Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian Students Speak by Arnold Krupat

Abstract

Reviewed by: Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian Students Speak by Arnold Krupat Geoff Hamilton Arnold Krupat. Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian Students Speak. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 402 pp. Hardcover, $80.00. With this follow-up to his two-volume study Changed Forever: American Indian Boarding School Literature (2018, 2020), Krupat turns to a selection of writings by former students of the Carlisle Indian School, framing these works with his own critical commentary. His broadest aim is to improve our still limited understanding of the experiences of those who attended the school and others like it, "allowing us a measure of insight into what they saw and thought and felt" (xiv). The texts, the bulk of which have not been published previously, date from the last decade of the nineteenth century to Carlisle's closing in 1918, and primarily consist of letters to administrators, responses to questionnaires, and pieces written for the school's newspapers. As Krupat notes, this archive represents only a fraction of the students who attended Carlisle—namely, those who seemingly felt positive enough about the school to carry on communication with its representatives. The texts express, in fact, a generally (and often markedly) positive view of the institution, and are identified as conforming, for the most part, to a "comic" literary structure, with the majority of former students "telling stories that, all in all, come to a moderately happy ending" (xix). With this selection bias kept in mind, Krupat explains how these writings can contribute to a fuller understanding of the role played by boarding schools in Native American lives: "There is no doubt that the schools caused pain and suffering that often lasted generations; some of their ill effects linger today. But the full story, so far as one can grasp it, is one not only of suffering and pain, loss, defeat, and abjection, but also of what Gerald Vizenor has termed Native survivance. It is a story not only of victim-subjects but of ingenious agents, a narrative not only of suffering but of creative syntheses and adaptive actions" (xvii). [End Page 349] Though the extant material Krupat has to work with is regrettably limited, his selected texts and commentary do indeed grant compelling insights into the experiences of some Carlisle students and their reactions to the world they confronted after leaving the school. We hear suggestive evidence, for instance, of the intensity of debates within Indian communities about the value of (and threats posed by) a Western education, along with the tensions felt by those who attempted to balance their new learning with traditional lifeways. At times we read of conflicts with conservative tribal authorities, and at others of a seemingly harmonious combination of cultural practices, as in a letter sent to the school's superintendent by a man named F. H. Miller from Acoma Pueblo, who reports on his successes as a potato farmer. Krupat observes here "the wonderful conjunction … of tradition and modernity in the field, where we have Miller spreading the odorless phosphate he had learned to use from Carlisle's agricultural program, and also singing songs that his Acoma people sung for generations 'so the crops will be pleased with it'" (64). Several texts speak to the diverse ways Carlisle's students negotiated the school's legacy in their own lives as they sought to leverage their education into successful careers. One striking example comes from Luther Standing Bear, by far the most well-known of the correspondents included in the book, who in a response to a questionnaire pointedly insists that, in spite of the school's opposition to Buffalo Bill shows, he has learned something of worth from performing in them. His stance models, as Krupat points out, how some correspondents expressed their gratitude to Carlisle while still affirming their intellectual independence. In letters sent to the school by Dr. Caleb Sickles, a Wisconsin Oneida who became a prosperous dentist, we find another intriguing reaction—a de facto rejection of Indigenous identity as a way of evading mainstream racial prejudices and the barriers they presented to professional advancement. Overall, the book helps illuminate former students' views on a panorama of contemporary topics, including the advancement...