Carlisle Indian Industrial School Research Articles

Opera and Land: Settler Colonialism and the Geopolitics of Music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

AbstractThis article examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship federal off-reservation boarding school for the compulsory education of Indigenous children, established in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, in 1879. By examining the music education and performance culture at the Carlisle School, this article considers the role of music both within boarding school discourses of “civilization” and in terms of the larger federal goal of dispossession of Native land. Based on original archival research and engagements with contemporary discourses in Indigenous music and sound studies, the article then considers a nationalistic comic opera titled The Captain of Plymouth performed by Native students at the Carlisle commencement exercises in 1909. It argues ultimately that, although music, dance, and expressive culture were a central concern for federal assimilationist policy, music making at Carlisle provided a groundwork for the emergence of an intertribal social formation that guided musical practices and self-determination movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

“Our Colored and Indian Charges Furnish So Much Amusement for Us”: Catholicism, Assimilation, and the Racial Hierarchy in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1883–1918

ABSTRACT While the history of White reformers’ attempts at assimilation has been studied in the American West and South, their role in the American Northeast still remains largely unexplored. This article examines the role of Catholic missionaries in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. These White missionaries worked with students at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School as well as African Americans at St. Katharine’s Select School. By comparing and contrasting Catholic work with these two ethnic groups, this article examines the racial hierarchy within the assimilation process at the turn of the twentieth century.

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

The Role of Education in the Struggle for Native American Sovereignty

This article explores the enduring struggle of Native Americans to preserve their land, culture, and sovereigntyin the face of European colonization and U.S. expansion. The Native American population, estimated between five and 18million prior to 1492, was drastically reduced to 250,000 by the early 20th century due to colonization’s harsh realities.Education emerged as a critical battleground for preserving tribal identity, as the U.S. imposed its system to erase nativecultures. Native American children were coerced into feeling ashamed of their heritage, all while the nation denied themequal opportunities. Educational autonomy is intrinsically linked to the broader fight for Native American sovereignty,enabling tribal nations to wield political and economic power as sovereign entities within the U.S. boundaries. Thenarrative covers the encroachment and division policies of the Reconstruction Era, exemplified by the Homestead Act andthe Dawes Act, which led to the loss of tribal land and imposition of Western culture. It also delves into the establishmentof off-reservation boarding schools, such as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which sought to assimilate NativeAmerican children through familial separation and a curriculum that suppressed cultural identity. This historical overviewreflects the hurdles overcome and the remaining obstacles in Native Americans’ quest for educational autonomy and self-determination, ultimately serving as a testament to their enduring resilience and determination in the face of centuries ofadversity

Middle Passages: Lessons in Racial Subjection at the Hampton Institute and Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Abstract: This essay argues that the historically Black Hampton Institute (1868) and the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879) are crucial sites to investigate how US political, territorial, and economic conquest were sutured to the project of emancipation after the Civil War. Rather than focusing on these schools’ manual education, I turn to their newspapers, the Southern Workman and Indian Helper , to demonstrate how they developed techniques of discursive representation, rooted in Black fungibility, that made racial subjection appear as racial emancipation in the postbellum period. These newspapers were framed as both tool and evidence of students’ subjective transformation. Instead of providing authentic evidence of Black and Native transformation, however, they provide a glimpse into how Hampton’s and Carlisle’s representations of racial emancipation drew on discursive techniques created in the material and symbolic violence of transatlantic slavery’s Middle Passage. The essay concludes by demonstrating how a trio of boarding school stories (1900) by the Yankton Sioux author Zitkala-Ša provides a nascent critique of the ways in which Indian boarding schools produced Native fungibility as a technique of white domination in the context of postbellum US imperialism.

