Episode 35: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School

This week I talk about the history of one of the most prominent residential schools in the United States. 

Transcript

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Hey everybody, I'm Shannon, and welcome to the They Hid What Podcast. On this podcast, I explore parts of history that have been kept hidden or swept under the rug. In this week's episode, I will be discussing the Carlisle Industrial School. Let's get into it. But the first residential school was the Mohawk Indian Residential School in Ontario, Canada, in 1831. So by the time the Carlisle School came into the picture, institutions like this were already in operation for about 48 years. And a school, quote unquote, like this doesn't just appear. The idea and funding have to come from somewhere. So let's start with how this came to be. The seed was planted by the Choctaw Academy in Scott County, Kentucky in 1825. This boarding school was started by Choctaw leaders and was funded by the U.S. government through the 1819 Civilization Fund Act. Now, this was an act that was passed by the United States Congress on March 3, 1819. The act, quote, encouraged activities of benevolent societies in providing education for Native Americans and authorized an annuity to stimulate the civilization process. A Baptist organization started an academy for the Choctaw tribe in 1818 in Georgetown, Kentucky, but due to lack of funding, it closed shortly after opening. In 1821, the United States acquired Choctaw lands in Mississippi through a treaty with the tribe. The Choctaw Academy was then reopened after Chief Peter Pitchlin and other Choctaw leaders asked the United States Representative Richard Mentor Johnson that part of the treaty money be used on schools. The Choctaw Academy was restarted as a federally funded school in 1825. Representative Johnson had a common law marriage with an enslaved woman of mixed race. Their two daughters and other family members attended the school, in addition to Native American children from the Choctaw and other tribes. Then came the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Gross. This act was signed into law on May 28, 1830, by United States President Andrew Jackson. The law was described by Congress, provided, quote, for an exchange of lands with the Indians residing in any of the states or territories, and for their removal west of the river, Mississippi, end quote. During the presidency of Jackson, which was from 1829 to 1837, and his successor, Martin Van Buren, who was president from 1837 to 1841, more than 60,000 American Indians from at least 18 tribes were forced to move west of the Mississippi River, where they were allocated new lands. The southern Indian tribes were resettled mostly into what was called Indian Territory, which is now about the Oklahoma. The Northern Indian tribes were resettled initially in Kansas. All of this moving around resulted in a lot of deaths due to its strenuous nature. And since the 21st century, scholars have cited the act and subsequent removals as an early example of state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing or genocide or settler colonialism. Some view it as all three. Under this new act, most Choctaw were forced to move to Indian territory, which again is now the state of Oklahoma. In 1840, Chief Peter Pitchlin, who was now superintendent of the Choctaw Schools, ordered an inspection of the Choctaw Academy after numerous complaints of abuse and mistreatment came forward. Superintendent Pitchlin wasn't happy with his findings, but knew he couldn't close the school. So instead, he removed all of the Choctaw students and severed all ties between the tribe and the school. And as a result, the Choctaw stopped funding the school in 1842 after numerous reservation schools were founded in their new homes. The Choctaw Academy officially closed the following year in 1843. Now the building is still there today, but it's in very poor shape. Private fundraising has started in Kentucky to save the 1825 building, and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma's Chanta Foundation made a grant for preservation. Our next piece of how it came to be is Richard Henry Pratt. Richard was born on December 6, 1840, in Rushford, New York, three years before the Choctaw Academy shutdown. He was the oldest of three boys, and in 1847, his father moved the family to Logansport, Indiana. Richard's dad soon left the family to take part in the California Gold Rush in 1849, but was robbed and murdered by another prospector. Richard now had to support his mother and two brothers, because what nine-year-old shouldn't be the breadwinner, am I right? When the American Civil War began in 1861, Richard enlisted in the 9th Indiana Infantry Regiment. Now, all of this that I'm about to tell you is a lot of his military career, and some of it feels a little unnecessary, but at the same time, it does come into play later, so just bear with me. After his three-month term expired, he re-enlisted as a sergeant of the 2nd Regiment Indiana Cavalry. While on a recruiting detail in Indiana during the winter of 1863 to 64, Richard met Anna Mason and they were married on April 2nd, 1864. Eight days later, he was commissioned as a first lieutenant of the 11th Regiment Indiana Cavalry. Richard served in administrative roles, then was discharged from the volunteer service in May 1865 as a captain. Richard returned to Logansport, Indiana, where he and Anna reunited and he opened a hardware. After running the store for two years, Richard re-entered the Army in March 1867 as a second lieutenant of the 10th United States Cavalry. Now this is interesting. The 10th United States Cavalry, who will probably get their own episode here one day, was an all-African American regiment, some of whom were freedmen, which is men that were freed from slavery. When they were assigned to Fort Still in Oklahoma Territory, they were nicknamed by Native Americans as Buffalo Soldiers because of the texture of their hair. I had heard the term Buffalo Soldier, but I didn't know where it came from. So now we both do. Richard's military career included eight