Governor Gretchen Whitmer had called for an investigation in 2022, but the state’s Department of Civil Rights refused to release the resulting 283-page report. No representatives from the Department of Civil Rights or the State Attorney General’s office attended a hearing held recently by the state legislature to explain why this was the case. Some sources have suggested that the report was “shoddy.” Others have suggested that the report bore little resemblance to the original assignment. Others still have suggested that releasing the Report could retraumatize survivors.
In order to try to sort this out, I decided to read the report, which an independent and non-profit news outlet called Bridge Michigan made public. Produced by an Indigenous-owned firm from Washington State called Kauffman and Associates, the document it produced is titled Native American Boarding Schools in Michigan: Final Report.
It’s far from perfect. The research is admittedly preliminary, despite the report’s title. The primary sources necessary to tell the story of Michigan’s boarding schools are extremely difficult to access, owing to the resistance of Catholic authorities. Marquette University has recently digitized the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions Correspondence Files, but this is only a very first step. Kauffman and Associates had to produce a detailed report in a limited amount of time. There is a lot of material they were not able to examine, and I cannot imagine a historian, who wanted to write a book on boarding schools in Michigan, finishing a thorough and satisfying work in so few years. There is so much material that the Report’s authors did not have time to assess. This is not the authors’ fault.
The bulk of the report relies on survey responses by thirty Michigan boarding school survivors, and 165 “Descendants, who shared what they knew, experienced, remembered or had heard about the state’s boarding schools. Identifying and interviewing the dwindling number of aged survivors must be a priority if the State is interested in bringing about healing, reconciliation and justice. There are more voices out there, and this report’s sample is small. It is unclear the relationship between “survivors” and “descendants.” Descendants tended to be much more harsh in their assessment of boarding schools than did survivors. For anyone who has read Brenda Child’s important essay, “The Boarding School as Metaphor,” this is not surprising at all.
Survivors and descendants both recognized the schools’ genocidal intention to erase Indigenous identity. Teachers routinely used derogatory language to describe their students. 78% of survivors and 90% of descendants said that children were not permitted to practice their culture. Many survivors said that they learned to feel shame about being Indigenous. Some former students adopted a range of “dysfunctional coping” methods, and some students committed suicide. Some of the students suffered from malnutrition. Survivors and descendants agreed about this. They also reported sadistic punishments, long hours of work in a system reliant on the exploitation of their labor, and separation from the many tender ties of family. Some survivors passed on the destructive tendencies they learned to their descendants, producing intergenerational trauma. They faced coercive attempts to persuade them to accept Christianity, seldom saw a doctor if they fell ill, and faced abuse and neglect.
There is nothing in the Michigan report that will surprise those who are familiar with the long history of Native American boarding schools in the United States. For that reason, the apparent decision to shelve the report is puzzling. There is not much that is new here. There was, however, in the report a list of recommendations that Kauffman and Associates felt the governor and state legislature should enact, and these may have raised the hackles of racists who objected to the breadth of the commitment they envisioned. Thinking in terms of the Four Directions, the Kauffman report said that the East is represented by “yellow, spring, childhood, and spirituality,” which corresponded to the early stage of reparations and the work towards healing. By following these “East Recommendations,” Michigan would “contribute to the spiritual healing within Native communities by recognizing harm, empowering families to reclaim their lost histories and identities, and be a step toward restoring balance.”
It is not hard to imagine that a state bureaucrat might conclude that these recommendations come at too high a price. For Michigan to “acknowledge that it has an inherent and ongoing obligation to provide for the educational interests of Indian nations” in the state, and that the state “has also knowingly neglected this obligation, contributing to the harm experienced under its oversight,” is a heavy lift in Trump’s America, where the white people of the past could do no wrong. To “acknowledge that its actions and inactions associated with Native American boarding schools, have caused significant damage to the education, health, and well-being of Tribes and their citizens,” might be seen as a heavy burden indeed.
Does Michigan want to make things better? Then the state “must embrace the broadest, most inclusive approach in its efforts to address” the problems boarding schools created, and the governor must issue “an executive order as an official apology that recognizes its deliberate participation in the national policy if Native American boarding schools.” Find the evidence. Force the Catholic Church, using the subpoena power of the state legislature, to turn over its documents, and fully fund the mammoth task of documenting the causes and consequences of Michigan’s boarding school era.
Words and apologies are not enough. And it cannot be a top-down solution. Within six months to a year of the report’s publication, as the first of its “south recommendations” that “can contribute to the emotional healing within Native communities by fostering justice and accountability, honoring lived experiences, respecting Tribal knowledge, restoring familial bonds, and creating spaces for cultivating genuine healing,” the report recommended that the state “consult with the Tribes on all state activities surrounding Native American boarding schools. Michigan should, as well, “provide financial support for ongoing research regarding its role in the development and perpetuation of Native American boarding schools as well as the aftermath.” In addition to providing financial support for research and to remedy the damage done, Michigan would as well “support individual and community tribal healing by providing resources, programs, and funding committed to addressing the trauma caused by Native American boarding schools.” The state must fix what it broke, repair what it damaged, and provide a full record of its actions to be taught to children in all of Michigan’s schools, and “eliminate the statute of limitations for sexual and physical abuse charges involving minors in Michigan.”
