To Save the Man by John Sayles

Published by Melville House on January 21, 2025

The story told in To Save the Man culminates (more or less) with the Wounded Knee Massacre, yet the massacre itself occupies only a few pages. Readers who want to learn more about the tragic event (and even those who don’t) would benefit from reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee.

To Save the Man's focus is on a school for Native American children who were sent by their families (under durress) to learn English and the white man’s ways. Jacques LaMere sends his son Antoine because the government will not recognize Jacques, whose father was a French Canadian, as an enrolled member of the Ojibwe unless his child is in an Indian school.

Indian schools were part of the disastrous federal policy of assimilating Indians — meaning, making them more like white people — or killing them. After Antoine takes a train to Pennsylvania, the story follows Antoine’s adaptation to life at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The school is run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, whose motto is: “To save the man, we must kill the Indian.” Students were not allowed to speak their own language, pray to their own god, or follow their own customs, lest they not learn to be white. After all, white people are civilized and Indians aren’t — just ask the white people.

Most Indians have been herded onto reservations, but the government’s latest plan is to take the reservation land, divide it into allotments, and deed an allotment to enrolled tribal members. The expectation, of course, is that Indians can be manipulated into selling their land to white people for less than it is worth (which isn’t much), making this yet another scheme to benefit white people at the expense of their nonwhite victims. No doubt the robber barons who ran the country at the time thought they were making America great again.

The novel’s background is familiar, but it is always worth remembering how tragically out nation has treated nonwhite people, Native Americans first among them. Unfortunately, the story adds little to the background. We meet a Paiute known as the Messiah, who has had a vision of a “great upheaval” that will restore the buffalo and swallow the white men, thus returning the Earth to “how it was before the whites came.” At the Creator’s direction, the Messiah teaches people a “ghost dance” that will hasten the upheaval. We also spend a few pages in the vicinity of Sitting Bull, just before he is killed by the police.

We meet other students, including Herbert Sweetcorn, Jesse Echohawk, Clarence Regal, and a young man known as Trouble. Some students are quick to learn but feel conflicted about the use they should make of their knowledge. Some students have adventures of their own, including fleeing from the school and riding on freight trains until they get caught. Some students have visions of romance. Miss Redbird, a teacher at the school, feels like a traitor for speaking to children in English who can’t understand her.

The story flits from character to character, never spending enough time with any of them to permit full development. The novel feels like a collection of characters in search of a meaty story. Each has a small story that illustrates the American government’s crappy treatment of Indians, but the stories fail to add up to anything larger.

The ghost dances eventually spook white soldiers into slaughtering hundreds of Indians at Wounded Knee. Perhaps John Sayles wanted to avoid glorifying the massacre, but in doing so, he deprived the scene of its inherent drama. Much the same can be said of the rest of the story. It’s interesting but lacks the forceful telling that such a horrifying time in American history deserves. Fiction can reveal new truths about history, but To Save the Man reveals little that most people who pay attention to history don’t already know. The novel nevertheless has value as a reminder of white America’s past that many would prefer to bury.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS