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  • Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations ed. by Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose
  • Adrea Lawrence
Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations. Edited by Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. xiv + 398 pp. Cloth $70.

In putting together their new book on the Carlisle Indian School, Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose have created a framework to begin to heal the traumas that Carlisle and other Indian boarding schools left on Native peoples and to reverse the amnesia non-Native peoples in the United States do not know they have. The Carlisle Indian School was established in 1879 as a colonial and military response to convert American Indian children to Euroamerican ideals and practices; from its example, the Office of Indian Affairs set up similar schools for Native children both in and away from Indian Country. Though Carlisle did not last as long as many of its counterparts across the continental United States, it did—like its counterparts—have long-term effects on the individuals who attended and their communities several generations after the fact. Fear-Segal and Rose's edited volume recounts and probes those effects through essays from descendants of Carlisle students and the archivists and historians who connected them to their ancestors. The book likewise includes poetry from Native writers and case studies that uncover buried histories of children and teachers who worked and lived at Carlisle.

The book contains seven parts, beginning with a section recounting the history of the Lower Susquehanna Valley and the Carlisle Indian School campus, and proceeds through several sections focused on students' experiences, the Carlisle cemetery, reconceptualized histories of Carlisle, and reflections on the significance of encountering and making sense of the histories presented. The book ends with a coda by N. Scott Momaday: "The story of Carlisle is told on the conscience of America. We must hope and believe that there is compassion in the telling" (355). In this book, there is. The chapters richly contextualize the [End Page 466] students, the school, and their experiences within the larger context of schooling American Indian children.

Chapter topics range from the identification of anonymous children in the school cemetery to those connecting lost students to the communities that never knew what happened to them to recognizing the place of Carlisle Indian School as hallowed because of its history. One particularly striking example is that of two Ndé (Lipan Apache) children who were taken by the US Army during an assault and ultimately carried to and enrolled at Carlisle. Kesetta and Jack, sister and brother, were the children of Ramon Castro, the leader of the Ndé band that the US Army had removed to Fort Griffin, Texas. Kesetta was to be a leader within her community, but she never had the chance because she and her brother were taken before their Ndé education fully bloomed. Castro and the rest of the Ndé did not know what happened to the children until Fear-Segal contacted Daniel Castro Romero Jr., a Ndé descendant of Ramon Castro. As a result of Fear-Segal's investigation, which stemmed from Barbara Landis's digitization of archival materials about Carlisle and her collaboration with the Ndé—who had always left place settings for Kesetta and Jack at gatherings, remembering the story of their disappearance 125 years earlier—Romero was able to attend the 2012 gathering at Carlisle and perform a blessing ceremony for the two lost children, inviting them home.

This book is comprised of a painful set of histories with attendant memories that have been previously obscured from view. At first glance, Carlisle Indian Industrial School might seem to fall in line with the recent scholarly literature on Indian boarding schools that has recovered pasts that many Americans had forgotten; it certainly makes a similar, significant contribution. This book, though, comes as a result of a 2012 gathering of its contributors, among others, at the Carlisle Indian School. It is a luminescent residue of sorts, offering glimpses into the conversations contributors had with one another, the presentations they made, and the ceremonies that they performed to ameliorate past traumas that...

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