The West recommendations would “contribute to physical healing with Native communities by restoring resources necessary for healing and well-being and fostering reconnections to traditional knowledge and cultural practices that promote wellness.” When a state tries to eradicate a culture, there are going to be costly consequences, so the state must investigate the misuse of federal trust funds by state authorities and support financially language revitalization programs. When much is broken, much must be repaired.
EVERY STEP OF THE WAY, “transitional justice should be used as the frameworks for all recommendations.” In a world where Donald Trump’s executive orders banish discussions of the Nation’s past that focus on enslavement and dispossession, and in which DOGE cutsmic funds from proposals with worlds like “tribal” contained therein, I find it easy to imagine how concepts like transitional justice would alienate racist Republicans and timorous Democrats. It is an approach, after all, “designed to transform societies into rights-respecting democracies while addressing past human rights violations.” It embraces things the Trump administration has rejected explicitly, and that Democrats approach with extreme caution and a noticeable lack of enthusiasm: “criminal prosecutions, truth commissions, reparations programs, institutional reforms, memorials, apologies and art.”
There is much more to learn about boarding schools in Michigan, the report’s authors suggest. This work must be undertaken carefully and critically. But even with the evidence collected thus far and included in the report, the remaining questions are simple. How serious is Michigan about setting things right? Was this undertaking more than a performative gesture? Are the recommendations the report made too big a request for a settler state to address honestly and seriously? Now that we know what we know about Michigan’s boarding schools, what is the state government willing to do about it? I hope I am wrong, but the apparent decision to shelve the report suggests to me that the answer will be, distressingly, “not very much at all.”
Native Americans, said Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas Jefferson Morgan, must surrender who and what they are and assimilate into the broader American culture. They must either conform to the dominant American culture, he wrote, “or be crushed by it.” Morgan attempted to ban the practice of Indigenous religion on reservations during his watch, require that Indigenous peoples only speak English on the reservation, and included them in a far-reaching program of education that included off-reservation boarding schools. No opposition could be tolerated.
Thomas Jefferson Morgan, in his uniform with the 14th United States Colored Infantry Regiment
Morgan thought a lot about education, and he saw instruction in American history as fundamental to his goal of assimilating Indigenous peoples. “It is in the highest degree important,” he wrote in his 1889 Annual Report, “that specific attention should be paid, particularly in the higher grades of the school, to the instruction of Indian youths in the elements of American history, acquainting them with the leading facts in the lives of the most notable and worthy characters.” Morgan believed that in the classroom, “the wrongs of their ancestors can not be ignored,” but “the injustice which they once had suffered can be contrasted with the larger future open to them, and their duties and opportunities rather than their wrongs will most profitably engage their attention.”
Morgan wanted Native American students, across a vast educational system that included reservation day schools, on-reservation boarding schools, and off-reservation institutions like Carlisle, to understand civics, to engage in debating societies. The American flag should be prominently displayed in Indian schools, and “patriotic songs should be taught to the pupils, and they should sing them frequently until they acquire complete familiarity with them.” Furthermore, “patriotic selections” should be memorized and recited publicly, “and should constitute a portion of the reading exercises.”
This is what the historian of boarding schools David Wallace Adams called “Education for Extinction.” Morgan, like other commissioners, spoke with a powerful conviction that the salvation of Indigenous peoples would follow only from the course of action he prescribed. “In all proper ways,” he wrote, “teaching in the Indian Service should endeavor to appeal to the highest elements of manhood and womanhood in their pupils, exciting in them an ambition after excellence in character and dignity of surroundings, and they should carefully avoid any unnecessary reference to the fact that they are Indians.”
The only value Morgan seemed to see in Indigenous people was that they might, with the proper application of a heavy hand, be guided to become something of value. Part of his program was the teaching of a past directed towards turning students to what Morgan saw as the only possible future. We shall use the past, he suggested, to teach them to move forward.
This got me thinking. Occasionally, I teach my department’s “Historical Methods” course. I focus on the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. We know what Commissioners of Indian Affairs and other government officials working in Indian policy wanted to achieve. But how were these pronouncements turned into educational policy? And more specifically, what did Carlisle students read in their history classes? Did they engage in debates about American history and culture? To what extent might we term history education at Carlisle propaganda? And, if so, what impact did this education have? What of this education stuck? You might have been young once. Perhaps you still are. Think back to your high school history class. How much of what you were taught do you actually remember? Be honest. Maybe you thought it was all bullshit and blew it off. Maybe Carlisle kids ignored their history lessons with the same alacrity as did you and I.
This is where research projects come from. I am a historian, interested in continuity and change, measured across time and space, in peoples, institutions, and cultures. I have been interested in the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. What, I have wondered, was history education like at Carlisle, and in what ways did it matter?