years in the Great Plains, where he was responsible for gathering testimony to assess charges against men for actions outside of warfare. He worked with interpreters and prisoners to clear as many charges as possible. Richard was promoted to captain in February 1883, Major in July 1898, Lieutenant Colonel in February 1901, and to colonel in January 1903. He retired from the Army in February 1903. In April 1904, he was advanced to Brigadier General on the retired list. After the Indian Wars, President Ulysses S. Grant's Attorney General concluded that a state of war could not exist between a nation and its wards, which is what federally recognized tribes were being called. He ordered the prisoners to be sent as prisoners of war for permanent imprisonment at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida. Richard Pratt was chosen to lead and supervise the prisoners at the fort because he had experience with both the Indians and their interpreters. After he requested further authority over the prisoners, he began to experiment with education at the fort. In the 1870s at Fort Marion, he introduced classes in the English language, art, and craftsmanship to several prisoners who had been chosen from among those who had surrendered in the Indian territory at the end of the Red River War in 1874. In addition, he worked to give prisoners agency and some independence, enlisting them in guard duty, assigning them other supervisory roles over the community, leading marching and maneuvers for exercise, etc. In June 1879, while Richard was still stationed in Florida, he visited a Seminole village, which was headed by Chief Chipko. Richard spoke to Chipko and wrote an ethnographic study about the village. Richard Pratt believed that the quote, noble cause of quote, civilizing Native Americans. He said, quote, the Indians need the chances of participation you have had, and they will just as easily become useful citizens. While many others regarded Native Americans as nearly subhuman, Richard Pratt regarded Native Americans as worthy of respect and help and capable of full participation in society. He once said, quote, if all men are created equal, then why were blacks segregated in separate regiments and Indians segregated on separate tribal reservations? Why aren't all men given equal opportunities and allowed to assume their rightful place in society? Race became a meaningless abstraction in his mind. End quote. Now, the basis of that sentiment is good. But the natives aren't segregated into tribes. Using these beliefs, Richard and his supporters successfully lobbied Congress to establish the off-reservation boarding school for Native Americans in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. After the end of the Great Sioux War in 1877, the Lakota people were impoverished, harassed, and confined to reservations. And many believe that Native Americans were a vanishing race whose only hope for survival was rapid cultural transformation. The United States government urgently sought a progressive educational model to quickly assimilate Indians into white culture. Whether this could be achieved or how rapidly it could be done was unknown. Richard believed that he could make use of the Carlisle facility. He thought his proximity to officials in Washington, D.C. would help him educate those officials about the Indians' capacity for learning. After the government assessed the initial success of older Indian schools at Hampton Normal and Agricultural School and some in upstate New York, Pratt was authorized to establish the first all Indian school and funded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School at the Carlisle Barracks in central Pennsylvania. The property was transferred from the War Department to the U.S. Department of Interior for this purpose. Okay. So the school has been established. Now we need to talk about how they got students and what this school did. In November 1878, Pratt was ordered by the War Department to report to the Secretary of the Interior for Indian education duty. He traveled to Dakota Territory to recruit Lakota, Dakota, and Nakota students for the new school. These tribes were elected by Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Ezra Haight, because they had resisted ceding more territory to the United States government. So basically, they were being punished. The War Department ordered Richard to go to leaders Red Cloud and Spotted Tail to compel the chiefs to surrender their children. Now the government believed that by removing the Lakota, Dakota, and Nakoda children from their homes, the U.S. would have leverage against the tribes in their continuing effort to acquire tribal land. Richard said that, quote, the children would be hostages for the good behavior of the people. He persuaded tribal elders and chiefs that the reason the Washichu, which is the Lakota word for white man, loosely translated to takes the fat, had been able to take their land was that the Indians were uneducated. He said that the natives were disadvantaged by being able to speak and write English. And if they had that knowledge, they might have been able to protect themselves. Pratt used this speech to convince Chief Spotted Tail to send his children to the school. And at first, the chief had been reluctant to relinquish his kids to the government that had stolen native land. But in a conversation with Spotted Tail, Pratt said the following quote, Spotted Tail, you are a remarkable man. You are such an able man that you are the principal chief of these thousands of your people. But Spotted Tail, you cannot read or write. You claim that the government has tricked your people and placed the lines of your reservation a long way inside of where it was agreed that they should be. You signed that paper, knowing only that the interpreter told you what it said. If anything happened when the paper was being made up that changed its orders, if you had been educated and could read and write, you could have known about it and refuse to put your name on it. Do you intend to let your children remain in the same condition of ignorance in which you have lived, which will compel them always to meet with