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Carlisle Indian Industrial School |
| Carlisle Indian School | |
|---|---|
| (U.S. National Historic Landmark) | |
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| Location: | Carlisle, Pennsylvania |
| Built/Founded: | 1879 |
| Architect: | Unknown |
| Architectural style(s): | Colonial Revival |
| Designated as NHL: | July 4, 1961[1] |
| Added to NRHP: | October 15, 1966 |
| NRHP Reference#: | 66000658[2] |
| Governing body: | United States Army |
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.
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Richard Pratt was an enlisted man 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.
| “ | "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."[3] | ” |
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".[4] 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".[5] 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.
| “ | "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…”[6] | ” |
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…”[7]
"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.”[8]
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.[9]
Hundreds of children died at Carlisle.[10] 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.”[11]
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."[12]
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.
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.
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