Native American pupils at Carlisle Indian School, c. 1900.
Carlisle Indian Industrial School, (1879 - 1918), was an Indian
Boarding School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1879 by Captain
Richard Henry Pratt at a disused barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The so-called “noble experiment” was a failed attempt to forcibly assimilate Native American children into the culture of the United States. The United States Army War College now
occupies the site of the former school.
History
Richard Pratt was an enlistedman and then an officer in the Civil War. After the
war, Lt. Pratt was an officer with the Buffalo Soldier’s 10th Cavalry Regiment, in the southern plains of the United States. One of Pratt's
jobs was to command the Native Americans who were enlisted Scouts for the 10th Cavalry. In 1875, Pratt took a small group of
Native American leaders to Fort Marion, an Indian
reservation or POW camp in Florida where they
were held hostage to allow the U.S. Government to coerce their respective nations. At Fort
Marion, Pratt set about trying to “civilize” his captives: taking away their traditional clothing in favor of military uniforms,
cutting their traditional braids, teaching them English, etc. While these people were released in 1878, Pratt and others thought
his techniques could be applied to others, especially children. He convinced others to establish Carlisle.
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"It seems curious that church people, humanitarians, and idealists should fall so much
in love with Pratt. He was a quite ordinary army officer who had developed a marked ability for knocking the spirit out of the
Indians and turning them into docile students who would obey all orders. Pratt was a domineering man who knew only one method for
dealing with anyone who opposed his will. He bullied them into submission." (Hyde, 1979, p. 289) |
” |
Pratt’s founding principle for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was to “Kill the Indian and save the man.” "Pratt saw
his education program with the Native Americans as analogous to his domestication of wild turkeys" (Fear-Segal 329).
Apparently, he took a nest of wild turkey eggs to be mothered by his barnyard hen, and they 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" (Fear-Segal 329). Pratt believed that the Native Americans should be totally uprooted from their
tribal past in order 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.
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"They told us that Indian ways were bad. They said we must get ‘civilized’….It means
‘be like the white man’… And the books told how bad the Indians had been to the white men—burning their towns and killing their
women and children. But I had seen white men do that to Indians. We all wore white man's clothes and ate white man's food and
went to white man's churches and spoke white man's talk. And so after a while we also began to say Indians were bad. We laughed
at our own people…” Sun Elk, Taos Pueblo, Carlisle, 1890 [1] |
” |
Student recruitment
At first Pratt convinced tribal elders and Chiefs that the reason the "washichu" (white men) were able to take their land is
because they were uneducated. He told them had they been able to speak and write the white man's language that they may have been
able to protect themselves. Many of the first children to be sent to Carlisle were sent by the families voluntarily. Descendants
of Spotted Tail and Red Cloud were among the first sent.
Parents were often coerced – or outright forced – to send their children to schools like Carlisle. Indian Affairs Commissioner Thomas Jefferson Morgan explained:
"I would...use the Indian police if necessary. I would withhold from [the Indian adults] rations and supplies...and when every
other means was exhausted...I would send a troop of United States soldiers…” [2]
"None of us wanted to go and our parents didn't want to let us go….I remember looking back at Na-tah-ki and she was crying
too….Once there our belongings were taken from us, even the little medicine bags our mothers had given to us to protect us from
harm. Everything was placed in a heap and set afire. Next was the long hair, the pride of all the Indians. The boys, one by one,
would break down and cry when they saw their braids thrown on the floor. All of the buckskin clothes had to go and we had to put
on the clothes of the White Man.” -- Lone Wolf, Blackfoot [3]
To save their children from capture, some parents taught their children a hiding “game” to be used when 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.[4]
Abuse
Hundreds of children died at Carlisle.[5] While some died from diseases foreign to Native American’s immune systems (tuberculosis, pneumonia,
smallpox, etc.) others died while attempting to escape from the school or from physical, emotional and sexual abuse or
malnutrition. Beatings were a common form of punishment for grieving, speaking their native languages, not understanding English,
attempting to escape and violations of harsh military rules. Other forms of punishment included confinement and being forced to
eat lye soap.
"(O)ne of the boys said something in Indian to another boy. The man in charge of us pounced on the boy, caught him by the
shirt, and threw him across the room. Later we found out that his collar-bone was broken.” -- Lone Wolf, Blackfoot [6]
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 misbehaviors.
Part of the culture the School sought to destroy was reflected in the children’s names. While traditional Native American
names reflected relationships and life experiences, the new names were assigned randomly from a list of “acceptable” names.
"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." -- Paula Gunn Allen, Laguna/Sioux, 1994.[7]
Results
By the time the “noble experiment” at Carlisle ended, over 10,000 children had been through the school. Less than 8% graduated
while well over twice that many ran away.
Pratt experienced conflict with government officials over his outspoken views on the need for Native Americans to assimilate.
This led to Pratt's forced retirement as superintendent of the Carlisle School on June 30, 1904.
American football
Today, the School is most widely remembered for its star American football player,
Jim Thorpe and their team the Carlisle Indians, coached by Glenn Scobey
"Pop" Warner. The Carlisle Indians also have the best winning percentage (.647) of
any defunct college football team.
The April 23, 2007, issue of Sports Illustrated included an excerpt from a
new book about the Carlisle Indians, by Sally Jenkins, characterizing them as "The Team that Invented Football," due to the
innovations introduced by Warner, which turned the team into a national football power and opened up the game's offensive
strategy significantly.
Bibliography
- Fear-Segal, Jacqueline. "Nineteenth-Century Indian Education: Universalism
Versus Evolutionism," in Journal of American Studies, 33(1999), 2, 323-341.
- Pratt, Richard Henry (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.
- 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.
In film
- Part of the 2005 mini-series on Turner Network Television, Into the
West, takes place at the school.
See also
In Film
Carlisle was depicted in the 1951 movie classic "Jim Thorpe." Thorpe thrived under the football tutelage of equally legendary
football coach Glenn S. "Pop" Warner.
External links
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