These are not difficult questions to answer. The work, in terms of technique, and the types of sources one must find to answer the question, are straightforward. The Carlisle Indian Industrial School Digital Resource Center has made digging through the sources so much easier than it would have been, say, at the beginning of my career. Many relevant sources are published, so they are not hard to find. I know the secondary source literature—that written by scholars who have pored through the sources—quite well. The only thing keeping me from doing this work is time, a commodity which I always seem to have less of than I would like. Someday, I will come back to these questions, and answer them fully. I am hopeful that a student will beat me to the punch, and choose this topic for a research paper. I would love to see what they come up with. Until then, some preliminary thoughts, based on some of the stuff I have stumbled across over the past few years I have spent reading about boarding and residential schools. (I have written a lot about Carlisle on this blog: Search for Carlisle, above, and most of that stuff ought to pop right up for you).
STUDENTS AT CARLISLE received history education in several ways. There was the classroom, of course, at Carlisle and, for some students, in the public schools they attended while on their “outing” assignments. There were the historical materials included in the school’s publications, some of which were written by the students themselves, some by Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers with varying degrees of expertise and knowledge. Where students did not write the work, those in the print shop set the type, but I cannot tell how many of them actually read the periodicals Carlisle produced. Finally, historical topics were addressed in school activities: lectures, debating societies, and historical pageants in which students played the lead roles.
From an early point in the school’s history, its founder Richard Henry Pratt was concerned about how the students might be portrayed when it came to historical pageants. In an 1880 letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, the year after Carlisle opened, Pratt made suggestions on the role Carlisle students could play at the “Indian exhibit” at that year’s Columbian Exposition. Pratt favored a chronological organization of the display. The first period, he wrote, should be that in which “the settlers were dependent on the forebearance of the Indians; illustrating this by a large wall map showing the whole country as Indian except for a few white settlements say 1565 to 1620.” Next there should follow the period “when the whites entered regularly on the occupation of the country and by force or purchase obtained large possessions, as by King Philip’s War and Penn’s treaty.” The third period would focus on Cherokee Removal and the Seminole War. “The Indians as dependent on the Government for protection, placed on restricted areas and partly supported by Government” would follow and, finally, “present policy of dealing with Indians, by education, training in agriculture and other industries leading to citizenship and absorption into the masses.” Pratt emphasized that throughout, the exposition “should be historical and utilitarian, exhibiting the Indian both as an historical and present factor in our national life and by no means purely or mainly from a scientific or ethnological stand point, that properly belongs to another time and place.”
The school’s founders seem to have worried about portrayals of Indigenous peoples that might lead audiences to conclude that Indians were part of the past. When students participated in “the Indian scene of the Historical Pageant “that commemorated the anniversary of the founding of Philadelphia in 1909,” the school’s leaders insisted that the students—sixty boys and five girls—wear their uniforms at all time except when performing.
Many of these performances were intended to instruct. Pratt had retired a half-decade before students at Carlisle staged The Captain of Plymouth: A Comic Opera in Three Acts, written by Seymour S. Tibbals and Harry C. Eldridge. Students played both English pilgrims and the Indigenous people who greeted them. The play opens with the Plymouth leader Jonathan Brewster, played by a 23-year-old Akwesasne student named John White, worried that “the unclean spirit has reached this land before us.” Miles Standish, meanwhile, played by a fascinating Oneida student from New York named Montreville Yuda, was preparing to marry Priscilla, the “fairest maiden in Plymouth, played by a Menominee, born in Denver but raised in Ohio, named Carlysle Greenbrier. Things go wrong when Standish is
Carlysle Greenbrier
captured by the Indians. With Standish out of the picture, John Alden, played by a Hoopa from California, Albert Scott, lusts for Priscilla. Ketonka, the “Indian Princess” in the village where Standish is held, played by Emma Esanetuck, frees Standish, but she has a price. “You have won my timid heart,” she tells Standish, and she will release him only if he promises to marry her. In return, she pledges that “I will forsake my home, my people, my all, and henceforth cling only to you.” Sort of like what Carlisle’s founders wanted their students to do. It is easy to see why they might have chosen the play and presented it in consecutive years, however dumb and filled with demeaning stereotypes of Indians. In any event, Harry Eldridge caught a performance and was quite impressed.
Montreville Yuda as Miles Standish.
Pageants like these were familiar to Americans in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. Filled with patriotic themes, they emphasized national progress, America’s rise from humble origins. Some were, at their heart, virtual dramatizations of the “Turner Thesis,” with Indigenous peoples one of the obstacles American settlers had to overcome on their way west. The student’s participation in these pageants, in this sense, conformed to white reformers’ expectations of what Indians’ were (a people with a proud past) and what they might become (non-troublesome, fully assimilated and productive members of American society).
It is hard to say how students felt about playing these roles. We do know, however, that in Philadelphia for performances they were sometimes not chaperoned as closely as the school’s directors would have liked, and they proved as capable as other teenagers, at other times and in other places, of finding trouble when unleashed upon an American city.
