Reviewed by: Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian School Students Speak by Arnold Krupat Susan D. Rose, Co-Director Arnold Krupat, Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian School Students Speak. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2021. 420 pp. Hardcover, $80; e-book, $80. “Oh, that they could speak if they wanted to.” This is what I was thinking as I read through Arnold Krupat’s volume, subtitled Carlisle Indian Students Speak. Krupat offers an anthology of mostly unpublished records and writings by Carlisle Indian School students. Words, yes, but despite the title, rarely do we hear the “students speak.” The first part of the book reports on responses to alumni student surveys and essays in Carlisle’s publications. Krupat gives due credit [End Page 213] to the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (CISDRC) for much of the material and transcriptions he presents. It is wonderful that people are finding the resource that makes student records, documents, publications, and correspondences readily and freely accessible to descendants, Native communities, scholars, and teachers. One needs to be careful and thoughtful, however, about the kind of assumptions and interpretations one might make given these resources. The alumni surveys in particular only include responses from those who chose to continue their relationship with Carlisle. The analyses and conclusions one can draw from these holdings are limited because of the nature of the records, especially when it comes to student perspectives and voices. Therein lies my critique of Krupat’s work. While he argues that Boarding School Voices “presents the words of some of those thousands of students who spoke the breath of boarding school life” (xiii), the degree to which these documents represent the voices of Carlisle students is open to interpretation. Certainly we can learn a lot from students’ school records, documents, and publications in which their names appear, but we cannot get a robust sense of what these students really experienced or had to say. How did the complex relationships among Carlisle students, administrators, and sponsors impact what was said and how Carlisle students expressed themselves? To what extent did the school censor or edit students’ writings? Such questions reveal why it is so important to combine archival work with oral histories that have been shared and passed down among Native families and communities, and research by Native and allied scholars. When Krupat does offer some analysis, it is often problematic. “These Indian people wrote about their lives in some detail, and their stories, like all written narratives, may be read as literary texts inviting attention to their structure and their style” (xix). He focuses, however, foremost on minor misspellings in student writing without acknowledging the numerous reasons for different spellings. He does not comment more seriously on the structure of the writing but rather offers a brief and irrelevant discussion of Western narrative genres (tragedy, comedy, romance, and irony) with little to no reference to the Carlisle writings to which he is referring, [End Page 214] nor a discussion of the possible satire or irony found in Carlisle students’ writings. To whom and for whom were they writing and with what purpose? Krupat draws most of his analysis from fifty-six alumni surveys of 103 returned surveys (of 7,800 students enrolled at Carlisle), and an analysis of some sample of Carlisle publications. He does not share his methodology here so the reader does not know how many volumes or articles of which publications he analyzed. Krupat then claims that “no student was forced to attend Carlisle; parental permission was required before a child could go” (xv). He goes on to say that it may have happened at other boarding schools but not at Carlisle. Yet he contradicts himself in endnote three of the introduction, where he says he knows of only two exceptions. Questions again arise: does refusing to give rations unless parents give their permission to send their children to Carlisle represent permission or coercion? Do the prisoners sent from Fort Marion in St. Augustine to Carlisle represent voluntary enrollment? Such blanket statements do not serve the book or the reader well. Neither does the conclusion: “I read the materials by most of the former students on record as telling stories...
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Oct 10, 2022
Stephen Mason 
Open Access
