Carlisle Indian School
The Carlisle Indian School, established in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, was the first U.S. government-run boarding school aimed at assimilating American Indian children into Euro-American society. Founded by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the school sought to transform Indigenous children into "civilized" citizens by enforcing English language use, Christianity, and Anglo-American cultural norms. Students, recruited from various Indian communities, faced a curriculum that prioritized basic academics for boys and domestic skills for girls, neglecting the preparation for life in their own communities. While some students gained skills that empowered them to advocate for Indigenous rights, the experience often resulted in significant trauma due to separation from family, cultural dislocation, and harsh living conditions, leading to instances of abuse and even death. The legacy of the Carlisle Indian School reflects the complex and painful history of Indigenous education in the United States, highlighting the tensions between assimilationist policies and the preservation of Indigenous identity and culture.
Carlisle Indian School
In 1879, a U.S. military officer, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, opened an Indian school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, with the aim of assimilating American Indian children into white society. Unlike many of his predecessors, Pratt believed that Indian people were capable of being transformed into the Anglo-American model of the law-abiding, Christian, wage-earning citizen, much as he saw freedmen becoming. According to Pratt, leaving behind everything that distinguished Indian people as “Indian,” including their language and spirituality, was a better Indian policy than extermination and relocation.
Pratt first experimented with Indian education by training Plains Indian prisoners being held at Fort Marion in Florida. After persuading the federal government to allow eighteen male prisoners to attend Hampton Normal Institute, an all-black school in Virginia, Pratt recruited both male and female students from Indian communities across the country for enrollment in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first such residential Indian boarding school. At Carlisle, students were required to speak only English, to convert to Christianity, and to adopt middle-class Anglo-American ways of living. In addition to very basic academic skills, girls were trained in domestic skills such as ironing and cooking, while boys learned industrial skills. Such a curriculum intentionally did little to prepare students for life in Indian communities. When a student left the school, he or she was sent to work for white families; nonetheless, most did find their way back to the reservation.
Although some students did emerge from the experience with new skills and a determination to improve political and social conditions for other native people, attending Carlisle and boarding schools like it required a traumatic isolation from family and community for all, as well as abuse, malnutrition, or disease for others and even death for some.
Bibliography
Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. Archives & Special Collections, Dickinson College, 2015. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
Douglass, Susan. "Carlisle Indian School Students [Photograph]." Children and Youth in History. Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason U, 2015. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
Landis, Barbara. "About the Carlisle Indian Industrial School." Modern American Poetry. Dept. of English, U of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1996. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.
Stout, Mary A. Native American Boarding Schools. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2012. Print.
Yu, Jane. "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." Pennsylvania Center for the Book. Penn State, 2009. Web. 9 Apr. 2015.