SOME CARLISLE BOYS were trained in the school’s print shop, where they learned typesetting and other skills that would allow them, their teachers hoped, to find employment when their time at Carlisle expired. The Red Man, “a magazine in the interest of the American Indian,” was an outward-facing publication directed toward the school’s supporters. It included essays on current events in Indian country, anthropological, ethnographic, and historical pieces, and analyses of federal Indian policies. The articles were written by Indigenous and non-Indigenous authors. The May 1900 issue, for instance, included a story about the Florida Seminoles that asserted that “there is not found on the page of history, in any country, an instance of a scattered remnant of a tribe, so few in number, defending themselves against the assaults of a numerous and disciplined army, with the same heroism and triumphant results as the Seminoles resisting American troops. Seventeen years later, The Red Man returned to the Seminoles, arguing that
today the 600 Seminoles of the Everglades are the descendants of this heroic band–a people without a country! Too honest to speak, to proud to beg, eking out but a pitiful existence in the land of his nativity. Why? Because the same master greed that has driven the American Indian across a continent has entered the sacred homes of Florida’s Indian population.
(A century later, in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, making such claims in a classroom in Ron DeSantis and Christopher Rufo’s Florida could get a teacher in a lot of hot water. Carlisle students were setting type on articles containing arguments that could get Red State teachers fired!)
The January 1915 issue included an essay by the Seneca Arthur C. Parker describing the reform program of the Society of American Indians. The April 1911 issue featured a piece by the important Crow leader Robert Yellowtail who explained “Why the Crow Reservation Should Not be Opened.” Yellowtail, at the time, was resisting efforts by the federal government to allot lands on their Montana reservation. Also in that issue appeared a historical essay about William Penn, the founder of the colony of Pennsylvania, known in myth and memory for his just treatment of Indigenous peoples. Where “the general practice” in colonial America “was to entirely ignore the Indian ownership when a grant in this country was to be taken up, and the new settlers not only appropriated what was granted to them by charter rights, but they would grab everything in sight,” Penn was different. Much of what appeared in The Red Man reflected the interests of Progressives, Indian and white, interested in Indigenous affairs: Assimilation, to be sure, but also citizenship; Education, not strictly in manual labor, but in colleges and the professions as well; citizenship and equality before the law, and a willingness to challenge negative representations and stereotypes about Indigenous Americans.
It is not clear to me how many students read The Red Man. It does seem pretty certain that they read the school’s student newspapers, much of which was written by the students. There are many hundreds of pages of these papers on the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center website. I did not read all of them, but do believe it will be worthwhile some day to pore through them thoroughly to learn what I can. From the pages I read, we can see that students engaged in debates about matters relevant to politics and society. They wrote in the school newspaper about their people and their history. Michael Balenti, a Cheyenne, wrote for The Arrow a brief history of the Comanches. Michael had also served as a first tenor in the Sailors’ chorus in The Captain of Plymouth. Elmira C. Jerome wrote about the history of the Munsees. Her writing ability was recognized in the paper, and we learn that she had a beautiful voice and had taken up learning shorthand.
Elmira Jerome is Number 15, the second from the left in the front row.
Allowing and encouraging students to discuss public affairs involved risks. It is easy to imagine that school officials wielded control over what might appear in the newspaper. It is not possible to consider The Arrow a free press. For the most part, students expressed views that conformed closely to those of reformers interested in Indigenous affairs, both Indian and white. But the students were free thinkers. Anyone who has taught history well knows that once students have considered why things are a certain way, it is an easy step for them to begin considering why things are not some other way. For example, in February of 1893, the college students gathered to vote on the following question: “Shall the school salute the National flag every day at Morning Exercises?” 508 students cast votes. Only 182 students voted in favor; 326 decided that the school would no longer salute the flag.
The vote took place on the 8th of February, 1993, the sixth anniversary of the passage of the Dawes, or General Allotment Act. A story in The Indian Helper, the school’s newspaper at the time, said that the day was celebrated “by exercises of a patriotic nature in the morning and a reading of the Bill and some discussion of the same in the evening.” The vote followed these discussions. Reflecting on its outcome, “The Man-on-the-band-stand,” the all-seeing and all-knowing eye of the school’s administration, said that he “knows that our pupils are not against saluting the flag.” Indeed, “if there be such a one let him hide his head in shame!” How to make sense of the outcome? The Man-on-the-bandstand said “that the sacred colors of our country should be treated in such a common way is what struck many of our pupils in an unfavorable light.” I’m a bit skeptical. Aren’t you?
OF COURSE MOST HISTORY EDUCATION for Carlisle students took place in the classroom. Though it has been said that Carlisle taught young people to hate their people and their culture, one of the stated purposes of its educational program was “to preserve all that is the best in Indian folktales and hero stories and race heritage, which is to be handed down by mothers to their children as an inspiration for racial advancement and progress.” Students with artistic talent should be urged to develop their skills. “Indian art should be fostered and encouraged in every possible way,” and “girls should be encouraged to get all that is best in their tribal art, to become proficient in its use, to understand its symbolism, and to apply it to the materials and furnishings of their new types of homes.”
