by Glenn Stout
Using NAGPRA, the 4,000 members of the Sac and Fox tribe already had won the return of nearly 100 bodies. Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne and Muscogee who helped develop the act and get it passed, says bringing Jim Thorpe home would be important not just for the Sac and Fox but for all Native Americans. “It would send a message that our people are not being stepped on,” she says. “It would show we are not going to be kept as collections or roadside attractions anymore. We are going to stand up to that.”
The suit enraged the Thorpians, as residents had come to call themselves.
“The state of Oklahoma wanted nothing to do with Jim Thorpe, and a community took him in—our community,” says Michael Sofranko, the longtime mayor. “This is the place that took Jim Thorpe in. [We] changed the name of the community, and we have held up our end of the contract. We have done everything we were asked to do.”
Six decades after the arrival of Thorpe’s body, the fortunes of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, have, indeed, picked up. Divisions have melted. The economy is strong for a town of only 5,000 in a region still being buffeted by the recent recession. Now, when Mayor Sofranko sits on the second-floor deck at the well-appointed Inn at Jim Thorpe, he sees Broadway bustling with people. Many are tourists. Some pedal red and yellow mountain bikes. Others amble along in stylish hiking boots, passing art studios and coffee shops.
The mayor concedes that few of the visitors have come to see Thorpe’s tomb. They are there to play in the surrounding hills and on nearby rivers, which have become a hot spot for hikers, bikers, and whitewater rafters. But Jim Thorpe’s tomb and monument has played a part in this, Sofranko says. “To get things going.” And residents are proud to possess Jim Thorpe’s body. To suggest this might be worth reconsidering, if only on moral grounds, makes the Thorpians dig in. Oklahoma had its chance, says Ray Brader, sitting in the back of his gift shop on Broadway. Mention the spiritual claims of the Sac and Fox, and Brader grows indignant. “Jim Thorpe the Olympian was brought here, not Jim Thorpe the Native American.” Thorpe smiles from posters and photos on streetlights and restaurant walls. His image is on T-shirts and coffee mugs. Students go to Jim Thorpe Area High School, home of the Olympians. “The movie about him with Burt Lancaster [Jim Thorpe: All-American, released in 1951], is required viewing when you grow up here,” says Brandon Fogal, manager of a whitewater rafting business. “You see that film again and again. You can’t escape hearing about him. It’s hard to find people of any age who don’t feel an attachment.”
Each spring, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, celebrates the birthday of its namesake. At his tomb, a local troupe of Native Americans dance, pray, chant, and beat drums. Improvements are noticeable. The tomb is well kept and has additions: a bronze statue of Thorpe throwing a discus, another of him holding a football. Plaques describe his feats. A metal sculpture of a lightning bolt reminds visitors of his Native American name.
At a firehouse in a neighborhood called The Heights, volunteer firefighter Jay Miller and his colleagues are suspicious. Miller says Oklahoma didn’t care about Jim Thorpe until his Olympic medals were restored in 1983. Other townspeople have heard a rumor that the tribe wants to put Thorpe’s bones in a casino to boost business. They seem to see little irony in the fact that they have used his bones to build their own economy. Ninety-five percent of the residents of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, are white. By count of the latest census, the percentage of Native Americans in town is nearly zero. But its residents do not accept the view that Jim Thorpe is a stranger. They say he belongs with them.
In court, the Thorpians fought back.
Their attorneys argued that the town was not a museum, even under the most expansive definition of the law. Moreover, they said NAGPRA was not meant to apply to “modern remains such as those of Jim Thorpe.” His wife and the town had signed a contract. “He was merely laid to rest,” one court document read, “in accordance with his faith.”
The town’s case was helped by the fact that Jim Thorpe had never made a will. In the oral tradition of Native Americans, there are few written wills. The town’s response also was strengthened by a legal brief from John Thorpe, the 59-year-old son of Jim’s daughter Charlotte. In 2005, John, a Lake Tahoe disc jockey, had abandoned his father’s surname, Adler, so he could take his grandfather’s name instead. “I am extremely proud of my heritage,” he says. Nonetheless, he favored leaving his grandfather’s body in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. He filed his brief after attending a Native American sun dance in Bastrop, Texas, where he went to a sweat lodge. In the steam and the smoke from burning cedar, John says, a spiritual healer “told me that he had made contact with my grandfather, and these were his words: ‘I am at peace, and I want no more pain created in my name.’ ”
As the court battle waged, Jack Thorpe died of cancer at age 73. Bill and Richard Thorpe and the Sac and Fox tribe joined the lawsuit in his place.