Wash Away Your Sins: Indigenous and Irish Women in Magdalene Laundries and the Poetics of Errant Histories

The history of Magdalene laundries in Ireland is well-documented. Magdalene laundries also existed in the U.S., but their existence and impact are less widely known. In 1914, several young Indigenous women were sent from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to the House of the Good Shepherd in Reading, Pennsylvania as punishment for perceived behavioral infractions. Placing Indigenous and Irish women's experiences of forced confinement into conversation with one another, this article calls for a more capacious understanding of the legacy of the U.S. federal boarding school system and the carceral institutions that comprised the settler apparatus.

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School by Matthew Bentley and John Bloom (review)

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School by Matthew Bentley and John Bloom (review)

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. By Matthew Bentley and John Bloom

<i>The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School</i>. By Matthew Bentley and John Bloom

“Any Violation of This Arrangement”: Catholic Negotiations at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1883–1918

ABSTRACT This article examines the relationship between the administration at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and Catholic missionaries, particularly those associated with the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions, as well as the local clergy. It traces the development of the school from the Protestant regime under Richard Pratt to the secular one under Moses Friedman. Throughout this shift, Catholics tried to negotiate a place for themselves at the school. The success of their efforts reflected federal policies on religious education, the personalities of those involved, or the perception of common goals. The author argues that Catholic attempts to develop a place for themselves were initially limited by Protestant sentiment and later the rise of the supposed secular school. In doing so, Davis adds to the historiography on interreligious tensions and dialogue at the turn of the twentieth century, placing the Carlisle Indian Industrial School at the center of these negotiations.

Colonial rhetoric in cinema for didactic use from a transnational view. The Italian epic film Cabiria (1914) at the Indian Industrial School of Carlisle

ABSTRACT The first silent epic Italian film, Cabiria (1914) by Giovanni Pastrone with the screenplay co-written by the director and the poet Gabriele D’Annunzio was used as an educational tool at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1915. The film’s plot unfolds during the Second Punic War (218 to 201 BC). The film’s narrative is pro-empire propaganda for Italy’s recent occupation of Libya (1911–1912). The visual narrative is rich in colonial rhetoric. It shows the viewers the friendship between the enslaved man Maciste, interpreted by a white man wearing blackface, and the Roman soldier and colonizer Fulvio Axilla. This essay analyses the film’s construction of racialized bodies and locates it within the larger context of cultural assimilation through visual technologies applied at the Carlisle school. This analysis focuses on the intermedial imagination of a progressive whitening process in moving pictures, photographs, and lantern slides used at the school.

Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton

Reviewed by: Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession by Elizabeth Sutton Emily C. Burns Elizabeth Sutton, Angel De Cora, Karen Thronson, and the Art of Place: How Two Midwestern Women Used Art to Negotiate Migration and Dispossession. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020. xix, 168 pp. $49.95 (paper). Histories built on comparative case studies often lead to new discoveries by focusing on examples that are both parallel and divergent. This is the model undergirding art historian Elizabeth Sutton's comparative study of Ho-Chunk artist Angel De Cora and the author's great-grandmother Karen Thronson, a Norwegian immigrant to the Midwest. Pairing these two figures' stories and the spaces of subjugation and assimilation that operated for both Native nations and Scandinavian immigrant communities in the [End Page 197] Midwest allows readers to consider the power of objects to engage with place, identity, culture, gender, and memory. Sutton argues that these artists, contemporaries who never met, both engaged in community-building through art production to, in Sutton's words, "connect with place and validate self and group identity" (1). The act of creating in a variety of media—and in particular engaging with long-standing practices in their respective communities—helped these individuals to navigate their identities in the context of expected assimilation. There is much to recommend in this discussion, that centers on female makers and challenges art history's traditional hierarchies that tend to devalue craft. Sutton's focus on minoritized experience recasts ongoing narratives of settler colonialism and cultural subjugation. The text also takes seriously the possibilities of "visual coding" (24, 56) as a strategy that Thronson and De Cora employed to speak to U.S. and non-U.S. audiences simultaneously. This question—what modes of cultural expression could be non-threatening to dominant culture—offers the book's key investigation of artistic agency and messaging. The text also highlights the role of organizations and publication outlets for communicating ideas of identity. The study, however, leaves some important questions tantalizingly unanswered. There is a promising synergy between the presentation of handicraft from Scandinavia and Native American design in ladies' magazine cultures (83), but this is not probed further. The crucial scholarship by art historian Elizabeth Hutchinson on De Cora's navigations of modern and Native identities is listed in the bibliography but is not cited or directly engaged in the content of the book, although the author does come to similar conclusions about how De Cora strategically sought to build a compatibly Native American and modern artistic practice. A dialogue with Hutchinson's conclusions on this topic would have also enabled greater clarity of Sutton's contributions, especially in her original research of design projects by De Cora's female students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the ways that De Cora encouraged her students to develop individual expression via a larger understanding of Native American art practices in the early twentieth century (108–116). I also would have appreciated a citation for her use of Lakota interpretations of color in the Carlisle student work (112) as well as some discussion of De Cora's painting in the Native American boarding school exhibition at the Universal Paris Exposition of 1900 when her participation in several other World's Fair displays is noted (57). Tonalism as an aesthetic practice, which De Cora employed, is never really defined or productively [End Page 198] engaged as an aesthetic (48, 65), which makes it difficult to trace the artists' adaptation of it. The project might have benefited from further integration of the main figures. Each chapter oscillates between the two subjects, and the brief conclusion does not fully show how they are complements or foils for each other. Do we really see either figure more clearly in this comparison? An extended article focusing on key similarities, such as immigration and dispossession, might have been more effective as a comparative study. Indeed, while the artists share a gender identity and the use of art to connect with their respective communities, certainly the experiences of Norwegian immigrant women and Native American women significantly diverge in...

Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series by Traci Sorell

Reviewed by: Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series by Traci Sorell Kate Quealy-Gainer, Editor Sorell, Traci Contenders: Two Native Baseball Players, One World Series; illus. by Arigon Starr. Kokila/Penguin, 2023 [48p] Trade ed. ISBN 9780593406472 $18.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9780593406489 $11.99 Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 3-5 This dual biography of Charles Bender and John Meyers, two of the few Native American baseball players in the early twentieth century, opens with their meeting at the 1911 World Series. A tense third-person narration calls the game with the breathless drama of any good sportscaster. Just as John scores a run, the book shifts briefly to the racism the two encountered leading up to the game (both were called Chief and endured slurs from both fans and teammates) and then dives back even further into the two men’s childhood. Charles, son of an Ojibwe woman and German man, played baseball while at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and John’s early experiences with the game were on his Cahuilla nation’s reservation. Both men eventually rose in the baseball ranks to become pros ready to help their teams to victory. The book comes full circle, returning to the World Series and documenting the A’s win, while still focusing on the discrimination the two men endured; a closing note discussed how such racism persists through today’s sports, in the form of offensive team mascots and cheers. The book’s structure keeps readerly engagement throughout, shifting focus among factual details, social commentary, and sports drama. While the tone lacks intimacy, it effectively contextualizes John’s and Charles’ roles in the diversifying of the sport. Illustrations have a classic comic-book like style with rich saturation and bold lines with deep textures. This has broad appeal for history buffs, sports fans, and social-justice minded kids. [End Page 234] Copyright © 2023 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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

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

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

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.

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

The Imperial Gridiron: Manhood, Civilization, and Football at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Reverberations of Boarding School Trauma in Upstate New York

The legacy of boarding schools in Upstate New York is one that non-Natives seem to have forgotten. This historical amnesia compounds other acts of genocide, including cultural genocide, of the Haudenosaunee people throughout US history. Established in 1855 at the Cattaraugus Reservation (Seneca), the Thomas Indian School would serve as an institution of forced assimilation and displacement, much like the other Native American boarding schools. While the larger US population has grown to forget these schools' existence, the shadowed legacy of institutions, like the Thomas Indian School, Haskell, and Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the rippling effects of these schools’ practices is glimpsed in Upstate NY’s Native populations. One such way of historical preservation is within the literature of the Native descendants of these schools, for example, within the poetic works of Eric Gansworth (Onondaga). Gansworth brilliantly crafts poems regarding his youth on reservations and within this youth demonstrates the last intergenerational impacts of the US boarding schools.

