Carlisle Indian Industrial School : indigenous histories, memories, and reclamations / edited by Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The Carlisle Indian School (1879-1918) was an audacious educational experiment. Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt, the school's founder and first superintendent, persuaded the federal government that training Native children to accept the white man's ways and values would be more efficient than fighting deadly battles. The result was that the last Indian war would be waged against Native children in the classroom.



More than 8,500 children from virtually every Native nation in the United States were taken from their homes and transported to Pennsylvania. Carlisle provided a blueprint for the federal Indian school system that was established across the United States and also served as a model for many residential schools in Canada. The Carlisle experiment initiated patterns of dislocation and rupture far deeper and more profound and enduring than its founder and supporters ever grasped.



Carlisle Indian Industrial School offers varied perspectives on the school by interweaving the voices of students' descendants, poets, and activists with cutting-edge research by Native and non-Native scholars. These contributions reveal the continuing impact and vitality of historical and collective memory, as well as the complex and enduring legacies of a school that still affects the lives of many Native Americans.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

CHOICE Review

Fear-Segal (Univ. of East Anglia, UK) and Rose (Dickinson College) have put together 22 essays based on a 2012 symposium held in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the history of the US government-run Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which sought to assimilate American Indians into "white" American culture from 1879 to its closure in 1918. The symposium brought together descendants of Carlisle students, historians, and others to remember the over ten thousand American Indian children who attended the school, sometimes forcefully brought as prisoners of war, and to memorialize those who died there as well as the many who survived. The school's founder, army officer Richard H. Pratt, sought to "kill the Indian to save the man"; in other words, to inflict cultural genocide so that American Indians would fade into the general population, including intermarrying with "white" Americans. The book's essays start with the Indian history of the Carlisle area and the impact of colonialism, and end with current efforts to keep Carlisle's history alive by preserving remnants of the school. Pulitzer Prize-winning Kiowa author N. Scott Momaday provides the first chapter and an epilogue. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. --Jon Allan Reyhner, Northern Arizona University