From Mendocino County Public Broadcasting, this is the KZOEX News art spot for Monday, January 20th. I'm Michelle Blackwell. John Sales is an independent film director, screenwriter, actor, and novelist. He's been nominated for 2 Academy Awards and for the National Book Award. He's published 8 novels and a short story collection.

His most recent novel, To Save the Man, tells the dual story of the Carlisle Indian School and the massacre at Wounded Knee. It juxtaposes the life of indigenous children who are forced to give up their heritage and the struggle of the Native American tribes who are forced into reservation and allotments in what was known in the 1800 as the territory. In your acknowledgments, you mentioned that this work has been in process for 20 years. What was your primary inspiration for writing about the massacre at Wounded Knee and the Carlisle Indian School?

You know, like most Americans, what I knew about the Carlisle Indian School growing up was that Jim Thorpe went there. I even wrote a book report, you know, Jim Thorpe all American, about how he eventually won these Olympic medals. And I was hired to write, a screenplay about a famous football game in 1912 between the Carlisle Indian, football team and the West Point Cadets. That movie never got made, but doing the research, I just got fascinated by this phenomenon of this school that lasted for about 40 years, I think it was, and was kind of the template for all of the Indian schools that came after. And this idea that, oh, the way to to solve the so called Indian problem was to get them to stop speaking their own language, to speak English, basically to teach them how to be white.

Also just got fascinated with the it was a coed boarding school, which was very rare, but also was kids from tribes from the East Coast to Alaska. There were kids from tribes that were traditional enemies.

You tell the story partly through the eyes of a Carlisle Indian School student who's introduced as Clarence. Clarence is Lakota Sioux and early in the book appears to assimilate quite well into white culture. Why Clarence? Is he a real person?

There are many real characters in it based on historical people. He's kind of a composite. His his name is Clarence because he came there speaking only Lakota, and they would give you an American name. Mhmm. And he's actually very good at the academics.

He's learned English very well. He's been there for quite a while. And so he's he's he's a good example of somebody who's kind of thrived in a situation. At the same times, he feels like a traitor. Eventually, when he decides to go back to the to the reservation, he retakes his name of War Eagle, but he's not so sure of his Lakota anymore.

Antwan and Grace are a subplot conducting a teen romance between 2 characters romance. Is there a deeper reason for bringing this piece into your book?

Well, one of the reasons I brought it in is you see pictures from the Carlisle Indian School. And at their celebrations, there are native kids dressed up like pilgrims alongside of, you know, native kids dressed up like tribes, usually not their own, doing the Thanksgiving pageant or literally doing the Hiawatha story. There's this strange thing of these people play acting Indian stuff written by white people as part of this effort to make them assimilate.

General Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School. The title of your book comes from a saying of his, To Save the Man, Kill the Indian. He was considered progressive in his time. Did he have a white savior complex or is that description too simplistic?

He's somebody who had fought in the civil war. He had fought in the Indian wars. He'd seen a lot of slaughter. He had commanded African American troops. He had natives from different tribes as scouts for him.

And he came away saying, you know, having spent time with these people, they're just as smart as we are. What is holding them back is their culture, especially in the case of Native Americans. And he was a progressive in that most of the white Americans at the time wanted to exterminate the Indians. So he felt like, okay. I think there's a way to to solve this problem for both sides, and it's to to get these people to adapt to our culture.

We have to make them capitalists. But, also, if they don't do this, I think they're all gonna die. They're they're they're just not going to thrive. He was a military guy. He was used to people.

You know, he you say something and and they say, yes, sir. So he wasn't listening a whole lot. So once he started out on this path, I think he was just pretty stubborn and was not really taking the kids aside and saying, well, how do you feel about this?

The story opens with Antoine's experience. He slips into this romance and we delve more into Clarence's story. Was it something you were planning all along, or did you decide while you were writing it to bring in The Massacre of Wounded Knee?

Yeah. Wounded Knee was always a part of the story. You know, there there was this thing that, okay, these kids, the ones who didn't already speak English, had learned to read English. And one one of the things that meant is they were reading the newspapers as the ghost dance phenomenon worked its way east from Nevada to, you know, the Dakotas. There was this hue and cry from the the yellow press, and the local white people got panicky and, you know, insisted that the American army come in and protect them, which was like a recipe for disaster.

And these kids are stuck in rural Pennsylvania seeing what looks like a train wreck about to happen to their people. The biggest, you know, subgroup of of native kids at Carlisle were Lakota kids. And that was not so much that it was popular with their parents, but the US army thought like, oh, we we'll pacify these people. We'll keep their kids hostage in in Pennsylvania. They won't jump the reservation and start a war again.

This is only about, you know, 10 years after Custer's last stand. Feelings are running high in that part of the world.

John will be appearing at Gallery Books in Mendocino on January 22nd. For KZYX news, I'm Michelle Blackwell. For all our news with photos and more, visit kzyx.org. You can also subscribe to the KZYX news podcast wherever you get your podcasts.