Western League in 1929 and 1930 for Topeka and St. Joseph respectively.

68 “Woman Admits She Slew Levi,” Webb City (Missouri) Sentinel, May 24, 1946: 4.

69 “Woman Admits She Slew Levi.”

70 “Levi, Ex-Haskell Indian Ace, Found Stabbed to Death,” Washington Post, January 24, 1946: 12. Stabler, a Native American, was ultimately given a one- to five-year sentence. She was 38 years old in 1946 and a mother of three children. See Associated Press, “Convicted in Levi Death,” Kansas City Times, May 24, 1946: 6.

71 United Press, “Levi, Once Haskell Grid Star, Slain,” Fargo (North Dakota) Forum and Daily Republican, January 23, 1946: 1. Levi’s first wife, Helen Hilda Levi, died in 1995 at the age of 90.

72 “Flashback Friday: John Levi.”

73 Douglas Martin, “William Mehojah, a Kaw Leader, Dies at 82,” New York Times, May 5, 2000: 24. Mehojah’s Indian name was Little Star and he was a member of the Night Clan of a Plains tribe known as the Wind People. Before his death, the last other four remaining purebred Kaws passed away; all were related to him.

74 Also known as Kanza, Kansa, or Kona.

75 Martin, “William Mehojah, a Kaw Leader, Dies at 82.”

76 Kaw Nation, “Last Kanza Full Blood,” October 19, 2002. See https://www.kawnation.gov/last-kanza-full-blood/, accessed June 3, 2025.

77 Stacy Downs (New York Times News Service), “Last Full-Blooded Kaw Indian Buried,” Wichita Eagle, April 30, 2000: 22A.

78 Downs. The land allotments were distributed to individual Indians after the Kaw reservation was dissolved in 1902.

79 “Kaw Indian Named Superintendent of Turtle Mountain Agency,” United States Department of Interior, Indian Affairs, November 12, 1964. See https://www.bia.gov/as-ia/opa/online-press-release/kaw-indian-named-superintendent-turtle-mountain-agency, accessed November 25, 2024.

80 During his tenure, Mehojah ordered a new tribal constitution drafted that enabled the Kaw to develop a variety of businesses such as a bingo parlor, a motel, and a truck stop. Under his leadership, the Kaw brought $13.5 million in assets and an additional 1,000 acres of commonly-held land. See Douglas Martin, “William Mehojah, a Kaw Leader, Dies at 82,” New York Times, May 5, 2000: 24.

81 Downs. William Mehojah, Jr. is a member of the Kaw Tribe of Oklahoma and was the director of the federal government’s Office of Indian Education Programs.

82 Fredericka L. Mehojah died on July 26, 2022. She and her husband were married in 1943 in Tulsa. She also attended Haskell.

83 “American Indian Boarding Schools,” Georgia State University Library, https://exhibits.library.gsu.edu/health-is-a-human-right/displacement/american-indian-boarding-schools/, accessed June 18, 2025.

84 Tens of thousands of American Indian children attended the boarding schools, peaking in the 1970s, with an estimated enrollment of 60,000 in 1973.

85 To review the Indian Reorganization Act, see National Archives and Record Administration’s record https://catalog.archives.gov/id/7873515.

86 Howard University School of Law Research Guides, “A Brief History of Civil Rights in the United States: The Allotment and Assimilation Era (1887 – 1934),” https://library.law.howard.edu/civilrightshistory/indigenous/allotment, accessed May 27, 2025.

87 Equal Justice Initiative, “‘Cultural Genocide’ and Native American Children,” September 2, 2014, See https://eji.org/news/history-racial-injustice-cultural-genocide/, accessed May 27, 2025.