Overview:
John Sayles’ latest novel brings life to the haunting history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890.
John Sayles’ stumbled across the 1912 showdown in a nonfiction history book when he was in college.
Though no lives were on the line, it was a game that would determine what these men were made of.
The battle happened on the football field. The West Point Academy Army athletes showed their best effort, with high hopes of winning. But the Carlisle Indian Industrial School athletes were quicker, smarter.
The outcome was unexpected – the Army lost.
The Carlisle students led by coach Pop Warner took down West Point.
Sayles explained that moment as “a big upset” for the Army.
This face off of athletic prowess happened just 22 years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, an Army battle with the Lakota/Sioux that killed close to 300 Native Americans.
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was a military boarding school that aimed to eliminate Native American culture and language, forcibly assimilating the students. One of the ways was on the football field.
The school’s motto: “To the save the man, we must kill the Indian.”
Sayles, now a film director and screenwriter, found this story in the book, “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee” in college.
“I was struck by each chapter,” Sayles said.
He knew this story needed to be represented in cinema, and in a way, he felt like it had already.
“I felt like, not only have I seen this movie, but this real story is more interesting than the ones that they put in the movie,” Sayles said. “It’s more complex and much more interesting. I think that was kind of the beginning of my interest in it.”
Sayles’ name might ring a bell from academy award nominations for his film writing. Some of his best known films include “Lone Star” and “Passion Fish.” Outside of being a filmwright, he also is a director and actor.
But he says he was a novelist first.
“I got a book published when I was 25, and so I had written two or three novels and a short story collection before I started working for the movies,” Sayles said.
However, he said film captivated him before books.
“Certainly growing up, I had watched more movies and seen more television, than I had read books,” Sayles said.
He was enamored by the films produced by the greats like John Ford, and actors like Humphrey Bogart. He watched his first film in color in college. From there, Sayles carved out his own success in the industry.
But, the Carlisle School project that he discovered as a young man and wrote for the screen sat on the shelf for over two decades.
“We tried to raise the money to make the screenplay,” Sayles explained. “It just felt like such a good story. I’m not going to just leave it.”
Years went by and he decided if the story wasn’t meant to be told on the screen, why not in the pages?
“I was able to find more things,” Sayles said. “More people had written about [the Carlisle School]. More of the tribes had tried to kind of deal with that history, and, more specifically, the bodies of children who had died there.”
The result, “To Save the Man” – a novel, not a film script, tells the nuanced story of the students and Captain Richard Henry Pratt. Pratt was the founder of the Carlisle school and, for a time, football co-coach with Pop Warner.
Though considered a “progressive” for his time because of his inclusion and advocacy for Native American military troops, Pratt’s assimilation practices targeted the students’ culture point blank.
The school forced the students to assimilate a few different ways, from sports to language. Students were placed in dorms – three girls to a room and four boys to a room. Often, no one in the room spoke the same tribal language.
“You’d have to speak English to communicate,” Sayles explained. “There’s this kind of cultural genocide going on at the same time that [Pratt] thinks he’s trying to help people.”
The book is a throughline to the language challenges that persist today for many native tribes.
“What I hope people take away is this, how difficult the idea is of expecting people to just drop the culture,” Sayles said.
Like some of his other works of fiction, “To Save the Man” is rooted in a real story and real people. It comes on the heels of his 2023 novel, “Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade’s Journey.” That book also was also a historical fiction film script adapted to the novel format.
But Sayles said he never took a history class in college, his interest in history is exactly that – an interest and a passion.
Merridee Book, CEO and artistic director of the Coronado Island Film Festival, will interview Sayles on Jan. 15 at the Coronado Public Library. She interviewed him in 2023 at his book launch for “Jamie MacGillivray: The Renegade’s Journey.”
“He’s so passionate about what he writes and he’s so immersive,” Book said. “I think directing and writing has really honed in his ability to create these very dynamic, really vivid narratives.”
Book and Sayles will talk about the process of adapting film to novel. She’ll also dig into “To Save the Man” with him.
“He sort of carries the interview really sharing the origin story and why he wrote this book,” Book said. “He just breathed new life into it as a novel.”
Book said that what stands out to her about Sayles’ work, is all of the backdrops he brings into his stories.
“It makes you want to research, explore on your own independently,” Book explained. “A lot of the stories that he tells are overlooked by mainstream media and [he] just shines a light on social, cultural or historic narratives.”
Sayles will discuss “To Save the Man” at a pre-release event on Wednesday, Jan. 15, at the Coronado Public Library. For more information, visit https://coronado.librarycalendar.com/event/evening-two-time-oscar-nominee-and-author-john-sayles-31967
