Complexities of the American Indian Identity

In the summer of 1897, Gertrude Simmons (Zitkala-Ša) accepted a position at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an Indian boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. As a Yankton Sioux, Simmons had experienced the acculturation, or so-called civilization, to which Indian students from dozens of western tribes were subjected at Carlisle. A month after her arrival, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, the school's founder and superintendent, sent Simmons on a recruiting trip to Yankton to procure students for Carlisle. A few years later, Simmons would become an outspoken critic of Indian boarding schools built on the Pratt model, but in the interim, she devoted herself to Pratt's mission of teaching and "civilizing" Carlisle students.

Two recent books reconnect Simmons and Pratt more than a century later. Jacqueline Fear-Segal's and Susan D. Rose's edited collection, Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations examines the Carlisle Indian School from the perspectives of poets, scholars, activists, and ancestors. The book is the outgrowth of the "Carlisle PA: Site of Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations" Symposium held at Dickinson College in October 2012. As Fear-Segal and Rose explain, the symposium was organized to allow a diverse group of Native and non-Native participants to "share their knowledge, stories, and perspectives about the history and legacy of Carlisle" (p. 4). The editors hope the printed collection will commemorate the symposium and "exemplif[y] the importance of researching, remembering, discussing, interpreting, and assessing the complex legacies of Carlisle Indian School within its wider historical context" (p. 5). The collection casts a wide net, telling the story of Carlisle and expanding upon existing literature.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School, founded in 1879, was the first federally-funded off-reservation boarding school in the United States. From its beginning, Carlisle served as a model for the Indian Bureau's education program. Captain Pratt's experiences with African Americans and Indian prisoners as an officer in the United States Army led him to conclude that keeping Indians on isolated reservations would never bring to fruition the federal government's assimilationist agenda. Consequently, with the blessing of Secretary of the Interior Carl Schurz, Pratt opened the Carlisle School in an abandoned army barracks. In his own words, Pratt envisioned Carlisle as "an industrial school to teach young Indians how to earn a living among civilized people by practicing mechanical and agricultural pursuits and the usual industries of civilized life."¹ Far from their homes and families, Carlisle students received instruction in academic subjects and mechanical arts. The curriculum emphasized instruction in speaking, reading, and writing English. Consequently, students were prohibited from speaking their Native languages and practicing their cultural traditions. As photos by local photographer John Nicholas Choate reveal, the students were stripped of their Native clothing, dressed in school-supplied military uniforms, and had their long hair shorn. Carlisle Indian Industrial School includes several examples of these photos, which, then and now, provide proof that Pratt's motto, "Kill the Indian and save the man," guided the school. More than 10,500 students shuffled through Carlisle's doors, during its nearly forty-year existence. When Carlisle closed in 1918, other off-reservation Indian boarding schools continued to carry the assimilationist torch. Ultimately, Carlisle "provided the blueprint for…twenty-four analogous, military-style, off-reservation schools" (p. 1).

As the keystone of the Indian boarding school program, Carlisle has received no shortage of attention in published works. Pratt himself extolled the virtues and successes of Carlisle in his memoirs, published as Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indians, 1867–1904 (1964). Luther Standing Bear, perhaps Carlisle's most well-known student behind Olympian Jim Thorpe, spoke of Carlisle in his memoirs, My People the Sioux (1928...