Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Kill the Indian, Save the Man
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
In eighteen seventy-nine, a captain in the United States Army named Richard Henry Pratt opened a school at Carlisle Barracks with a philosophy he stated in the bluntest terms possible: "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." The Carlisle Indian Industrial School became the template for a nationwide network of off-reservation boarding schools designed to erase Indigenous identity and replace it with assimilated American citizenship.
Pratt had spent years as a soldier managing Apache and Cheyenne prisoners of war in Florida and came to believe that total cultural immersion could transform Native people into productive members of white American society. He was, by the standards of his era, considered a progressive, an opponent of the reservation system who believed in integration rather than segregation. What he did not question was whether Indigenous people had any right to remain Indigenous.
Over the thirty-nine years it operated, the school brought more than eight thousand five hundred children from virtually every Native nation in the country to Carlisle. Some were sent by parents who hoped education would help their children survive in the changing world. Others were taken under coercion, with the threat of withheld government rations hanging over tribal communities. Students had their hair cut, their clothing replaced, their languages forbidden. Letters home were censored. The practice of their religions was prohibited.
Mortality rates were significant. Children died of tuberculosis, influenza, and other diseases, often far from home. The school cemetery at Carlisle holds nearly two hundred graves of students who never returned.
The school produced one of the greatest athletes of the twentieth century: Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox man from Oklahoma, who won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon at the nineteen twelve Olympics and played professional football and baseball. Pratt held Thorpe up as proof of the school's success. Thorpe himself rarely spoke of Carlisle the way Pratt did.
The school closed in nineteen eighteen when the Army needed the barracks back for wounded veterans returning from Europe. Today the federal government is conducting ongoing repatriation of student remains to their home communities.
