“An Ordinary Case of Discipline”: Deputizing White Americans and Punishing Indian Men at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1900–1918

Abstract

Abstract The Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918) is often remembered as the first residential school for American Indian children and youth forcibly removed from their communities as a part of the U.S. government’s policy of so-called assimilation. In addition to “school-aged” youth, however, American Indian women and men eighteen years of age and older comprised a substantial proportion, and from 1912 to 1918 the majority, of Carlisle’s “student” body. In centering the disciplinary documents of American Indian men, this article examines a seeming paradox: Carlisle employees, U.S. officials, and U.S. citizens punished older male enrollees for enacting the very ideals that Carlisle claimed to be teaching them. Simultaneously, archival records reveal that White Americans profited off of their participation in the punitive structure of the settler state. Viewed through the prism of adult Indian men’s punitive experiences, Carlisle served many non-educational purposes as a carceral place of Indigenous punishment that deputized White Americans, helped maintain White hegemony, and furthered explicitly settler colonial objectives. The punitive patterns explored here show how Carlisle benefited the settler society by increasing the reach of its power over tribal nations—a fact that reveals the interlocking and interchangeable nature of carceral facilities, and which further demonstrates how Indigenous institutionalization was inherent to U.S. settler colonialism in this era.