Project
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Frank Vitale
The Carlisle Indian Industrial School
Vitale: My name is Frank Vitale. I am assistant professor, university archivist and special collections librarian at Millersville, University of Pennsylvania. I research to boarding schools for indigenous children that were run in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The one that if anyone has heard of any of them, they will have heard of is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This is the school that people associate with the Olympians, Jim Thorpe and Lewis Tewanima. About 8000 Indigenous youth go through that institution over the 39 years that it's opened from 1879 to 1918. And then the other school that I study is a very small school in the Altoona area of Pennsylvania called the Martinsburg Indian Training School, which is only open for about three years and only enrolls approximately a hundred youth from the Oneida and from the Osage. And so I'm my research really focuses on these two polar opposites in terms of schools operating in this period. the Carlisle Indian School is an institution that is fully run by the federal government. It has most all of its finances coming through the federal government and by the turn of the century, around 1900 or so, this school is enormous in terms of enrolling approximately a thousand individuals in any given year. And these are indigenous youth from a variety of different age ranges that are coming from all across the American empire. They're coming from as far away as the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, as well as across the continental United States. So what we see now is the continental United States the Carlisle Indian School is established on the site of an old cavalry barracks that had been sort of defunct since the end of the Civil War. And its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, was a through and through Army individual who had fought in the Indian wars on the American frontier and came to be of the mind that instead of killing and engaging in warfare with these various indigenous groups, the more quote unquote progressive way to assimilate indigenous individuals and indigenous groups and to allow white settlement is to educate. Right. So one of his big mottoes that he's always known for is that his goal is to kill the Indian in him and save the man. Right. It's this idea that through assimilation you can and christianization you can incorporate indigenous individuals into the broader Euro-American polity. So Carlisle is founded in this abandoned barracks in 1879. It's not very well supplied for a number of years in its very early period. Students children are sleeping on floors. And, you know, food insecurity is a big thing that's happening. And then over time, the schools profile develops. More and more sports teams become more popular to the point that around the turn of the century, they start playing Ivy League schools right? The 1912 Olympics features two students from the Colville Indian School, Jim Thorpe and Lewis Tewanima. Jim Thorpe, famous for the decathlon, sac and fox, and Lewis Tewanima, who was a sprint runner with the Hopi. Right. So the school operates for that 39 years, and it is the flagship school in the Bureau of Indian Affairs System of Boarding Schools. So there's approximately two or three dozen other large boarding schools that the federal government operates. And they're also supporting hundreds of other day schools and mission run schools across, again, this large American empire. But Carlisle is the closest institution to Washington, D.C. So it becomes a tourist destination. It's also an institution that again, has all of this attention towards it because of its athletic programs. And just a couple of hundred feet away from the famed athletic fields is the school's cemetery. Approximately 238 individuals died at Carlisle that we've been able to identify, and dozens more were sent home before they could die on campus so that the statistics looked better when they were being sent back to the BIA. Right. So Carlisle is a site of significant contestation of space, both in its day and in the present. So when you are working with various groups, whether they be from the military perspective, right, Because after the colonial Indian school closes down, it devolves back to the U.S. Army. It is now the site of the U.S. Army War College. So a very prestigious institution in a military educational structure here in the United States. So depending on the audience member and where they're coming from, some individuals still see the school as this very benevolent action of the federal government. Right. And that imperialistic colonial narrative is lost. Some individuals see it as a sort of Harvard or Princeton for indigenous individuals in this period. Right. That's partially because a lot of the thinkers of the early 20th century that are indigenous make their way through this school. A number of notable chiefs and various different indigenous nations, artists and thinkers are coming through the school. And then of course, there are those who are comparing it to the concentration camps, right? Carlisle is in many ways a form of colonial genocide of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So it has a very contested narrative throughout its history and even today. So a number of the readings for the institute talk about the nature of contested spaces in the present day and talk about the nature of how spaces become contested, right? Sometimes that is through the policy of assimilation. And so you see this through pieces such as LaPierre's work on Blackfeet spirituality. You see this in McNally's and Farrell's works that are looking specifically at Yellowstone and some of the major legal battles that are happening today, right where these contests have very long historical roots. It's not something that just emerged out of the ether, you know, because of social media or, you know, people having a modern gripe. Right. There's a long history, local roots, both to the creation of concepts of space themselves within one given location. But then how those play out in the modern day. And so those are three particularly strong works that talk about how you can't really discuss modern day contests over meanings between different constructions of space without acknowledging that there is this very complex history that you have to unpack and it may go back 100 years or, you know, in the case of certain sacred spaces, may go back millennia.
