He was not, in the public imagination of those years, the fallen Olympic champion.

He was a football player — the most famous Native American athlete in the country, competing in a sport that was still defining itself.

And even as his playing career ended, he found ways to remain connected to the public life of sport.

He worked in Hollywood from the late 1920s onward, appearing in dozens of films in uncredited roles — most of them playing generic Native American characters in Westerns, the particular Hollywood shorthand for Indigenous life that reduced centuries of cultural complexity to a few recognizable images.

He also tried, with varying success, to form a casting agency that would push for the hiring of actual Native American performers rather than the European-American actors who typically played Native roles on screen.