According to the school catalogue, students in first and second grade should study history in the form of “stories of primitive people; industrial life; home, schoolroom, and playground ethics,” and “memory gems” like the dates of major American holidays. In third grade they learned about “inventions and inventors, societies of men and people in connection with geography, civics, stories, selections and adaptations from literature.” This would continue through fourth grade, while in fifth grade they learned “stories of discovery and colonization” and local government as they read from the textbook, Civics for Young Americans as a guide. In sixth grade, they learned about “colonial growth and independence,” and in seventh grade “formulation of the government; beginning of the National Period,” with Dole’s American Citizen, the text that would guide the teachers. In eighth grade, instruction in American history came to a close.
One of the history books used at Carlisle was Roscoe Lewis Ashley’s American History for Use in Secondary Schools, first published in 1907. It is a product of its time. The early colonists, the first chapter reads, “came into contact with the red man.” These “savage hunters were especially numerous along the heavily timbered Atlantic slope, within easy reach of the great supply of fish on the one hand and the animals of the forest on the other.” They “had not reached a high degree of civilization,” but they seemed to know their lands, even though they “were not attached to the soil and removed their wigwams with ease,” and their villages “were often little more than headquarters for hunting expeditions and raids.”
Only the Iroquois defied this ugly depiction. It was the Iroquois, Ashley wrote, “whose political organization, the most perfect of any north of Mexico, enabled them to conquer all their neighbors, either Iroquois or Algonquins, so that they often controlled the territory as far south as the Kenawha and as far west as the Wabash.” They were important in American history. “Of great ability and courage unusual even among Indians, the Iroquois have left an impress on our history that is out of all proportion to their number.” All the rest, he said, were ruled by passions. Ashley quoted the racist Francis Parkman, who thought that there is “much that is dark, cold, and sinister” in the Indians’ character. “Treacherous himself, he is always suspicious of treachery in others.” Indeed, Ashley concluded, “it was perhaps fortunate for the English that the Indian race was incapable of civilization, for it prevented the mixing of races.”
That is quite a lot. Many Carlisle students attended school in towns throughout Pennsylvania and New Jersey. They attended the public schools in they areas where they were on their “outing” assignments. But many took classes at Carlisle and likely would have been exposed to Ashley’s lessons, or from books similar to his. Ashley’s book was not designed for Indian school students. It was read by children across the United States. In that sense, it is difficult to prove that Carlisle kids received a history education that was different from non-Indigenous children. For all Americans, history education was moral training, vital in preparing citizens for a republic where white people were in charge. But there is so much we cannot see in the records—the condescension, perhaps, of a teacher who quietly believed everything Ashley said about civilization, or who abhorred the prospect of mixed races. All kids probably learned stuff like this in their history courses, but they did not occupy the same position relative to the material that the Carlisle students did. The lessons that Indigenous people were incapable of civilization, and prone to “ambition, revenge, envy, jealousy” as part of the “ruling passions” that governed “his cold temperament” obviously would have resonated in a deeper and darker tones for Indigenous students.
I have a lot left to read. The thoughts I have expressed here are tentative. I hope to keep digging through this material. I think I see the Carlisle students talking back to this in their school papers. When they describe their communities, in terms that are affectionate and respectful and not in the slightest bit ashamed, I think they knew they were working on several planes at once: showing their readiness for civilization, but also their defiance towards those who embraced the idea that they were not ready for equality. I think also, as I read what they wrote, of our current political moment. So much disturbing news. But when the president decrees, and Americans cheer, an unconstitutional executive order that requires a “patriotic education” that leaves no white child feeling ashamed for what his ancestors did to those they enslaved or dispossessed, I wish they would stop and think for a moment. White people have, of course, decided what history is in this country. Look at the monuments placed across public spaces the length and breadth of this country. Remember the reaction when people of good taste and character came together to take some of them down. To put it bluntly, white people have been shoveling shit in their classrooms for a very long time. Indigenous students know that. And the response to their calls for a more complicated story, one that respects the nation’s many pasts, is to wave a flag and shout it down. You shall not do, Trump and his amoral supporters are saying, what we have done to so many for so long. They are not setting things right. They are burying inconvenient truths.
It seems very likely that President Biden’s last official act affecting Indigenous peoples will be the “formal apology” he issued late in October. He apologized for the American Nation’s treatment of the thousands of Native American children it placed in dozens of boarding schools across the country. Like so much about Biden, his apology had the potential to be so much more than what it was.
Biden was following the lead of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, launched in the summer of 2021 under the leadership of the first Native American Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland. Item 1 in their report was “Acknowledge, Apologize, Repudiate, and Affirm.” That meant that:
There were problems with the final report. It was incomplete, and understandably rushed. The staffers working on it knew that the clock was ticking and, indeed, it is difficult to imagine that a work of this sort, or any formal apology, would emerge from the administration of President-Elect Trump. Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs Bryan Newland claimed that those who compiled the Initiative’s two reports read through 103 million pages of government records between June of 2021 and July of 2024. That means they worked through nearly 89,000 pages a day, an impossibly large number of pages to read thoroughly, or at all. They were undisciplined in their approach to examining continuity and change over time, for the boarding schools were not static entities: they solved some problems as they failed to address others. There is little evidence that they examined closely student files. Their count of the number of children attending these schools, and the number that died while attending them, appears low. It was, by its own admission, a first step.
