Carlisle Indian Industrial School

The Carlisle Indian School (1879–1918) was an audacious educational experiment. Capt. Richard Henry Pratt, the school’s founder and first superintendent, persuaded the federal government that training Native children to accept the white man’s ways and values would be more efficient than fighting deadly battles. The result was that the last Indian war would be waged against Native children in the classroom.More than 10,500 children from virtually every Native nation in the United States were taken from their homes and transported to Pennsylvania. Carlisle provided a blueprint for the federal Indian school system that was established across the United States and served as a model for many residential schools in Canada. The Carlisle experiment initiated patterns of dislocation and rupture far deeper and more profound and enduring than its initiators ever grasped.Carlisle Indian Industrial School offers varied perspectives on the school by interweaving the voices of students’ descendants, poets, and activists with cutting-edge research by Native and non-Native scholars. These contributions reveal the continuing impact and vitality of historical and collective memory, as well as the complex and enduring legacies of a school that still touches the lives of many Native Americans

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act after two decades: institutional death and ceremonial healing far from home

The remains of 186 Native American children from nearly 50 nations are buried in the Carlisle Indian School cemetery, which today stands just inside the main entrance of the U.S. Army War College, in Carlisle, PA. Taken in the late 19th and early 20th centuries from homes across the United States, these children-trained for American citizenship and to reject their traditional cultures-died and were buried far from home. The children remain historically and spiritually connected to native peoples across the United States, but the Carlisle Indian burial ground does not fall under NAGPRA. In this article, the complex history of this cemetery-its creation, segregation, removal, contraction, transformation, and preservation-introduces an account of its repossession by the students' descendants at "Powwow 2000: Remembering the Carlisle Indian School."Parallels between the treatment of Indian dead in the Carlisle cemetery and the treatment of Indian ancestral remains are drawn; yet, although a study of loss and recovery, this is not a story of repatriation. Rather, it is an analysis of the history of a unique Indian burial site and its reclamation as a place for ceremony, healing, and recovery

Death, Power, and Silence:Native Nations’ Ancestral Remains at the Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania

The foci of this chapter are the many troubling issues associated with indigenous student deaths at US and Canadian boarding/residential schools. These institutions were organized to strip students of their cultural traditions and loyalties, in preparation for assimilation into mainstream society. The cemetery of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School is used here as both case study and synecdoche, to address the larger geo-political and historical questions connected with this educational program of cultural genocide. By interweaving an investigation of physical changes to the cemetery with scrutiny of archival documents, the analysis reveals that behind the neat lines of cemetery stones stands a powerful but covert narrative of Native exclusion, segregation, and dispossession. The chapter argues that ongoing scrutiny of both the past and current physical site of the cemetery can supply information that is able (in part) to mitigate the silences, gaps, and pervasive deficiencies of the historical record