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Carlisle Indian School
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
U.S. National Historic Landmark
Native American pupils at Carlisle Indian School, c. 1900.
Location:	Carlisle, Pennsylvania
Built/Founded:	1879
Architectural style(s):	Colonial Revival
Governing body:	United States Army
Added to NRHP:	October 15, 1966[1]
Designated NHL:	July 4, 1961[2]
NRHP Reference#:	66000658

Carlisle Indian Industrial School, (1879 - 1918), was an Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1879 at Carlisle, Pennsylvania by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the school was the first off-reservation boarding school, and it became a model for schools in other locations. It was an attempt to forcibly assimilate Native American children from 140 tribes into the majority culture of the United States. The school had its football team, led by superior athlete Jim Thorpe, compete with colleges in the early 20th century.

After the school closed in 1918, the United States Army took back Carlisle Barracks to use as a hospital to treat soldiers wounded in World War I. Later it established the War College there.

In 1961 the complex was designated a National Historic Landmark (NHL). In 2000 the former school was the site of a historical commemoration for its Native American students.^[3]

[edit] History

Lieut Richard Henry Pratt, Founder and Superintendent of Carlisle Indian School, in Military Uniform and With Sword 1879.

The Indian boarding schools were founded in the late 19th century aftermath of the Civil War and the Indian wars, when many Native Americans had been removed to reservations. The schools represented a mixture of American ideals and arrogance; the founders thought the American Indians needed to adapt to majority culture to survive.

[edit] Prisoners at Ft. Marion

(See Castillo de San Marcos)

Richard Pratt had served in the Civil War. After the war, Lt. Pratt led the 10th Cavalry Regiment, who became known as Buffalo Soldiers, in the southern plains of the United States. One of Pratt's jobs was to command Native Americans who were enlisted scouts for the 10th Cavalry. In 1875, Pratt transported a small group of 72 Indian prisoners, to Fort Marion, an old Spanish fort in St. Augustine, Florida. The prisoners had been captured in the Indian Territory at the close of the Red River War.

At Fort Marion, Pratt immediately set about improving physical conditions for the Indians. He soon set up an Indian self-guarding system and worked in other ways to help them preserve their dignity. The prisoners became the center of interest by northerners wintering at St. Augustine. They encouraged Pratt in his plans for education, and several participated as volunteer teachers. Some were teachers or had missionary backgrounds. Pratt believed language was critical and that it was easier for Indians to learn English, than for Americans to learn the great variety of Indian languages. He organized volunteers to teach the Indian prisoners language, religion, and customs as a form of cultural assimilation to prepare them for life after release.^[3][4]

When the prisoners were freed in 1878, Pratt encouraged them to seek more education. Seventeen went to the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute for Negroes (now Hampton University, a historically black college established soon after the Civil War for freedmen.) Others were educated in New York. All funds for their education were raised by private benefactors. Based on their apparent success, Pratt and others thought such education could be useful for other American Indians, especially children.^[4]

Pratt believed a model similar to Hampton Institute would be useful for educating Indians, and worked to gain support for that purpose. The "industrial school", which included trade and farm skills, was seen as more practical for mass education than the classical academic college.^[3] United States Senator Pendleton, whose wife had befriended one of the prisoners and supported his education in Syracuse, New York, pushed a bill through Congress to establish a school for American Indians.^[4]

[edit] Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Carlisle Students in School Uniform Exercising Inside Gymnasium; Some with Indian Clubs, Others with Gymnastic Equipment; Non-Native Group Watching 1879.

The federal government authorized Pratt to use the Carlisle Barracks in central Pennsylvania as the site for the school. The first students came from the Lakota tribe. "Pratt saw his education program with the Native Americans as analogous to his domestication of wild turkeys.".^[5] He was said to have taken a nest of wild turkey eggs to be mothered by his barnyard hen, and the fledglings became as assimilated as his best domesticated turkeys. They only needed, in Pratt's words, “the environment and kind treatment of domestic civilized life to become a very part of it."^[6] Pratt believed that the Native Americans should be uprooted from their tribal past to “achieve full participation.” In practice, this meant erasing, as much as possible, any trace of Native American customs, culture, language and religion from the children at the school.

^[7]

[edit] Student recruitment

Group of Young Women Students in School Uniform at Gym Class; Some with Indian Clubs; Some on Parallel Bars, Others on Catwalk Above Gym Floor 1880.