Despite these problems, the Report is significant. There have been attempts by the United States government to apologize for its past treatment of Indigenous peoples—the best brief summary of them appears in Sarah Deer’s The Beginning and End of Rape—but Biden’s apology had the potential to do more—to come clean about the misdeeds, to examine the receipts and present the data, and try to move forward. The report’s recommendations for government action are all reasonable and would be helpful, and I find it difficult to believe that the incoming Trump Administration will follow through with any of them. That is one of many disappointments adhering to Trump’s victory.
So on October 25th, President Biden visited the Gila River Crossing School in the Gila River Indian Community, not far from Phoenix. He came on stage. He joked with his friends. He was generous in giving credit to others, especially Secretary Haaland. His delivery was predictably untidy. You know how he speaks. He recalled a conversation he had at the hotel where he stayed. The person with whom Biden had spoken, he claimed, had never heard of boarding schools. Biden wanted people to know, he said, about the “generations of Native children stolen, taken away to places they didn’t know with people they never met who spoke a language they had never heard. Native communities silenced. Their children’s laughter and play were gone.” Once the children their clothing was removed, their hair cut, and their names “literally ersed and replaced by a number or an English name.” Children were beaten, Biden said, for speaking their own language. He continued:
The boarding school system was “horribly, horribly wrong,” Biden said, “a sin on our soul.”
Biden then called for a moment of silence. Then he shouted the apology. “I formally apologize,” he said, “as president of the United States of America, for what we did. I formally apologize. And it’s long overdue.” He was then interrupted by an audience member, shouting out about “the people in Gaza.” Biden said to let the protestor speak, for “there’s a lot of innocent people being killed, and it has to stop.” When the disturbance died down, he spoke of his administration’s accomplishments. He was appealing to Native American voters. His apology led into a campaign speech describing all that the Biden-Harris administration had done for Indigenous people.
We know now that Native Americans, like every other group in America, swung to the right in 2024. If his goal was to secure votes for his successor, it is unlikely that he succeeded. Biden has aged. That is clear. He seems feebler every time I see him. Like Trump, he can do little but read from a teleprompter and, like Trump, at times he struggles to do even that. It is easy to dismiss this apology for these reasons. But as Native News Online put it in an editorial that appeared a couple of days ago, “Indian Country Deserves a President Who Shows Us Respect.” Of course Biden’s apology, and the Boarding School Initiative Report on which it was based, flattened a complex history, and treated incompletely the complications, nuances, and ambivalence that is present in the record. But it is significant. Sandwiched between two Trump administrations, the first of which was a disaster for Indigenous communities, Biden at least leaned in the direction of admitting the sins of a country that will now be consigned to the hands of those who view any criticism of the nation not merely as a cardinal sin, but a crime that just may be prosecuted. He showed some respect, even if it may turn out to be too little, too late.
And, like many things one looks forward to from Democratic administrations, it’s a bit of a letdown. If you are a historian who has worked with these sources, and if you have even a passing familiarity with the published scholarship on American Indian Boarding schools, you are unlikely to be surprised by anything that appears in the report’s 100-plus pages. It is a brief document, no more than an a cursory introduction into a vast, complex and important subject. But it’s a start.
Assistant Secretary of the Interior–Indian Affairs Bryan Newland
Produced by Assistant Secretary–Indian Affairs Bryan Newland, the bulk of the report is an institutional overview of American Indian boarding schools and the government policies and programs that implemented, supported, and funded these institutions. The report is divided into nineteen very-brief chapters. The penultimate one includes the “Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Findings and Conclusions.”
The list consists of the following:
The Federal Indian boarding system was expansive, consisting of 408 Federal Indian boarding schools, comprised of 431 specific sites, across 37 states or then-territories, including 21 schools in Alaska and 7 schools in Hawaii.
Multiple generations of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children were induced or compelled by the Federal Government to experience the Federal Indian boarding school system, given their political and legal status as Indians and Native Hawaiians.
The twin Federal policy of Indian territorial dispossession and Indian assimilation through Indian education extended beyond the Federal Indian boarding school system, including an identified 1,000+ other Federal and non-Federal institutions including Indian day schools, sanitariums, asylums, orphanages, and stand-alone dormitories that involved education of Indian people, mainly Indian children.
Funding for the Federal Indian boarding school system included both Federal funds through congressional appropriations and funds obtained from Tribal trust accounts for the benefit of Indians and maintained by the United States.
The Federal Indian boarding school system deployed militarized and identity-alteration methodologies to assimilate American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian people—primarily children—through education.
The Federal Indian boarding school system predominately utilized manual labor of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children to compensate for the poor conditions of school facilities and lack of financial support from the Federal Government.
The Federal Indian boarding school system discouraged or prevented the use of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian languages or cultural or religious practices through punishment, including corporal punishment.
