"Young people and Indian people need to know that we existed in the 20th Century. We need to know who our heroes are and to know what we have done and accomplished in this century other than what Olympic athletes Jim Thorpe and Billy Mills have done"
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Means is doing two things at once: indicting the historical record and rescuing Native presence from the museum display case. The line lands like a refusal to be flattened into either tragedy or spectacle. When he says young people "need to know that we existed in the 20th Century", he’s not making a demographic claim; he’s naming erasure as policy. The century that marketed itself as modernity also perfected ways of making Indigenous life appear either premodern or vanished: textbooks that skip from "frontier" to civil rights, media that treats Native people as costumes, institutions that keep sovereignty off the page.
The pointed shout-out to Jim Thorpe and Billy Mills is strategic. Sports are one of the few lanes where America has been willing to celebrate Native excellence without confronting Native political demands. Means praises the athletes by implication while exposing the trap: if the only widely recognized Native heroes are Olympic icons, then Indigenous accomplishment becomes acceptable only when it’s consumable, nonthreatening, and detached from land, treaty rights, and self-determination.
Underneath the sentence is a recruitment pitch to Native youth and a challenge to non-Native audiences. Know your heroes, he insists, because memory is infrastructure for movements. In the context of the Red Power era and Means’s own visibility with AIM, he’s arguing that representation isn’t a vanity project; it’s a survival tactic. A people denied a 20th-century story is easier to govern, easier to dispossess, easier to ignore.
The pointed shout-out to Jim Thorpe and Billy Mills is strategic. Sports are one of the few lanes where America has been willing to celebrate Native excellence without confronting Native political demands. Means praises the athletes by implication while exposing the trap: if the only widely recognized Native heroes are Olympic icons, then Indigenous accomplishment becomes acceptable only when it’s consumable, nonthreatening, and detached from land, treaty rights, and self-determination.
Underneath the sentence is a recruitment pitch to Native youth and a challenge to non-Native audiences. Know your heroes, he insists, because memory is infrastructure for movements. In the context of the Red Power era and Means’s own visibility with AIM, he’s arguing that representation isn’t a vanity project; it’s a survival tactic. A people denied a 20th-century story is easier to govern, easier to dispossess, easier to ignore.
Quote Details
| Topic | Legacy & Remembrance |
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