Long before Paul Wenell Jr. ever picked up a mic and became the Hip-Hop MC known today as Tall Paul, he was the Anishinaabe and Oneida boy who longed to see someone on his television screen who looked like him.
“At this point in time, the representation I had seen of natives on TV was primarily westerns. You know, natives getting killed by the cowboys,” Tall Paul said of growing up in the 90s. “Subconsciously, that does something to an impressionable youth.”
What it did for Tall Paul, who was born and raised in South Minneapolis, Minnesota, was make him ask questions.
Were natives really the inferior and incompetent caricatures he had seen on the silver screen? Where were the natives in the sports leagues that he loved so much?
Tall Paul found the answers to those questions in Jim Thorpe, a name that would illuminate the path that would forever change Tall Paul’s life.
“It kind of lit a fire in me.”
The Native Baby Born the Greatest
In the Indian Territory that would eventually become the occupied state of Oklahoma, Jim Thorpe and his twin brother Charlie were born in 1887 in a one-room cabin. His parents welcomed him into the world as “Wa-Tho-Huk,” which in English translates to “path lit by great flash of lightning.”
Of Sac and Fox and Potawatomi ancestry, Thorpe — a two-time Olympic gold medalist, a Pro Football and College Football Hall of Famer who also played professional baseball and basketball — is undisputedly one of the greatest athletes of all time, but his name and athletic achievements are oftentimes overlooked or forgotten when discussing sporting greats.
Tall Paul, in his scholarly and musical genius way, is looking to change that.
On Nov. 17, Tall Paul released “The Story of Jim Thorpe,” a 10-track semi-biographical album dedicated to the life and legacy of the Sac and Fox and Potawatomi legend. But the album does more than just musically chronicle Thorpe’s triumphant and tragic life. With each passing track, Tall Paul lyrically schools us and lays bare this country’s foundational and savage legacy of conquest and colonization.
With flows, bars and hooks that seem to effortlessly spill from the depths of Tall Paul’s soul, he seamlessly weaves together the painful histories of settler colonialism, the forced removal of indigenous people from their rightful land, and the infamous genocidal project of the boarding school.
Tall Paul intentionally raps about all of this — including the legacy of indigenous armed resistance — to set the backdrop for the world Thorpe would step into. Born just as the whites were celebrating the triumphant end of the “Indian Wars,” Thorpe and his twin brother Charlie were sent by their father into the very same boarding school system that claimed countless lives of native children. Richard Henry Pratt, the army captain who coined the infamous phrase “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” built the framework for the boarding school system, where native children were prohibited to speak their language and had their culture physically beaten out of them. Pratt’s first off-reservation school would be Carlisle, the same place where Thorpe’s athletic legacy would begin to take shape in 1907.
If the album sounds like a thesis statement, it’s because it is. Digging into his college education, Tall Paul researched all aspects of Thorpe’s life, reading numerous books, including Robert W. Wheeler’s “Jim Thorpe: World’s Greatest Athlete,” and watched numerous documentaries and interviews.
“I just really tried to dig in deep and find out as much accurate information as I could,” he said. “It was a tedious process. It was grueling. It wasn’t always enjoyable. Sometimes, it felt like an assignment, but at the same time I knew that it was important and I did enjoy it.”
On the track “No Place for Young Men,” — one of the album’s best songs — we learn that Thorpe and Charlie first attended the Sac and Fox Indian Agency school at the behest of their father. “His dad wanted him to learn the white man’s way so that he could come back and use those skills to empower himself and his loved ones in this new world,” Tall Paul said.
But it’s in the song “Keep On Keeping On” where we hear the heartbreak Thorpe suffered as a child. Charlie, who Thorpe called his strength, died at the age of nine of pneumonia. While at Haskell Institute, another boarding school, Jim’s mother would soon follow, dying while giving birth to her 11th child. By age 17, and now attending Carlisle, Jim’s father would die of gangrene.
Jim was alone.
“He lost basically everybody close to him while he was in these boarding schools and he dealt with a lot of that trauma,” Tall Paul said. “And he was able to fight through all of those things and still become the person that he was, the legend that he was as an athlete and a person.”
A Native Threat
The tracks “Ain’t Nobody Gonna Tackle Ol’ Jim,” “You Shot Me” and “Legend” chronicle Thorpe’s meteoric athletic rise. At Carlisle, Jim excelled in all sports, most notably track and field, ballroom dancing and football. Thorpe played for Pop Warner — who to this day has a children’s football program named after him — a coach who exploited him. Thorpe, technically an amateur, went unpaid for his athletic achievements at Carlisle. Still, under Thorpe’s leadership, Carlisle’s football team upset top-ranked Harvard in 1911. The following year, in what is perhaps still one of the most symbolic victories in American sports, Thorpe and his fellow natives at Carlisle thrashed West Point Army 27-6.
“Jim Thorpe and his teammates realized that they were going on to the proverbial battlefield with the children of the people who colonized our ancestors and who did cowardly things. And it’s a level playing field,” Tall Paul said. “It was kind of like the first time these native kids felt like they had a fair shake. So they took advantage of it and we’re dominant.”
In 1912, Thorpe represented the United States at the Sweden Olympics, taking gold in both the classic pentathlon and the decathlon. He was stripped a year later of his medals when it was reported that he was meagerly paid for playing semi-professional baseball years before the Olympics. Warner, who marketed Thorpe’s native heritage and ability for ticket sales, refused to come to Thorpe’s aid. It wasn’t until this past July that the International Olympic Committee reinstated Thorpe as the sole winner of both events.
It’s when the album begins its conclusion that we see Thorpe’s light begin to dim. Mourning the death of his child and struggling with alcoholism and family issues, Thorpe died penniless in 1953 in the California trailer he shared with his third wife. Those struggles were important for Tall Paul to highlight.
“He was this great athlete, he was also still a human being who had real-life issues, just like me,” he said. “So that made him more human to me … it makes his story even that much more inspiring and motivating.”
The final song, “Someone Great Who Looked Like Me,” was actually the catalyst for Taul Paul’s project. It was in 2017 that Tall Paul wrote that song, and with a grant from the First Peoples Fund, Tall Paul created a music video, visiting the various places that molded Thorpe into the person he would become.
“I wanted to tell his story so that people could learn about him,” Tall Paul said. “And remember him, remember his legacy and who he was, how great he was, and do my small part in increasing his visibility. And the fact that people are still talking about him, roughly 70 years after his death, that’s pretty powerful.”
Tall Paul’s album, “The Story of Jim Thorpe,” is available for download.