On April 19, 2013, Judge Richard Caputo of the U.S. District Court of the Middle District of Pennsylvania ruled in favor of Jim Thorpe’s sons and the tribe. NAGPRA, Caputo said, superseded contract law. Congress, he said, had “recognized larger and different concerns in such circumstances, namely, the sanctity of the Native American culture’s treatment of the remains of those of Native American ancestry.”
Bill Thorpe remembers thinking: “This is all going to be done with soon. Justice.”
Nearly 300 angry Thorpians packed a town hall. “We had an open discussion on what to do,” Ray Brader says. “It was very emotional.” Speakers included members of the Jim Thorpe High School history club. “It was beautiful,” adds his coworker, Anne Marie Fitzpatrick. “The last thing they said was: ‘Please leave our namesake alone.’ ”
The town decided to appeal.
On Oct. 23, 2014, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Third Circuit Court of Appeals overturned Caputo and ruled in favor of the Thorpians. The reversal was based on what is known as the “absurdity doctrine,” which judges can use when they think the results of a case have gone against congressional intent.
Chief Judge Theodore McKee said Thorpe’s burial accommodated the wishes of his wife and was therefore lawful. In addition, McKee said, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, did not meet NAGPRA’s definition of a museum, even as broad as the definition was.
“We find that applying NAGPRA to Thorpe’s burial in the borough is . . . a clearly absurd result . . . contrary to Congress’s intent to protect Native American burial sites,” McKee wrote. Therefore, Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, “is not subject to the statute’s requirement that his remains be ‘returned’ to Thorpe’s descendants.”
In Pennsylvania, there was joy, mixed with relief.
In Oklahoma, misery. “It felt like this was the same old story, the same old raw deal that Indian people have always gotten,” says attorney Stephen Ward, who represented Thorpe’s sons and the tribe. “It felt like the courts just don’t work well for Indian people.”
Bill and Richard Thorpe appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
On Oct. 5, 2015, the court declined to hear the case without comment.
Bill Thorpe heard the news over the phone. He could barely speak. “It hurt bad,” he says. “The worst part of it is that we felt like we were not being heard. Not even given a listen, a chance to tell our story. It’s as if you don’t count or exist. But then again, we’ve gotten used to this sort of thing. It’s the Indian way, maybe. We’ve had to get used to it. Disappointment. Bitter disappointment.”
The bones of Jim Thorpe do not rest easy.
Bill and Richard Thorpe and the Sac and Fox tribe believe that Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, wouldn’t be harmed by giving up their father’s remains. “What difference could it possibly make?” Richard says. “The town can keep its name and everything else. Just give Dad back.”
There has been talk, however vague, of suing in state courts, of a boycott, of getting help from a wealthy Oklahoma oilman, “someone like T. Boone Pickens,” says Massey, the Sac and Fox historic preservation officer.
More concretely, Bill Thorpe has engaged Tom Rodgers, a Washington lobbyist who was a key whistleblower in the 2006 case against Jack Abramoff, the D.C. power broker sent to prison for defrauding Native American tribes. Rodgers, a member of the Blackfeet tribe in Montana, is working pro bono.
He plans to meet with the civic leaders of Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. “I am going to appeal to their sense of ethics and morality,” he says. “You are displaying a man’s remains and making money off of it. Jim Thorpe may be buried there, but that is not his home. I will remind them of history: how the white man took our land, our children, and then they came and took our spirits and our bones. Failing that, we will go another route.”
Rodgers won’t say on the record what that route might be.
