"Battlefield and Classroom": Indigenous Student-Soldiers and US Imperialism in the Carlisle Indian School Press

Abstract

ABSTRACT: The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw the beginnings of US empire abroad and simultaneously the crystallization of the US assimilation era at home. While off-reservation Native American boarding schools like the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879–1918) developed national recognition, the US began to acquire overseas territories in Cuba, Hawai'i, Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico. Students at schools like Carlisle produced white-edited, school-controlled periodicals like the Indian Helper , the Red Man and Helper , the Arrow , and the Carlisle Arrow . Reading Carlisle's periodicals, this essay traces the experiences of thirty-eight Carlisle students who enlisted in the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars and wrote about their experiences across the US's new empire. Although such periodicals have long been read as colonial documents, these newspapers, newsletters, and magazines nevertheless offer insights into Native students' writing and Native soldiers' voices at war, including their impressions of—and, sometimes, identification with—Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and Native Hawaiians. Carlisle's administrators often used student-soldiers' reprinted letters to demonstrate successful assimilation which promised to transform Native peoples into patriotic US soldiers. These new "war correspondents" could then provide first-hand accounts of some of the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars most famous battles. Although largely meant to legitimate assimilative education systems, reprinted letters by Native student-soldiers often detail their everyday lives at war, including interactions with other Indigenous and non-Indigenous communities overseas. This essay ultimately argues for more generous readings of Native voices in these otherwise heavily censored letters. Despite their framing in the periodicals as willing agents of US empire, these reprinted letters by Native students underscore how the US military was likewise a site of trans-Indigenous exchange that provided the material circumstances for connection and solidarity.