The Carlisle Indian School: Kill the Indian, Save the Man
Near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
In eighteen seventy-nine, an Army officer named Richard Henry Pratt opened a school on the grounds of Carlisle Barracks with a philosophy he stated plainly: "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man." What Pratt meant was that Native American children could be assimilated into white American society if you stripped away everything that made them Native. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School became the model for that effort, and its methods defined federal Indian education policy for decades.
Children were taken from their families, often against their will and sometimes very young, and transported to Carlisle from tribes across the country. Upon arrival, their hair was cut. They were given English names. Their traditional clothing was replaced with military-style uniforms. Speaking their languages was forbidden. Their religions and ceremonies were prohibited. The school operated on the conviction that Native identity itself was the problem to be solved.
At least one hundred eighty-six children died at Carlisle and were buried in a cemetery on the grounds, far from their homelands and families. Of those buried, many headstones carry only a name and a tribe. The children came from at least fifty-nine different tribal nations.
The school also produced athletes. Jim Thorpe, a Sac and Fox citizen from Oklahoma, arrived at Carlisle and became one of the greatest athletes in American history: an All-American football player, winner of the pentathlon and decathlon at the nineteen twelve Olympics, and the man King Gustav the Fifth of Sweden called the greatest athlete in the world.
Carlisle closed in nineteen eighteen. Beginning in twenty twenty-one, the United States Army began the slow process of disinterring children's remains from the cemetery and returning them to their tribes and families. More than one hundred sixty children are still waiting to come home. The site today is part of Carlisle Barracks, and the cemetery stands as a permanent record of what the policy of assimilation actually cost.