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

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.

Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian by Terri A. Castaneda (review)

Reviewed by: Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian by Terri A. Castaneda Kevin Whalen (bio) Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian by Terri A. Castaneda University of Oklahoma Press, 2020 BIOGRAPHICAL ACCOUNTS of Indigenous experiences in the early twentieth century remain somewhat few and far between. After a spate of as-told-to biographies written in the mid-twentieth century that often blurred the line between non-Native writers and their subjects, biography fell out of favor among historians and anthropologists. With Marie Mason Potts: The Lettered Life of a California Indian, anthropologist Terri A. Castaneda joins a growing group of scholars working to refresh the medium as she brings to vivid life the rich and varied life of a Mountain Maidu activist. While Potts became a prominent journalist, political activist, and cultural leader among California Native people in the decades after World War II, Castaneda begins her account by drawing a painstaking portrait of Potts's Big Meadow community of Mountain Maidu people in the mid-nineteenth century, effectively using settler colonial theory to underscore the changes brought by the arrival of non-Native gold miners, land speculators, and (later) settlers. Castaneda then explores Potts's experiences at the Greenville Boarding School, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, and after returning home to northern California. The second section of the book details how Potts rose to political prominence through editing Smoke Signals, a news publication for California Native people, and by participating in the Federated Indians of California, a group that pushed for just compensation of California Indians under the Indian Claims Commission Act of 1946. Castaneda then analyzes Potts's rising importance as a cultural leader and collaborator with anthropologists in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Finally, the book closes with respective explorations of Potts's roles within the National Congress of American Indians and the urban Indian community of Sacramento. Through it all, Potts left a voluminous paper trail, and Castaneda demonstrates thoughtfulness in incorporating these written sources, as well as interviews with descendants and Native community members in Sacramento. Driven by the careful pen of Castaneda, Marie Mason Potts adds depth and texture to what we know within many critical areas of California Indian history and Native American history more broadly. For example, Potts sought out the opportunity to attend Carlisle Indian School, and her experiences at [End Page 133] Carlisle and after returning home reflect agency and its limits among boarding school students, both at school and after returning home. Potts's leadership within the Native community in Sacramento adds a crucial knowledge of Indigenous urbanization in the decades before World War II. Additionally, Castaneda's analysis of Potts's participation in the Federated Indians of California and the National Congress of American Indians, and her long run as editor of the Smoke Signal, provides a crucial window into California Native communities during the upheavals of the Indian Claims Commission and termination. Moreover, Potts's political activism as limned by Castaneda demonstrates the critical ties between local experiences and national Indigenous politics during the first half of the twentieth century. The journey of Potts was long and rich with meaningful experiences; as relayed by Castaneda, these stories bring to life both the uniqueness and exceptionality of Potts's stories and their relationships to the broader challenges and opportunities faced by Native people in California and beyond. Analyzing a life as long and rich as Potts's presents some challenges. Potts's life touched many themes and subfields that are often approached in isolation from one another by academics. Boarding school experiences, wage labor, political activism, and the development of community-oriented anthropological methods—each of these topics fill separate shelves at university libraries. Relating the experiences and activism of Potts to the literatures of each of these fields requires considerable time and attention, and in lesser hands scholarly context might compete with the narrative arc of Potts's life. Castaneda handles this difficult work with aplomb. Marie Mason Potts is an exceptional book, and it offers renewed promise for the possibilities of biographical study as a lens into Indigenous experiences of the early twentieth century. [End Page 134] Kevin...

"To keep the Catholics intact": The Catholic Experience at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1883–1918

"To keep the Catholics intact": The Catholic Experience at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1883–1918

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy

We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans and Comedy