the whiter man at a great disadvantage through an interpreter, as you have to do? As a friend, Spotted Tail, I urge you to send your children with me to the Carlisle School, and I will do everything I can to advance them in intelligence and industry in order that they may come back and help you. Consent to send students to Carlisle was often gained with concessions, such as the promise to allow tribal leaders to inspect the school soon after it opened. The first group of inspectors, some 40 Lakota, Dakota, and Nakoda, chiefs representing nine Missouri River agencies, visited Carlisle in June 1880. Other tribal leaders followed. American Horse, quote, took a lively interest in what Pratt had to say. He was a tribal leader and head of a large household with at least 10 children. He believed that his children would have to deal with whites and perhaps live with them, whether they liked it or not. He decided to send two sons and a daughter for the first class in Carlisle in 1870. So using that argument that Pratt made to Spotted Tail, you can understand how maybe some of these chiefs would think this school was a good idea, because to them, all they were being told was your children will learn English. They will learn how to read it, write it, and speak it. And then they can bring that knowledge back to your tribe and you can better protect yourselves when it comes to the United States government. But that's not all that they were doing there. Now, as I said, Carlisle Barracks was an old military base and was converted to the Carlisle Industrial School. By October 1879, Richard Pratt had recruited the first students. 82 boys and girls arrived in one night at midnight at the railroad station. They were met by hundreds of local residents who escorted them to the quote old barracks. The school formally opened on November 1st, 1879 with 147 students. The youngest was six and the eldest was 25, but the majority were teenagers. Two-thirds of the students were children of leaders of Plains Indian tribes. The first class was made up of 84 Lakota, 52 Cheyenne, Kiowa, and Pawnee, and 11 Apache. The class included a group of child students and former prisoners from Fort Marion who wanted to continue their education with Richard Pratt at Carlisle. Richard Pratt became convinced that education was the key to assimilation. His philosophy meant administrators forced students to speak English, wear Anglo-American clothing, and act according to the U.S. values and cultures. The Carlisle model spawned twenty-four more off-reservation schools. Richard Pratt believed that to quote claim their rightful place as American citizens, excuse me, Native Americans needed to renounce their tribal way of life, convert to Christianity, abandon their reservations, and seek education and employment among the best classes of Americans. In his writings, he described his belief that the government must kill the Indian to save the man. Upon each student's arrival, their long hair would be cut short, especially the boys. Long hair was a strong tradition in tribal culture. The students had to take new names, either by choice or by assignment. One former student, Luther Standing Bear, said he was, quote, asked to choose a name from a list on the wall. He randomly pointed at the symbols on the wall and was named as Luther. The school assigned his father's name, Standing Bear, as his surname. Students had to give up their clothes and had to wear European-American style clothing. Standing Bear said, quote, The civilizing process at Carlisle began with clothes. Whites believed the Indian children could not be civilized while wearing moccasins and blankets. Their hair was cut because in some mysterious way, long hair stood in the path of our development. They were issued the clothes of white men, high-collar, stiff-bosomed shirts and suspenders, fully three inches in width, were uncomfortable. White leather boots caused actual suffering. He said that red flannel underwear caused actual torture. He remembered the red flannel underwear as the worst thing about life at Carlisle. After their clothes were changed and hair was cut, the student's physical appearance was fully transformed. In an effort to convince doubters of the transformation process, Richard Pratt hired photographers to present his evidence. Before and after contrast photos were sent to officials in Washington, friends of the new school, and back to the reservations to recruit more students. They're told they're being sent to this school to learn English to help their tribes, but then once they get there, they're told to abandon tribes altogether and become a fully new American citizen. Students were also required to practice Christianity and speak only English. For the most part, each student in a dorm was from a different tribe, and they all spoke different languages. The only common language they now had was English. Students were also forced to take on American gender roles. One student, Mary Welsh, completed seven years at the school. At the end of her time there, the school said she would make a quote. A coin housekeeper or seamstress. Mary was part of the Cherokee Nation, and some Cherokee women had even made the rank of chief. It wasn't uncommon for Cherokee women to be hunters or warriors or healers. For many of the female students, the forced acceptance of domestic roles was actually harmful. When they returned to their tribes, they felt confused and alienated. They felt like they didn't belong anywhere. The Carlisle School meant to turn the school into the ultimate Americanizer. At Carlisle, Richard Pratt established a high-structured quasi-military regime. He was known to use corporal punishment, which was not uncommon in society at the time. Officials sometimes took advantage of the children's traditional respect for elders to get them to inform on their friends. School discipline was strict and consistent according to the military tradition, and students faced court-martial for serious cases. Once students were in school, communication with home was virtually cut off. Letters from parents were left unsent by Indian agents or like a go-between, and parents were not notified promptly when