Vitale: My name is Frank Vitale. I am assistant professor, university archivist and special collections librarian at Millersville, University of Pennsylvania. I research to boarding schools for indigenous children that were run in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The one that if anyone has heard of any of them, they will have heard of is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, based in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. This is the school that people associate with the Olympians, Jim Thorpe and Lewis Tewanima. About 8000 Indigenous youth go through that institution over the 39 years that it's opened from 1879 to 1918. And then the other school that I study is a very small school in the Altoona area of Pennsylvania called the Martinsburg Indian Training School, which is only open for about three years and only enrolls approximately a hundred youth from the Oneida and from the Osage. And so I'm my research really focuses on these two polar opposites in terms of schools operating in this period. the Carlisle Indian School is an institution that is fully run by the federal government. It has most all of its finances coming through the federal government and by the turn of the century, around 1900 or so, this school is enormous in terms of enrolling approximately a thousand individuals in any given year. And these are indigenous youth from a variety of different age ranges that are coming from all across the American empire. They're coming from as far away as the Aleutian Islands in Alaska, in Puerto Rico, in the Philippines, as well as across the continental United States. So what we see now is the continental United States the Carlisle Indian School is established on the site of an old cavalry barracks that had been sort of defunct since the end of the Civil War. And its founder, Richard Henry Pratt, was a through and through Army individual who had fought in the Indian wars on the American frontier and came to be of the mind that instead of killing and engaging in warfare with these various indigenous groups, the more quote unquote progressive way to assimilate indigenous individuals and indigenous groups and to allow white settlement is to educate. Right. So one of his big mottoes that he's always known for is that his goal is to kill the Indian in him and save the man. Right. It's this idea that through assimilation you can and christianization you can incorporate indigenous individuals into the broader Euro-American polity. So Carlisle is founded in this abandoned barracks in 1879. It's not very well supplied for a number of years in its very early period. Students children are sleeping on floors. And, you know, food insecurity is a big thing that's happening. And then over time, the schools profile develops. More and more sports teams become more popular to the point that around the turn of the century, they start playing Ivy League schools right? The 1912 Olympics features two students from the Colville Indian School, Jim Thorpe and Lewis Tewanima. Jim Thorpe, famous for the decathlon, sac and fox, and Lewis Tewanima, who was a sprint runner with the Hopi. Right. So the school operates for that 39 years, and it is the flagship school in the Bureau of Indian Affairs System of Boarding Schools. So there's approximately two or three dozen other large boarding schools that the federal government operates. And they're also supporting hundreds of other day schools and mission run schools across, again, this large American empire. But Carlisle is the closest institution to Washington, D.C. So it becomes a tourist destination. It's also an institution that again, has all of this attention towards it because of its athletic programs. And just a couple of hundred feet away from the famed athletic fields is the school's cemetery. Approximately 238 individuals died at Carlisle that we've been able to identify, and dozens more were sent home before they could die on campus so that the statistics looked better when they were being sent back to the BIA. Right. So Carlisle is a site of significant contestation of space, both in its day and in the present. So when you are working with various groups, whether they be from the military perspective, right, Because after the colonial Indian school closes down, it devolves back to the U.S. Army. It is now the site of the U.S. Army War College. So a very prestigious institution in a military educational structure here in the United States. So depending on the audience member and where they're coming from, some individuals still see the school as this very benevolent action of the federal government. Right. And that imperialistic colonial narrative is lost. Some individuals see it as a sort of Harvard or Princeton for indigenous individuals in this period. Right. That's partially because a lot of the thinkers of the early 20th century that are indigenous make their way through this school. A number of notable chiefs and various different indigenous nations, artists and thinkers are coming through the school. And then of course, there are those who are comparing it to the concentration camps, right? Carlisle is in many ways a form of colonial genocide of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. So it has a very contested narrative throughout its history and even today. So a number of the readings for the institute talk about the nature of contested spaces in the present day and talk about the nature of how spaces become contested, right? Sometimes that is through the policy of assimilation. And so you see this through pieces such as LaPierre's work on Blackfeet spirituality. You see this in McNally's and Farrell's works that are looking specifically at Yellowstone and some of the major legal battles that are happening today, right where these contests have very long historical roots. It's not something that just emerged out of the ether, you know, because of social media or, you know, people having a modern gripe. Right. There's a long history, local roots, both to the creation of concepts of space themselves within one given location. But then how those play out in the modern day. And so those are three particularly strong works that talk about how you can't really discuss modern day contests over meanings between different constructions of space without acknowledging that there is this very complex history that you have to unpack and it may go back 100 years or, you know, in the case of certain sacred spaces, may go back millennia.
Frank Vitale discusses the history of contestation and conflict associated with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an American residential school for Indigenous children that has been compared to both an “ivy league” institution and a concentration camp.
Photographs courtesy of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.
Further Resources:
Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center
Home From School PBS documentary about the 2017 repatriation (trailer)
