Counting Carlisle's Casualties: Defining Student Death at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879–1918

Abstract

Operating from 1879 to 1918 and educating over 8,000 students, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first and one of the largest federal off-reservation boarding schools for Native Americans in the United States. Carlisle symbolized Progressive-Era attempts to assimilate indigenous populations through education, and similarly typified mortality at federal schools across the American empire. Consequently, death at Carlisle is commonly used by scholars and activists as a rhetorical tool in arguments surrounding reconciliation and repatriation. Two incommensurable death counts of 220 and 537 decedents for Carlisle have been proposed, based on competing definitions of which types of decedents should and should not be included. Using cross-referential analysis of administrative records related to school, this study suggests a death count of 232 students and 6 proximal individuals, which adheres to historic categories of mortality. Quantitative analysis of mortality is then linked to contextual information, exploring differential fatality as well as absolute and proportional death trends. This reveals social historical information about student experiences and school mortuary practices, illustrating that mortality investigations hold significant potential beyond enumeration. Simultaneously, these findings challenge existing conceptions of death's alleged objectivity, showing that mortality is an unstandardized, complex phenomenon. This complicates emotional invocations of death counts, especially considering the national and international significance ascribed to understanding mortality at indigenous boarding schools. This study argues that more historically persuasive information about death is revealed through qualitative analysis of quantitative data, showing that mortality is best understood as a highly individualized traumatic experience.