their child was ill or even after they had died. Although the Civilization Fund Act of 1819 required parental consent for children to be sent to off-reservation boarding school, in practice, children were regularly forcibly removed. U.S. officials justified the practice of forceful removal because they believed that native parenting practices were seen as inferior to mainstream white parenting. The U.S. officially legalized the denial of native parental rights in 1891, leading to mass forced removal of Native children from their families. And it was not until 1976, Indian Child Welfare Act, that this process was ended. That is disgusting. Carlisle Industrial School also had a summer program, so the kids really couldn't escape. A summer camp was established in the mountains of Pine Grove Furnace State Park, near a place called Tag's Run. Students lived in tents and picked berries, hunted, and fished. Luther Standing Bear recalled, quote, In 1881, after the school closed for the summer vacation, some of the boys and girls were placed out in farmers' homes to work throughout the summer. Those who remained at school were sent to the mountains for a vacation trip. I was among the number. When we reached our camping place, we pitched out tents like soldiers all in a row. Captain Pratt brought along a lot of feathers and some sinew, and we made bows and arrows. While white people came to visit the Indian camp and seeing us shooting with the bow and arrow, they would put nickels and dimes in the slots of wood and set them up for us to shoot at. If we knocked the money from the stick, it was ours. We enjoyed this sport very much as it brought a real home thrill to us. So now not only were these kids pulled from home told not to behave as they used to in their own reservations, now they're told, no, do all those things that were natural to you on your reservation, and we're gonna bring people to watch you do it and put money on it. It just gets more disgusting. The Carlisle Summer Outing Program arranged for students to work in homes as domestic servants or in farms or businesses during the summer. The program won praise from reformers and administrators alike and helped increase the public's faith that Indians could be educated and assimilated. The program gave students opportunities to interact and live in the white world and found jobs for students during the summer months with middle-class farm families where they earned their first wages. The outing program continued throughout the Carlisle history, and of the thousands who attended Carlisle for the first 24 years, at least half participated in the program. Around 1909, Superintendent Friedman expanded the outing program by placing boys in manufacturing corporations such as Ford Motor Company. Over 60 of the boys from Carlisle were subsequently hired and worked steady for Ford. During the later part of World War I, about 40 had good jobs at the Hog Island, Philadelphia shipyards. As I mentioned above with student Mary Welsh, returning home after attending the Carlisle School wasn't easy. Some returning Carlisle students had become ashamed of their culture, and some tried to pretend that they didn't speak their native language. The difficulties of returning Carlisle students disturbed educators of the school. Returning students found themselves between two cultures and not accepted by either. Some rejected their educational experiences and, quote, returned to the blanket, casting off white ways. Others found it more convenient and satisfying to remain in white society. Luther Staningbare got a mixed reception at home on the reservation. Some were proud of his achievements, while others did not like that he, quote, became a white man. He was happy to be home, yet some of his relatives remarked that he, quote, looked like a white boy dressed in eastern clothes. Luther was proud to be compared to a white boy, even though some on the reservation wouldn't even shake his hand. It all has to end somehow. Beginning in the early 1900s, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School began to diminish in relevance. In May 1904, Pratt denounced the Indian Bureau and the reservation system as a hindrance to the civilization and assimilation of Native Americans. This controversy, coupled with earlier disputes with government over civil service reform, led to Pratt's forced retirement as superintendent of the Carlisle School on June 30, 1904. Around 1913, rumors circulated at Carlisle that there was a movement to close the school. In 1914, a congressional investigation focused on management at the school. Pop Warner, Superintendent Moses Friedman, and bandmaster C. M. Stauffer were dismissed from Carlisle School. After the hearings, attendance dwindled, morale declined, and the need for the school no longer existed. When the United States entered World War I on April 6, 1917, there was an additional reduction of enrollment. Many Carlisle alumni and students served in the U.S. military during World War I. On the morning of September 1st, 1918, a transfer ceremony took place. The American flag was lowered for the last time at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and presented to Major A. C. Beckmeyer, who raised it again over the new U.S. Army Base Hospital No. 31, which was a pioneering new type of rehabilitation hospital to treat soldiers wounded in World War I. From 1879 until 1918, more than 10,000 Native American children from 140 tribes had attended Carlisle Industrial School. During the years of operation, hundreds of children died, most from infectious diseases common in the early 20th century. More than 180 students were buried in the Carlisle Indian School Cemetery. The bodies of most who died were sent to their families. Children who died of tuberculosis were buried at the school as people were worried about contagion. Now, I can understand the leg of Pratt's argument that said he wanted to make it easier for the native people to interact with the white people and to better protect themselves. Once again, I say respect the natives, let them honor their traditions and customs just as we honor ours, and come back next week to see what else has been hidden.