Meanwhile, the burial land waits. Thorpe’s daughters are interred near Cushing, Oklahoma, surrounded by gentle hills in every direction. His first wife is laid to rest there, too. Behind her is a gray, leaning stone topped by a rounded sculpture of a baby lamb. Buffeted by a century of hard weather, its inscription is so worn that only part of it can be read: “James, Son of Jim / May 1915”—the toddler who died in his arms. Near Stroud, there is a plot in a circular memorial park for military veterans, across the highway from a small casino and a few dozen paces from the tribal headquarters, a police station, and grounds used for sacred tribal gatherings. And there is a flat, rectangular cemetery near the North Canadian River and a school that Jim Thorpe attended before he went to Carlisle. It is easy to imagine him as a boy there, chasing horses in the distance, hunting rabbits and squirrels. In one corner, by a low fence, near a leafy tree, lies his father, Hiram.
Bill reflects on the possible sites and thinks of his own father, Jim Thorpe.
He curls his right hand into a fist.
“We are not giving up.”
JESSE KATZ
26.2 to Life
from gq
The race begins on the west side of San Quentin’s lower yard, just before the sun creeps over the walls. Two dozen men surge forward. With few exceptions all are murderers, most at least a decade into their sentences, including the early leader, a lifer named Markelle Taylor, who has run this course before but never for as long or as fast as he hopes to today.
With mesh gym shorts hanging to his knees and a cotton tank that soon droops with sweat, Taylor springs over a patchwork of gravel and pavement and grass scorched by the California drought. He makes his first turn at the laundry room, where inmates in V-neck smocks and denim jackets exchange their prison blues, then jabs right at the horseshoe pit and climbs a tight concrete ramp—a pivot so abrupt it has a name: the Gantlet. He swings east across blacktop, past the open-air urinals, past the punching bag and chin-up bars, past the clinic that treats the swell of aging convicts, all while staying within the spray-painted green lines that are supposed to remind the 3,700 non-runners housed here not to wander into his path. On the north side, Taylor guides the pack downhill toward the base of a guard tower, then makes a final 90-degree turn—his sixth—where convict preachers thump Bibles in a cloud of geese and gulls.
That’s one lap. Today there’s a marathon. Behind these walls, that means 104 to go.
Once a year, the runners of San Quentin do this—stretch their tatted limbs, hike their white crew socks, and attempt to extract under the worst of conditions something that resembles the best of themselves.
“You’re seeing people escape from prison,” says Rahsaan Thomas, sports editor of the inmate-produced San Quentin News, who is 12 years into a 55-to-life sentence for shooting two armed men. “Here,” says Thomas, who is helping pass out water, “you can only be free in your own mind.”
If running a marathon is as much a test of mental rigor as of physical endurance, then doing 26.2 miles at California’s oldest prison, home to America’s largest death row, is the ultimate internal contest. On the outside, marathons are movable celebrations that engulf and delight entire cities. The Los Angeles Marathon follows a glittery path from Dodger Stadium, via the Sunset Strip and Rodeo Drive, to Santa Monica Beach; the New York Marathon traverses a five-borough jamboree to the cheers of a million spectators. In the lower yard, a four-acre box on San Quentin’s sloped backside, the only way to re-create that distance is to run the perimeter—round and round, hour after hour—going nowhere fast.
Sometimes even that exercise in confinement will grind to a halt. No matter the day, alarms punctuate life at San Quentin, signaling fights or medical emergencies, often in corners of the prison unseen from the lower yard. In those moments, every inmate must drop to the ground—runners included—and wait for guards to restore order. During last year’s race, the marathoners had to stop four times.
Perched on the redwooded fringes of San Francisco Bay, about 12 miles north of the Golden Gate Bridge, San Quentin is an anachronism: a moldering castle that dates from the Gold Rush days, now commandeering 432 acres of waterfront property in California’s richest county.
Charles Manson and Sirhan Sirhan have passed through these iron latticed gates. Johnny Cash has performed here, earning a Grammy nomination and inspiring a young burglar named Merle Haggard. So many bebop greats did time for heroin that San Quentin used to field its own jazz band. Crips leader and Nobel Peace Prize nominee Stanley “Tookie” Williams (played by Jamie Foxx in Redemption) was executed here. Wife slayer and cable-news obsession Scott Peterson (played by Dean Cain in The Perfect Husband) awaits his turn. So do 725 other men, their fate likelier to be decided by old age, or their own hand, than by the state’s glacial appellate machinery.
