Playing Indian, Playing Filipino: Native American and Filipino Interactions at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

When the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879, it became the first off-reservation Native American boarding school and the founding model for similar schools across the US. In addition to Carlisle’s influence on domestic education, this essay contends that Carlisle’s reach extended beyond home, as the school was intimately connected to colonial projects in the Philippines, educating its Native students on Filipino life through shared teachers, regular lectures, school debates, and in some cases, conscription into the military during the Spanish– American and Philippine–American Wars. In particular, this essay centers on Stephen Glori, Carlisle’s first Filipino student, who would later join an Indian show and change his identity to Stephen Red Leaf, a Pueblo. Given the US’s slippery racial categorization of Filipinos in education and colonial performance, the essay uses Glori as a case study to argue that schools like Carlisle inadvertently allowed Filipino and Native students to form alternative transnational kinship networks.