Contenders: Two Native Baseball players, one world series

 Shirley J.            juvenile literature      The story of two native americans who rose to fame in sports        

Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series by Traci Sorell   48 pages

Two native baseball players who were taken from their families by government programs set up to indoctrinate native children from their cultures into living the life of white people.  Native children were torn from their families and  forced into boarding schools that strove to take their true identities from them, to strip them of their culture, their language, cut their hair force them to wear the white man's clothes and follow the white man's ways treating them like second class citizens while praising the white lifestyle.  This is the story of two of the captives at the orphanage who grew up playing baseball and who were discovered for their excellent skills at the game and who went on to play for different teams who eventually face each other in the world series.   A good story showing the cruel reality of early native life after the white man took over to the prejudices they grew up facing and even in adulthood continued to deal with even as professional baseball players.