‘To Save the Man’ by John Sayles   (2025) – 320 pages

Much of the historical novel ‘To Save the Man’ takes place at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This school actually did exist and had all Native American students from its founding in 1879 until its closing in 1918.

The student body was made up of young high school age boy and girl students from native American tribes from across the United States. Each tribe spoke their own language and were very different from each other, differences the white people did not recognize. Lakota, Pawnee, Blackfoot, Shawnee, Pueblo, Kiowa, Comanche, Ojibwe, Navajo, Apache, Sioux, Dakotah, Choctaw, Lakota, Ottawa, Potawaami, Mohawk, Oglala, Cheyenne, Arapaho.

This military-like school was founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Perhaps he started out with good intentions, to assimilate these young native Americans into the dominant white society by training them. However the methods at the school were heavy-handed. The first thing they did at the school was cut the boys’ hair off so they looked more like white boys. They were made to look like white students as much as possible. The Carlisle students were punished if they spoke their native language. Captain Pratt’s motto for the school was “To save the man, we must kill the Indian”.

This novel traces the day-to-day lives of a few of these native American students at the school as they live in the dorms and attend their classes. The students are given new names to replace their tribal names. There is Antoine, Clarence, Grace, Trouble (short for Make-Trouble-in-Front), Wilma, and Lizzie.

The novel takes place in 1890 which was a momentous year in native American history. Cheated by white people out of most of their land, the tribes were forced on to reservations where they were forced to depend on the United States government for their food which usually arrived late and was of extremely poor quality. Their people were going hungry, nearly starving. Some of the white people (including L. Frank Baum who wrote ‘The Wizard of Oz’) called for “the total annihilation of the remaining Indians”.

Meanwhile, some of the tribes were practicing the Ghost Dance which they believed would reunite the living with spirits of the dead, bring back the buffalo, end white westward expansion, and bring peace, prosperity, and unity to Native American peoples.

“Though we are few in number now, soon the ghosts of all our people who ever walked the earth will join us, driving before them herds of buffalo and fine horse -”

These Ghost Dances made the whites, who had most of the guns, extremely nervous.

When the Carlisle student Clarence hears that his old tribal leader Sitting Bull has been murdered by white people, he hops on a train which takes him back to his reservation at Wounded Knee. South Dakota. By the time Clarence gets there the Wounded Knee Massacre has occurred in which nearly 300 Lakota people were killed by soldiers of the United States army. Also 25 United States soldiers were killed.

Meanwhile at the Carlisle school, an epidemic of the white people’s disease scarlet fever has begun.

‘To Save the Man’ is the dramatic re-telling of these critical events in United States history – the Carlisle School, the Ghost Dances, and the Wounded Knee Massacre. I have been an admirer of the fiction of John Sayles from the beginning. John Sayles is also an excellent independent movie director of such movies as ‘The Return of the Secaucus 7’, ‘Matewan’, and ‘Lone Star’. In both his fiction and his movies, Sayles dramatizes often little-known incidents or situations in United States history.

The terrible treatment of our native American tribes is another shameful episode in United States history.

Grade:    A