One morning in November 1906, a Hopi teenager on the Second Mesa of the Arizona reservation awoke to pandemonium. A U.S. Army officer was calling the villagers together. He said the government had reached the limit of its patience. For two decades, the tribe had refused to send its children to government-sanctioned boarding schools, as directed; now, under military compulsion, every Hopi child had to attend one. Soldiers began rounding up sleepy-eyed children and older kids, too. Mothers wailed, babies cried and fathers vowed to stand up to the Army. But the unarmed Hopi were no match for the soldiers, and their young ones were seized.
Tsökahovi Tewanima, a teenager who was 5 feet 4½ inches tall and weighed 110 pounds, was described by one soldier as “thin, emaciated and beligerent [sic].” Tewanima and ten other teens were handcuffed and marched 20 miles east to Keams Canyon, says Leigh Lomayestewa, Tewanima’s nephew. There, the Hopi youths were shackled and forced to build a road. In mid-January 1907, the soldiers marched the prisoners 110 miles east to Fort Wingate, New Mexico, where they boarded a train. About five days later, they arrived at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, roughly 2,000 miles from home.
The school was the flagship of a fleet of around 25 federally funded, off-reservation institutions for Native American children, run by religious groups and government agencies. Carlisle, founded by the Union Army veteran Col. Richard H. Pratt, aimed to “civilize” native youth by teaching them Christianity and the ways of Western society. “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” was Pratt’s motto, and, in fact, many children did die at Carlisle because of disease, starvation and physical abuse.
Tewanima coped with such cultural eradication by tapping into an ancient Hopi tradition—running. And he would become an inspirational figure: a two-time Olympian, a record-holder for more than half a century and a source of pride for his people.