Pratt persuaded tribal elders and Chiefs that the reason the washichu (Lakota word for white man) were able to take their land was because the Indians were uneducated. He believed that the Natives were disadvantaged by being unable to speak and write the white man's language, that if they had the knowledge, they may have been able to protect themselves. Many of the first children to be sent to Carlisle were sent voluntarily by tribal families. Descendants of Spotted Tail and Red Cloud were among the first sent to Carlisle School.

As the decades passed, enrollment at the Carlisle School increased, with up to 1,000 students a year. The older students participated in using their skills to help build new classrooms and dorm buildings.

As more schools were developed across the country, the BIA put pressure on Indian families to send their children to the boarding schools. To save their children from capture, some parents taught their children a hiding “game” to be used when Bureau of Indian Affairs officers arrived. The Hopi nation surrendered groups of their men to prison sentences in Alcatraz rather than send their children to the schools.^[8]

[edit] Education

Elementary school class of Indian students, 1901.

Classes included subjects such as English, math, history, drawing and composition. The students produced a variety of weekly and monthly newspapers and other publications that were considered part of their "industrial training", or preparing for work in the larger economy. These featured their artwork and writing. Miss Angel DeCora was a Native American teacher that was chosen to teach art to their students. After many year of teaching the student, the schools ideas of assimilating them into the white culture were thought to be wrong, Miss Angel DeCora was chosen to try to bring back some of the Indian art so that their culture wouldn't die.

Music was a part of the program, and many students studied instruments. After some time, the Carlisle School developed a band. It performed locally, and it was also invited to every national presidential inaugural celebration until the school closed.

Students also learned other trade and work skills, such as artisan and domestic crafts, that were considered useful. They were taught Christianity and expected to attend church, but had their choice among those in town.The school also had an outing program where the Indian children could go live with white families in the attempt to Americanize them.

The industrial school movement was later criticized for training graduates for lower class jobs. This argument took place regarding the institutes established for freedmen, as well as for Native Americans. At the time, many founders and benefactors believed that such skills training provided steps for jobs which the students might realistically get after they returned to their families in home environments, whether Indian reservations in the rural West, or farms and villages in the rural South.

[edit] Abuse

During the years of operation, hundreds of children died at Carlisle. More than 175 were buried in the cemetery. The bodies of most who died were sent to their families. Children who died of tuberculosis were buried at the school, as people were worried about contagion.^[3] Most died from infectious diseases common in the early 20th century that killed many children. The new climate, separation anxiety and lack of immunity increased the death toll. Others died while attempting to escape from the school. Some suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse or malnutrition.^[9] Beatings were a common form of punishment for students' grieving, speaking their native languages, not understanding English, attempting to escape and violating the harsh military rules. Other forms of punishment included hard labor and confinement. According to Dr. Eulynda J. Toledo of the Boarding School Healing Project, children at Carlisle had their mouths washed with lye soap for speaking in their tribal languages.^[9]

The children who arrived at Carlisle able to speak some English were presented to the other children as "translators." The authorities at the School, however, used these children’s traditional respect for elders to turn them into informants, used to catch other children’s misbehavior.

School officials required students to take new names in English. This was confusing to them, as the names from which they were to choose had no meaning. In traditional Native American culture, people had a variety of formal and informal names that reflected relationships and life experiences. The "renaming" was difficult for many of the children especially because they couldn't read and had to pick their names by the way that the writing looked.

Late 20th century appraisal has led to criticism like this: "The boys and girls at Carlisle Indian School were trained to be cannon fodder in American wars, to serve as domestics and farm hands, and to leave off all ideas or beliefs that came to them from their Native communities, including and particularly their belief that they were entitled to land, life, liberty, and dignity....separated from all that is familiar; stripped, shorn, robbed of their very self; renamed."^[8]

[edit] Results

Portrait of Native Americans from the Cherokee, Cheyenne, Choctaw, Comanche, Iroquois, and Muscogee tribes in American attire. Photos dates from 1868 to 1924.

The Carlisle School was a model for the founding of 26 Indian boarding schools across the country by the federal government by 1902.^[10] The belief was that Native American children needed to assimilate to the majority culture in order to survive, and they were forced to give up much of what they knew. Ideas about education have since changed drastically.

Pratt experienced conflict with government officials over his outspoken views on the need for Native Americans to assimilate. In 1904 he was forced to retire as superintendent of the School.

After Pratt was forced out, some of the school was upgraded to be a counterpart of colleges and training institutes. Its football teams competed against those of colleges. It had a strong sports program and training for trade industries, as industry represented what directors saw as the area of greatest job expansion.

