The Associated Press sent this story out as a News Break this afternoon. It’s by Maryclaire Dale:

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A son of sports great Jim Thorpe sued the Pennsylvania town that bears his father’s name Thursday, demanding that it return his remains to Oklahoma under a federal law designed to give Native American artifacts back to their tribal homelands.

Jack Thorpe, 72, of Shawnee, Okla., sued in federal court in Scranton, saying he had waited until the last of his half-sisters died to avoid a family conflict over the lawsuit.

“The bones of my father do not make or break your town,” Jack Thorpe, a past chief of the Sac and Fox tribe, said of the defendants, who include numerous current and former town officials. “I resent using my father as a tourist attraction.”

His father, a native Oklahoman born into the tribe, overcame humble roots to win the decathlon and pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics. Jim Thorpe later earned enviable sums playing professional football and baseball, and somewhat less playing the Indian in B-list Hollywood movies, then struggled financially before his March 1953 death in California at age 64.

In a bizarre deal to draw tourists, the merging towns of Mauch Chunk and East Mauch Chunk, Pa., brokered a deal with Thorpe’s ambitious third wife that renamed the community Jim Thorpe in 1954 and brought his remains to a corner of the Pocono Mountains that he likely never saw.

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Tags: 1912 Olympics, buffalo post, East Mauch Chunk, Gwen Florio, Jack Thorpe, Jim Thorpe, King Gustav V, Mauch Chunk, Native American athletes, Native American news, Poconos, Sac and Fox Tribe, Shawnee

And speaking of Native athletes (See previous post about Louis Sockalexis, the first Native American to play Major League baseball) – it’s been a full quarter-century since a Native American competitor won an Olympic gold medal.

Jim Thorpe, who is Sac and Fox, who won gold medals in 1912 in Stockholm, and Billy Mills (Oglala Lakota) who won gold in 1964 in Tokyo.

And, in the 1984 Games in Los Angeles, Canada’s Alwyn Morris, who is Mohawk from Kahnawake, Quebec, and his partner Hugh Fisher won the men’s 1,000-meter doubles kayak race.

When Morris won, he held an eagle feather high As he tells Canadian Press, here, that salute meant everything to him.

It honored the grandparents who raised him, and his heritage as an aboriginal.

“It was important for me to be self identified in order to share that with the other part of who I am,” he says.

So it’s frustrating to report there are no aboriginal athletes on the teams that Canada will send to the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver.

Aaron Marchant, of British Columbia’s Squamish Nation aims to change that.

In 2004, he helped develop First Nations Snowboard Team with the goal of putting a snowboarder in the Olympics. The program has snowboarders training on nine mountains in British Columbia and one in Washington State, he tells CP.

“What we’re doing is very positive,” he said. “We’re striving to get more athletes to have the support to get to that level. I definitely see our program progressing.”

For his part, Morris says that it’s important aboriginal people are being included in the staging of the Games, something he says could inspire indigenous athletes.

“If the Four Host Nations for the 2010 Games show that there is legacy, that there is ability, and it’s more than just being the facade of the Olympic Games in Vancouver,” he says, “that’s going to lend a tremendous amount of support for athletes who are saying, ‘You know what, that’s where we were in 2010, and in 2020 we’re at the top of the podium.”

Gwen Florio

Tags: 2010 Vancouver Olympics, Alwyn Morris, Billy Mills, buffalo post, Jim Thorpe, Kahnawake, Mohawk Nation, Native American news, Native athletes, Squamish Nation

“Jim Thorpe: The World’s Greatest Athlete,” will chronicle the life of the member of the Sac and Fox Nation who among many feats got involved in sports at the Carlisle Indian School, set records in the 1912 Olympics, and then saw his medals stripped away amid questions about his amateur status.

The idea behind the new documentary, says this Native Times story, is to put that familiar story in a much broader historical context.

“In many ways he was emblematic of the American Indian experience in the 20th Century,” says co-producer, Joseph Bruchac, who is of Abenaki descent.

The film also aims to flesh out the personality of a man too often portrayed, says Thorpe’s son Jack, “as that poor drunken Indian.”

But, says his son, “be’s a legend – a legend in Indian Country.”

How about, in the whole country?

Gwen Florio

Tags: buffalo post, Carlisle Indian School, Jim Thorpe, Native American news, Sac and Fox