The Carlisle Indian Industrial School's role in the diaspora of Native American children is so significant that any monograph that discusses the history of formal schooling for Native students would be considered incomplete if it were not addressed. However, while the body of work on Carlisle continues to expand, missing from the narrative has been a centering of student experience. Emerging from a symposium about the school that was held October 2012 in the city of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations places its emphasis on students. The sacredness of the subject is felt throughout the volume's six parts, which use songs, poems, and essays from Native and non-Native scholars, activists, poets, and descendants to fill this gap in the scholarship in unexpected ways. The volume offers space for examination and reflection of Carlisle's legacy as well as space for response and healing.
Carlisle has a complex and difficult history. Originally opened in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, by Captain Richard Henry Pratt as an experiment in Native education, the school quickly became the model mechanism for the federal government's attempts to contain and control Native American communities. The school's mission was to turn Native children away from “savagery” and toward “civilization.” Pratt's methodology quickly took hold and numerous institutions were built in its image. Thousands of Native children were removed from their families and endured militaristic and often violent schooling at Carlisle during its reign from 1879 to 1918. While not all students’ experiences were traumatic, for many the effects of Carlisle were destructive and felt for generations.
Building from seminal works such as David Wallace Adams's Education for Extinction (1995) and Jacqueline Fear-Segal's White Man's Club (2007), this volume uses the voices of students and those connected to them in unique ways to explore Carlisle's legacy. The creative methods of expression used in the text generate a sense of intimacy and connection with the material.
In Part 1, “A Sacred and Storied Place,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author N. Scott Momaday provides a melodic essay asking us to “imagine Carlisle, imagine the children.” Using poems, narrative, and portions of a play, Momaday encourages us to see the similarities between the nearly two hundred military-issued markers of the Carlisle cemetery and those at Gettysburg, as they both represent significant events in America's history. The subsequent chapter, “Before Carlisle,” provides the history of the physical space that encompassed the school and reminds us of the complexities of Native/white relations that span hundreds of years.
Bookended by poems, Part 2, “Student Lives and Losses,” offers intimate and personal accounts of the “civilizing” program and the deep and lasting wounds that have resulted from it. Using emotive language, the poems by Maurice Kenny each focus on a single student and draw attention to the sense of isolation many of the attendees of Carlisle withstood. The large number of students who attended Carlisle and their various tribal affiliations are examined in “The Names,” which uses the life stories of the first and last students found on Carlisle's long student roster to bring new attention to the thousands of stories that have yet to be told. An intimate account of a descendant of a Carlisle student is provided in “White Power and the Performance of Assimilation.” It details a student's involvement with the outing and theatrical programs at Carlisle and how they “contributed to the sustained and comprehensive performance of ‘civilization’” (p. 25). The closing chapter in this section, “The Imperial Gridiron,” takes a unique look at sports at Carlisle using oral histories to explore how sporting successes did not necessarily eliminate the conflicted feelings students had toward Carlisle.
Currently, the only place at the site of the school that names students’ tribal affiliations is the cemetery. As this volume centers on Carlisle's students, it is fitting that Part 3, “Carlisle Indian School Cemetery,” rests at the heart of the collection. The first chapter of this section is a poem by Eduardo Jordá that reflects the powerful emotions that the Spanish author felt during his visit to Carlisle. The next chapter, “The History and Reclamation of a Sacred Space,” reveals the deep racism found in the history of Carlisle's cemetery. Sitting on the oldest active Army post in the United States, the cemetery came to stand “as the physical manifestation of a composite, monolithic, white-created Indian identity” (p. 160). Within the cemetery, thirteen of the headstones were marked as “Unknown.” The last chapter in this part details the search and discovery of seven of the “Unknowns,” which brings closure to some communities but also calls attention to the unhealed wounds and the research that remains to be done for the six still unidentified students.
The chapters in Part 4, “Reclamations,” offer narratives on the lasting impressions of boarding school experiences and how the Carlisle farmhouse is worthy of preservation as a site of contemplation and acknowledgement. A particularly significant discovery is detailed in the opening chapter, “The Lost Ones,” which tells of two Lipan Apache children taken as prisoners of war in 1873 and brought to Carlisle in 1880. After capture, the children were never to return home, and their family and community did not know of their whereabouts for almost 130 years. Through this important finding, healing could finally begin for the Lipan Apache community. The next chapter, “Necropolitics, Carlisle Indian School, and Ndé Memory,” explores how this discovery situates itself in the modern-day struggles of the Ndé. Although not discussing the “Lost Ones,” the next essay offers a personal story of removal to demonstrate how Carlisle's aims at cultural genocide are enduring and that recovery was found in the reclaiming of a Native identity. The concluding chapter in this section, “Carlisle Farmhouse,” details the successful fight to save the building on the site of the original school. The effort represented more than just a struggle to retain a historical artifact but offers that the location is a place where “some of the cultural destruction promulgated by Carlisle [can be] reversed” (p. 28).
Sharing the research and knowledge gathered about Carlisle was a primary goal of both the symposium and the collection. Helping to fulfill that aim, Part 5, “Revisioning the Past,” includes information on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Digital Humanities Project. The project is digitizing information and research gathered on Carlisle and making it accessible to those with an interest in the school. The second chapter explores how using the Carlisle experience as a pedagogical tool provides instructors with “an opportunity to cultivate an awareness of the causal linkages associated with contemporary schooling practices, family dysfunction, and personal alienation from tradition” (p. 307).
Inherent with Carlisle are stories of disruption and loss. However, there are also stories of resilience, strength, and courage. Part 6, “Reflections and Reponses,” synthesizes these themes. The opening chapter, “The Spirit Survives,” emotionally conveys the conflicts Dovie Thomason experiences when considering sharing the painful truths of the Carlisle cemetery with her daughter. In perhaps the most compelling of the essays, Thomason implores us to tell everybody the stories of Carlisle so that all who have been touched by it can begin to see clearly. Intergenerational trauma is explored in another powerful piece, “Response to Visiting Carlisle.” Warren Petoskey's grandfather attended Carlisle and, as a result, his family would “never be ordinary” (p. 333). Chapters 19 through 21 offer personal reflections of the symposium and how the authors’ lives have continued to be impacted by their experiences there. The volume's closing chapter, “The Ndé and Carlisle,” reaffirms that although Carlisle closed a hundred years ago, its devastating effects continue on for many family and community members connected to the institution. More importantly, it also declares that in acknowledging the past, space has been opened for healing and growth.
The text is engaging and varied. Due to the rich diversity of material in the collection though, there are moments where continuity or connection between contributions is missing. For instance, the grouping of essays that are formal in tone and structure with pieces that are more conversational can be disorienting. Several chapters seem out of place or do not clearly connect to the volume's primary themes as well as others. Yet, even with these minor shortfalls, the collection of songs, poems, and essays is powerful. Fear-Segal and Rose's edited volume provides new and greater understandings of Carlisle, its students, and the generations of people impacted by the school and offers hope for healing for generations to come.
