Carlisle Indian Industrial School, established in 1879 by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, aimed to assimilate Native American children into the white mainstream through education and manual labour. Despite being shut down in 1918, the school became a model for several similar institutions across the US and Canada. Carlisle, as such, presents a place of particular historic, spiritual and emotional significance for the thousands of descendants of Native boarding-school students. In Carlisle Indian Industrial School, editors Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose promise “more than a scholarly work,” aiming to “reveal the continuing presence, impact, and vitality of historical and collective memory, and the enduring legacy of the Indian school” (17–18). With its delicate balance of academic analysis, stories, poetry and indigenous theory, the collection is certainly successful in collating interdisciplinary and multi-genre work.

The book is the culmination of a 2012 symposium held at Dickinson College, and emulates this event not just through the group of Native and non-Native collaborators, but also in structure and form. Following a helpful contextualizing introduction, the collection presents an outline of the symposium's welcome, including a Seneca prayer as spoken by Peter Jemison. The rest of the collection's chapters are arranged in six parts: “A Sacred and Storied Place,” “Student Lives and Losses,” “Carlisle Indian School Cemetery,” “Reclamations,” “Revisioning the Past” and “Reflections and Responses.” Apart from these divisions, three overall themes emerge: the physical space of Carlisle, the experiences of the students, and the living memory of boarding schools amongst Native families and communities. Unlike most scholarly texts on Native boarding schools, this book does not focus on investigating the logic of assimilation or the ways in which such institutions functioned, but instead explores ways in which the intergenerational trauma imposed by this past may be approached.

The physical space of Carlisle is examined at length, most notably in Fear-Segal's chapter “The History and Reclamation of a Sacred Space” on the school's cemetery and its 1927 relocation, and Carolyn Tolman's “Carlisle Farmhouse: A Major Site of Memory.” The chapters track the development of these spaces from their establishment to the present, demonstrating the significance of these sites both for Native students and for redressing the school's history. The cemetery and farmhouse have come close to demolition, and the chapters demonstrate the role these spaces can play in reconciling and reclaiming the boarding-school past.

Reclaiming Carlisle student identities is a central aim of the volume, most literally demonstrated by Barbara Landis's intriguing account of matching names to unmarked graves in the Carlisle cemetery. The collection's integration of multiple genres adds emotional depth to centring student experiences. N. Scott Momaday's powerful opening chapter intertwining narrative, poetry and drama, as well as Maurice Kenny and Eduardo Jórda's poems, are particularly evocative. These sections demonstrate the importance of storytelling and oral history in recovering Native perspectives, as well as the struggle to come to terms with the things that can never be known. As Kenny writes in “Photograph”:

Dovie Thomason's personal story, “The Spirit Survives,” explores similar themes and reflects on her family history, and attempts to piece together the painful history of boarding schools. The rest of Part 6, “Reflections and Responses,” introduces varying perspectives on the 2012 symposium and thoughts on how to move forward from the cultural and psychological rupture inflicted by boarding schools. For instance, Daniel Castro Romero Jr. (Ndé/Lipan Apache) describes the symposium as having provided a “template” for Native elders to open discussions to move toward healing (354).

There are too many insightful, moving and inspiring sections of the book to cover in a short review. The collection has undoubtedly achieved its aim of sparking discussions around reconciliation and promoting a greater awareness of Carlisle Indian School within American history. However, continuous references to the symposium can be frustrating for the reader who did not attend, raising the question whether the volume attempts too closely to emulate the atmosphere of the event. Nevertheless, the collection is a must-read not only for scholars of Native American history, but also for anyone engaging with a “studies” field. Carlisle Indian Industrial School presents a successful model of truly interdisciplinary and multi-genre work, integrating collaborative engagement beyond academia. As such, it is indeed more than just a scholarly work.