Despite its notorious name and medieval atmospherics, the Q is known within the American penal system as a rehabilitative showcase, the place to be if you want to do something productive with your time—and not, as the old heads will say, let your time do you. The prison hosts at least 140 programs, from Wall Street investing to Shakespearean theater, sustained by thousands of volunteers from the Bay Area’s prosperous burbs. Which is how Frank Ruona, then the president of an elite Marin County running club, ended up receiving a call in 2005 from a prison administrator seeking a coach. Ruona—a veteran of 78 marathons who was also an executive at Ghilotti Bros., a ubiquitous highway contractor—didn’t see himself ministering to felons, but when he forwarded the request to his hundreds of fellow Tamalpa Runners, he got no response. “So, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll come over,’ ” Ruona recalls. “I wasn’t sure what to expect.”
The 163-year-old prison, for all its educational offerings, was a cold, clamorous tangle of concrete cellblocks, five stories tall and ringed by razor wire—“an environment that’s very degrading, very demoralizing,” Ruona had to admit—and yet he discovered that it had also bred a small brotherhood of would-be runners “trying their best to pay for whatever errors they’ve made.”
His first order of business was to outfit them in decent shoes, a task complicated by the prison’s strict, sometimes cryptic dress code. Even though he was shopping for a racially diverse bunch, men who did not seem caught up in the gang rivalries or affiliations of the segregated yard they trained on, Ruona’s donations kept getting rejected for their potential to create division: no blue swooshes, no orange stripes, no air-bubble soles. Black shoes were okayed, then nixed. Lately the only colors he can push through the bureaucracy are white and gray. “I’ve had a couple times where guys gave me their size, I brought in the shoes, and they didn’t fit,” says Ruona, who trains with the inmates every other Monday. “Then I found out they didn’t know what their size was.”
The marathoners face other obstacles, reminders of their captivity. On days when the fog rolls in, clinging to the yard like a pelt, the track is off-limits; the sharpshooting guards in the watchtowers need a clear view. Health scares can trigger lockdowns—chicken pox in 2012, Legionnaires’ disease in 2015—as can shank-swinging melees, the sort that have to be quelled with pepper spray and foam projectiles. Says Ruona, now 70 and hobbled by a bum knee, “You kind of roll with the punches.”
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nbsp; On this crisp Friday morning in November, the eighth running of the San Quentin Marathon, there is no ceremony or fanfare. The only prize is a certificate, made on PowerPoint, for each participant. The men who have signed up for the race, who have submitted to the risk of injury and exhaustion and failure, did not ask for anyone to come document their efforts. A few have dates with the parole board on the horizon, but many have no illusions: they will die inside these walls.
“I’m trying to be the best person I can be, with what I have left,” says 49-year-old Darren Settlemeyer, a repeat offender who will be 99 when he is eligible for release. He tried to kill himself, he says, when he first got to San Quentin. “You will do stuff in here that you wouldn’t normally do, and some of it’s really not good for a person to be doing.” Settlemeyer stayed on meds for a decade until he started running last year. “You run the track,” he says, “and you just let everything go.”
The marathon was scheduled to begin at 8:00 a.m., but already Eddie DeWeaver has been trotting around the yard for an hour. He has a class to attend after lunch, “Guiding Rage into Power,” and does not want to be late. “I used to think, when something happened to me, it was the end of the world,” says DeWeaver, his long twisted locks glistening as if dusted with diamonds. “Now I know: just stay in the moment, focus on what you’re feeling in that moment, focus on why you feel that way, what need are you not having met that has you feeling this way. That’s part of the power right there: you look inside yourself for the answers.”
“We’re going in four and a half minutes, four and a half,” Ruona hollers, checking his watch. Armed with a clipboard and spreadsheets, a Ken-Tech digital clock, and several bottles of Succeed! electrolyte capsules, he is not a “Kumbaya”-singing coach. He barks at the runners to hydrate and pace themselves, a challenge if you’re emerging from a two-man cell the size of a walk-in closet. Last year an old-timer named Lee Goins ignored that advice; he collapsed at the 22-mile mark and had to be revived intravenously.