By the time the “noble experiment” at Carlisle ended, nearly 12,000 children had been through the school. Students came from 140 tribes from all over the United States.^[3] Less than 8% graduated, while well over twice that percentage ran away.

[edit] Legacy

[edit] American football

Jim Thorpe in his Carlisle Indians football uniform

Today, the school is notable nationally for its star athlete and double Olympic gold medalist and professional baseball and football player, Jim Thorpe, and the team the Carlisle Indians. The strongest coach was Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, who started at the school when he was twenty-eight. He coached for two different periods, 1899 - 1903 and 1907 - 1914. Thorpe competed under him from 1907-1911. The Carlisle Indians' winning percentage (.647) is the best of any defunct college football team.

In a new book (2007) about the Carlisle Indians, Sally Jenkins characterized them as "The Team that Invented Football", due to innovations introduced by Warner.^[11] Still close to the beginning of his long and successful career as a coach, Warner turned the team into a national football power and significantly opened up the game's offensive strategy.

[edit] Native American history

The school has a mixed legacy of educational ideals and controversy. It was a model for other Indian boarding schools, of which 26 were established by 1902.^[10] These were established in years in which Quakers and missionaries led efforts for education of formerly marginalized populations: schools had been established in the South for basic and college education of African Americans, and the nation was concerned with educating the millions of new European immigrants arriving in northern industrial cities.

Many Native Americans are bitter about the deracination that took place at this and other Indian boarding schools, and the traumatic experiences of children taken from their families. Others appreciate the chances their ancestors got for education, having heard positive stories in family tradition. In 2000 the Cumberland County 250th Anniversary Committee worked with Native Americans from numerous tribes and non-natives alike to organize a Powwow on Memorial Day, to commemorate the school, the students, and their history in all its aspects.^[3]

[edit] In media

• Carlisle Indian Industrial School was depicted in the 1951 movie classic Jim Thorpe. Thorpe thrived under the football tutelage of equally legendary football coach Glenn S. "Pop" Warner.
• Part of the 2005 mini-series on Turner Network Television, Into the West, takes place at the school.
• The PBS documentary In the White Man's Image (1992) tells the story of Richard Pratt and the founding of the Carlisle School. It was directed by Christine Lesiak, and part of the series The American Experience.^[10]
• The Dear America Series young adult fictional diary My Heart is on the Ground by Ann Rinaldi tells the story of Nannie Little Rose, a Sioux girl sent to the school in 1889.

[edit] See also

• Indian boarding school
• Zitkala-Sa
• Cultural Genocide

[edit] Citations

[edit] References

• Fear-Segal, Jacqueline. "Nineteenth-Century Indian Education: Universalism Versus Evolutionism", Journal of American Studies, 33 (1999), 2, 323-341. 
• Pratt, Richard Henry (1964, 2004). Battlefield and classroom : four decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-8061-3603-0. 
• Witmer, Linda F. (1993). The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1879-1918. Carlisle, Pa.: Cumberland County Historical Society. ISBN 0-9638923-0-4. 
• Pratt, Richard Henry (1983). How to deal with the Indians: the potency of environment. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress Photoduplication Service. 
• Daniel E. Witte and Paul T. Mero, "Removing Classrooms from the Battlefield: Liberty, Paternalism, and the Redemptive Promise of Educational Choice", 2008 Brigham Young University Law Review 377
• Eastman, Alaine Goodale (1935). Pratt, the Red Man's Moses. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. LCCN 35021899. 
• Pratt, Richard Henry (1979). The Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania : its origins, purposes, progress, and the difficulties surmounted. Carlisle, Pa.: Cumberland County Historical Society. 
• Richard Henry Pratt Papers. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• Adams, David Wallace (1997). Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience 1875 - 1928,. University of Kansas Press. ISBN 978-0700608386. 
• Anderson, Lars (2007). Carlisle vs. Army: Jim Thorpe, Dwight Eisenhower, Pop Warner, and the Forgotten Story of Football's Greatest Battle. Random House. ISBN 978-1400066001. 
• Fear-Segal, Jacqueline (2007). White Man's Club: Schools and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation. Lincoln, NA: Nebraska UP. ISBN 9780803220249. 

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Carlisle Indian Industrial School

• "Carlisle Indian School", Cumberland County Historical Society
• "Richard Henry Pratt Papers", Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• Doctors, Lawyers, Indian Chiefs (2008) ISBN 978-0-9774486-7-8 Life stories of 50 Carlisle Indian School football players
• "Fort Marion Artists", Smithsonian Institution

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