Tribal preferences for the possible disinterment or repatriation of remains of children discovered in marked or unmarked burial sites across the Federal Indian boarding school system vary widely. Depending on the religious and cultural practices of an Indian Tribe, Alaska Native Village, or the Native Hawaiian Community, it may prefer to disinter or repatriate any remains of a child discovered across the Federal Indian boarding school system for return to the child’s home territory or to leave the child’s remains undisturbed in its current burial site. Moreover, some burial sites contain human remains or parts of remains of multiple individuals or human remains that were relocated from other burial sites, thereby preventing Tribal and individual identification.
The Federal Government has not provided a forum or opportunity for survivors or descendants of survivors of Federal Indian boarding schools, or their families, to voluntarily detail their experiences in the Federal Indian boarding school system.
Based on that list of conclusions, Secretary Newland recommended that research continue through the “approximately 98.4 million sheets of paper” housed in boxes at the National Archives and other federal agencies. It is an enormous undertaking. The following questions, he suggested, would guide the research:
Approximate the total number of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children that attended Federal Indian boarding schools;
Approximate the total number of marked and unmarked burial sites associated with Federal Indian boarding schools;
Locate marked and unmarked burial sites associated with a particular Indian boarding school facility or site, which may later be used to assist in locating unidentified remains of Indian children, Indian Prisoners of War, and Freedmen from the Five Civilized Tribes;
Expand the summary profiles of individual Federal Indian boarding schools;
Detail the health and mortality of Indian children who experienced the Federal Indian boarding school system, which may later be used to develop dataset(s) for analysis of health impacts of Indian boarding school attendance, including an approximate mortality rate for attendees, as the Department was responsible for the health care of American Indians and Alaska Natives until 1954;
Identify documented methodologies and practices used in the Federal Indian boarding school system that discouraged or prevented the use of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian languages or cultural or religious practices;
Approximate the amount of Federal support, including financial, property, livestock and animals, equipment, and personnel for the Federal Indian boarding school system, recognizing that some records are no longer available;
Approximate the amount of Tribal or individual Indian trust funds held by the United States in trust that were used to support the Federal Indian boarding school system, including to non-Federal entities and, or individuals, recognizing that some records are no longer available;
Identify religious institutions and organizations that have ever received Federal funding in support of the Federal Indian boarding school system;
Identify States that may have ever received Federal funding in support of the Federal Indian boarding school system;
Identify nonprofits, associations, academic institutions, philanthropies, and other organizations that may have received Federal funding in support of the Federal Indian boarding school system;
Confirm additional sites within the Federal Indian boarding school system;
Examine the connection between the use of Federal Indian boarding schools and subsequent systematic foster care and adoption programs to remove Indian children, including the Indian Adoption Project established by the Bureau of Indian Affairs and Child Welfare League of America, that were not repudiated by Congress until the enactment of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978
The shadow of recent discoveries of unmarked graves in Canada hangs over Newland’s report. He wants to produce a second, much larger report, that determines the locations for all unmarked and marked burial sites connected to federal boarding schools, identify the children buried in these sites, and approximates “a full accounting of Federal support for the Federal Indian boarding school system.”
In addition, Newland recommends that the government undertake efforts to identify living survivors of the boarding schools, document the students’ experiences, “support protection, preservation, reclamation, and co-management of sites across the Federal Indian boarding school system where the Federal Government has jurisdiction over a location.” Newlands wants to see a systematic effort to collect documents and house them at the Department of Interior Library “to preserve centralized Federal expertise on the Federal Indian boarding school system.” Interior should solicit help from other federal agencies which have information on boarding schools, and support non-federal entities that house information as well. Newland recommends congressional action as well: to support or strengthen NAGPRA to prevent sensitive and specific tribal information that may be uncovered as a result of the investigation; to advance legislation encouraging Indigenous language revitalization; to promote public health research on the consequences of the boarding school system; and finally to erect a federal memorial to the children who experienced the federal boarding school system.
There are some laudable goals here. Indian Boarding Schools were institutions that affected many thousands and thousands of Native American people over many generations, over many decades. The subject is vast, the documentary record so enormous as to make a complete accounting of the sort envisioned by Newland in his recommendations a mammoth, generational task. I would encourage this effort. We all should encourage this effort. This report is nothing but a start.
But I would encourage the investigators to remember that there is no more uninteresting and unimportant way to write about educational institutions than to focus on bureaucrats and leaders, policies, proposals and laws. What we need is a history of the students, with proper protections in place to guard privacy. The evidence suggests that the physical and emotional consequences of attending boarding school could be substantial and the damage could be transmitted across the generations.
This is a more difficult story to tell than to write about a “system.” It takes so much more work. It is exhausting to be exhaustive. Doing this work well, I know, can take a toll on the researchers. But we must keep in mind that the federal boarding school system was a haphazard and large network of loosely connected and poorly supervised institutions that acted with little effective federal oversight. The institutions that were part of this system began with a commitment to assimilation and erasure, to incorporating Indigenous young people into the American body politic by eliminating their Indigenous culture, language and religion. One can write a history of schools. One can write about curricula, educators, and federal policy makers. What we need, however, is a history of the Boarding schools from the bottom-up. We must never forget that this is a history that involves thousands of young people placed in an educational system that claimed as its goal cultural genocide.
