Of all the horrific incidents in American history that can no longer be covered up, the terrors and abuses in schools during the post-Civil War era have become another known chapter of misery and injustice utilized by artists and writers in new explorations. TO SAVE THE MAN by John Sayles is the latest book to focus on the victims and the government that said they would be protected and educated. It is an emotional and straight-ahead declaration of the wrongdoings that need to be recalled in order to stop them from ever happening again.

The academic year begins in September 1890 at the Carlisle School, a coed military-style boarding school in Pennsylvania for Native American children. The students are ordered to speak only English, forget their own language and customs, and learn to be like the white community. They try to find ways around the intellectual abuse, but Captain Richard Henry Pratt is a tough headmaster. His motto is “To save the man, we must kill the Indian.”

"This is not a book that’s fun to read. It’s thrilling and complicated, and its prose speaks directly to readers’ hearts and minds. TO SAVE THE MAN will stand as a historical rendering as compelling and profound as KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON."

Soon the school is alive with the rumors of a “ghost dance” moving across their reservation homes. Tribal people are dancing, chanting and reporting visions in the hopes that their efforts will inspire the Creator to return the buffalo to the Plains, raise their beloved dead, and destroy their overseers with floods and fire. The yellow press hypes the story with falsehoods and spreads panic amongst white settlers, leading to the deployment of federal troops onto Lakota land. When Carlisle hears about Sitting Bull being killed by Native police working for the government, he demands that each student choose between the white man’s path or be part of a way of life that may be about to die out.

Sayles is a social activist filmmaker who does not skirt over issues and make light of difficult and tragic circumstances. From his look at the Matewan incident, to the corrupt World Series of the “Black Sox,” to race relations in Newark, Sayles is a historian of special artistic note. Antoine, a half-Ojibwe boy, and his friends at the school become the living and breathing example of how difficult and unfair these circumstances were. And now readers can better understand and learn from those times about what true democracy looks like in American history.

TO SAVE THE MAN is also a story of generations. The older generation holds fast to their beautiful, legendary ways of life, while the younger generation is torn between their elders’ customs and a world where they may be able to find a path of their own. This fight, this gap, is where the novel’s true drama sits. These young men and women explore a variety of relationships and ideas in order to find out what could be the best way forward.

“Hanging is no way for one of us to die!” shouts one young man after the hanging of a student. “Think of the shame it would bring your parents.” Thumping his chest, Clarence speaks in his native Lakota: “You have murder here…but we have to fight with our wits now.” The students bring the reality of the situation to a point where Carlisle is in the middle of both an intellectual war and a war of valor that will define what freedom really is for the next generations of Native youth.

This is not a book that’s fun to read. It’s thrilling and complicated, and its prose speaks directly to readers’ hearts and minds. TO SAVE THE MAN will stand as a historical rendering as compelling and profound as KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON.