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4. Putting Lucy Pretty Eagle to Rest
- University of Nebraska Press
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T 4. Putting Lucy Pretty Eagle to Rest Barbara C. Landis Barbara C. Landis is the Carlisle Indian School biographer for the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Scholars best know her for creating and maintaining an extensive and detailed website , http://www.carlisleindianschool.org, and for her work with American Indian people, tribes, and communities interested in researching relatives who once attended the Carlisle school. Landis also worked with Native Americans to have the school cemetery marked with a Pennsylvania State Marker. One of the first graves found in the cemetery was that of Take the Tail, better known to non-Indians as Lucy Pretty Eagle. In this essay, Landis offers a moving analysis of the short life of this Lakota student . Born and raised among Lakota people before the Battle of the Little Big Horn, Lucy was taken to Carlisle Indian Industrial School by the government in 1883. Within months she died of unknown causes, and school officials buried her in the school cemetery. Landis uses Lucy’s life as an example of the thousands of children the government took from their families, clans, communities, and tribes to Pennsylvania. Like too many Indian people, Lucy suffered a fatal illness that took her life. Even in death, she received little rest. Officials at Carlisle Barracks moved her remains to another site, and non-Indians spread tales that she had been buried alive. Her ghost, they said, haunted an old building at the former Indian school that people mistakenly identified as the girls’ dormitory. Over the years, Lucy became a regional legend. Landis corrects the false information about Lucy, who died at the age of ten, never returning to the people of the Rosebud. In August 2003 a group of descendants of Carlisle Indian Industrial School students gathered just outside the wrought-iron fence bordering the Indian cemetery to dedicate a historic marker. Passersby watched as people in the group took turns talking. Amid the uniform military markers that identi- fied the remains of those children who were left behind, they remembered stories of rage and comfort, pride and shame, sorrow and laughter. Barely A6C9>H conspicuous in the first row of the government-issue stones was the grave of Lucy Pretty Eagle. In 1879 the United States established the first off-reservation Indian boarding school at Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Between 1879 and 1918 thousands of Native children passed through the doors of the best-known U.S. Indian school, among them a Lakota girl from the Rosebud Agency who was known to her people as Take the Tail. At Carlisle her name was changed to Lucy Pretty Eagle, the name that appears on her headstone: “Lucy Pretty Eagle, Sioux, May 9, 1884.” She became one of the earliest casualties of the federal government’s culture war on Indian children, and she suffered the fate of countless Native children who died at the dozens of off-reservation boarding schools throughout North America that were modeled after Carlisle. As Luther Standing Bear remembered, “I could think of no reason why white people wanted Indian boys and girls except to kill them. I thought we were going East to die.”1 The U.S. government shipped the remains of many of the children home in wooden boxes, but others, like Lucy, were buried in segregated Indian cemeteries like the one at Carlisle. She later became the victim of a “historical” novel, as a leading character in a fictionalized diary published for Scholastic’s popular “Dear America” series. Even in death, this Lakota child could not escape those determined to distort her identity. On November 14, 1883, Take the Tail stepped off the train that had carried her from the Dakota Territory to Carlisle. The ten-year-old had traveled thousands of miles from her parents, grandparents, and home at the Rosebud Agency. The train had taken her out of the rolling hills and grassy flatlands of the Great Plains and across the Mississippi River into a strange environment. After her journey she found herself on a strange platform in a strange place, walking toward her new school home, a victim of an experiment designed to save her. That experiment would, ironically, destroy her. Richard Henry Pratt, the architect of the off-reservation boarding school movement, designed his school for utmost efficiency in order to transform Indian children from their perceived savagery into useful citizens—“civilized ” Indians who would champion European-American values such as progress, materialism, and Christianity...