"To Save the Man" | Reviewed by William Winkler

In 1879 the first students were enrolled in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, located in south-central Pennsylvania. Until its closing in 1918 the boarding school admitted nearly 8000 Native American boys and girls from all over the country. In its nearly four decades of existence graduates of the school went on to become doctors, lawyers, engineers and other professionals.

The school was founded by American army officer Richard Pratt, a veteran of the United States Civil War and later the Indian Wars. Pratt’s interest in Native Americans developed when he oversaw a prisoner of war camp in Florida, where he observed how intellectually keen his “Indian” prisoners were and how quickly they adapted to American culture.

Unlike other federally established “Indian” schools, whose goal was to educate students and return them to their tribes, Pratt’s school aimed to assimilate students into mainstream America. In his words, “To save the man, one must kill the Indian.”

Incoming students were shorn of their hair and tribal names, issued traditional American clothing, required to speak only English, and made to embrace Christianity.

John Sayles’s most recent novel, “To Save the Man,” is set at the Carlisle school in the last four months of 1890. The school had been in existence long enough for its longest-tenured students to have risen to levels of supervision in the quasi-military culture.

The novel opens as Antoine, an Ojibwe from Wisconsin, leaves his ancestral home to travel by train to Carlisle. We watch as he, with other new recruits, go through the rituals of induction day where the process of separating them from their ancestral heritage begins.

As the narrative moves on we watch as the new students struggle, some more successfully than others, with the task of becoming “real” Americans.

Through flashbacks Sayles reveals the varied ethic histories of the disparate assembly of young Native Americans, offering insight into the cultural gulfs among their tribes.

We also learn of the “Ghost Dance,” a ritual spreading through the various tribes of the Lakota nation in South Dakota. Instituted by a Paiute prophet named Wovoka, the dance revolved around a prophecy that the earth would rise up and cover the white men, that the buffalo would return, and that the tribes would be restored to greatness.

The dance so frightened the white settlers of the area that the U.S. Army attempted to disarm the Lakota at Wounded Knee Creek, resulting in the massacre of almost 300 Lakota, many of them women and children, on December 29, 1890.

News of the massacre reached Carlisle within days, forcing many of the students to reconsider their commitment to their ethnic heritage contrasted with their assimilation into mainstream Euro-American culture.

Sayles’s novel is a powerful reminder of the impact American westward expansion wrought upon indigenous Americans, an impact for which the U.S. government recently made a formal apology.

Buy the Book.