Undefeated: Jim Thorpe and the Carlisle Indian School Football Team

One of Sheinkin’s main goals in Undefeated is to bring attention to the exploitation of Indigenous peoples in the United States. For this reason, the biography departs from the traditional sports genre narrative, which focuses mainly on an athlete’s achievements. While it would be possible to tell Jim Thorpe’s story in that manner, focusing only on the events of his life and highlighting his athletic achievements, this would come the expense of portraying his sociohistorical context, which is critical to understanding his story and the larger story of the United States at that time.

While Sheinkin focuses the narrative on Thorpe, the story of the Carlisle Indian School football team is just as important, making Undefeated more of a group biography than one that focuses solely on an individual. Thorpe’s story provides a context for the book’s themes of Resilience in the Face of Adversity, Sportsmanship as a Life Philosophy, and the Exploitation of Indigenous Peoples, helping Sheinkin teach middle grade readers about the United States’ problematic past in an approachable way. To this end, Sheinkin includes significant side stories about Thorpe’s teammates, his fans, the Indigenous population at large, and the way other countries reacted to Thorpe competing in the 1912 Olympic Games in Sweden.

As a sports biography with a sociohistorical focus, Undefeated offers examples of the way Thorpe and his Carlisle teammates were mistreated and misrepresented even as they gained fame and changed the game of football. Sheinkin uses real newspaper headlines to emphasize the racism Thorpe and his teammates faced, such as one from the Syracuse Herald that proclaimed, “PRINCETON […] SOLVED INDIAN PROBLEM” (124) when it beat Carlisle 16-0. This headline reinforces the book’s theme that the inclusion of Indigenous people in American society was seen as a problem to be solved: “Pratt’s answer to the ‘Indian problem’ was to treat Native Americans as if they were immigrants to the United States. His answer was to help young Indians—if necessary, to force them—to assimilate into white American culture” (28). This type of parallelism shows that the “Indian Problem” was a pervasive concept in the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. By pointing to these sociohistorical aspects of the story, Sheinkin helps middle grade readers not only learn history, but also understand how these problems persist in contemporary culture and how they might be averted by future generations.