I have tried to write some of these stories on this blog: I wrote about the lonely death of Carlos Pico, a Mission Indian from California. I have written about some Onondaga and Oneida Carlisle alums who traveled to Europe in 1914 as part of a circus, performing in a variant of a “Wild West” type show before the first World War broke out. Reflecting on Arlette Farge’s wonderful essay, The Allure of the Archives, I wrote about the challenge of reconstructing the lives of ordinary Onondagas who attended Carlisle and other boarding schools. And late last year I wrote a series of posts following all the Carlisle students who passed through one “outing” placement for Native American girls. The first of those posts is right here.
Schools are people. They are teachers (and for those who worked in Boarding Schools we need to learn more) and students.
I have found through my own work that descendants of boarding school students do not often know the entirety of their ancestors’ experience. I have had the opportunity to share with families the stories of their grandparents’ time at Carlisle, for instance, or lesser-studied schools like the Lincoln Institution in Philadelphia. Ten thousand students attended Carlisle, and that is only one of many schools. We need to know about the history of these institutions, but more than that, we need to recover the stories of the young people who attended them. What I am willing to bet is that the results of so enormous a historical undertaking and accounting will show that Indigenous peoples were so much more powerful, as individuals and as members of native nations, than the forces the federal government aimed at their destruction.
Della John and Ella Israel were the last two Carlisle girls to pass through Mrs. Jacobs’ House. There is no evidence as to why or what happened to cause her to give up this work. Maybe Mrs. Jacobs got old. Maybe she wanted her summers free, or no longer needed the help the Carlisle girls on outing might provide. She had been at it for more than a decade and a half. It would be an interesting research project indeed to compare Mrs. Jacobs’ work with Carlisle with that of other outing patrons. These patrons have not been studied at all, but they played a role of fundamental importance in the Carlisle students’ lives. They did a great deal of the teaching.
As we wrap up this brief discussion of those young women who passed through the home of Mrs. C. H. Jacobs of Oak Lane, Pennsylvania and Ocean City, New Jersey, it is worth noting that some of the girls who passed through lived lives that are difficult to reconstruct. Dora LaBelle, Francis Halftown, Agnes White, Theresa Brown, and Libby Skye left sparse records from their time at Carlisle. Others, like Helen Welch from Brothertown in Wisconsin, reported familiar themes.
She was doing well, she wrote to Superintendent Moses Friedman after her departure from the school, “but often wish I was back to dear Carlisle.” She left the school because she lacked “a sufficient degree of Indian blood.” She was living in Chicago in 1916, five years after her departure, still writing to the school. Times were tight, and she wondered if there was any money left in her Carlisle account from her outings, including the time she spent at Mrs. Jacobs’ house.
Report on Helen Welch’s placement at Mrs. Jacobs’ House
Della and Ella stayed at Mrs. Jacobs’ from the end of May until the beginning of September, 1915. Ella, a Cherokee, was 16 at the time. Della, who came to Carlisle from the Seneca Cattaraugus Reservation, was much older. An orphan, she was 26 years old. She hung around Carlisle after her graduation, continued to attend school during her outings, but did not have much to return home to. She suffered as well from ill health. She had a number of operations during her time at Carlisle, and was plagued by a “nervous disorder” that could be debilitating at times and for which she took medication.
Their time at Carlisle was not dissimilar to that of the other women I have written about in this series of essays. Both Della and Ella were active in the YWCA at Carlisle. Both were members of the Mercers, and both were active in debate. And both Ella and Della, after they left Carlisle, expressed their gratitude for the education they had received and their desire to remain in touch with events back at Carlisle.
I was grading papers as I worked through the final Carlisle files. I am reading drafts of term papers students are writing for my research methods course in Native American history. Two students, in their drafts, felt the need to say something about Carlisle. Both repeated what will be for many a familiar refrain about Carlisle. Students were taken to Carlisle against their will. Once there, they received humiliating haircuts and new names. They suffered from heartache and loneliness at an institution that imposed upon them a soul-crushing American-style education. They were prisoners.
But what the experience of the women who moved through Mrs. Jacobs’ house reveals is that these assumptions—accepted as gospel truth by many students of the Native American past—are not entirely true. Parents sent their children to Carlisle. They wanted for them the education they felt it would provide. The students we have visited with appreciated their time at Carlisle, missed it after they left, and tried to stay in touch with teachers, administrators, and fellow students. It is easy to imagine that the opportunity to learn a trade, to play a sport, to perform in an musical band, and to meet other young people from Native American communities across the country might have been attractive if not exhilarating. Della John’s best friend was a Creek young woman named Tookah McIntosh.
Carlisle opened in 1879. The first of the students I wrote about arrived twenty years later and arrived at Mrs. Jacobs’ house in 1901. Carlisle in its early years was different than in its later years. Record-keeping become more thorough. More and more of the students came from Christian families which had practiced agriculture on the American model. They were literate in English, and they had family names in which they took great pride.
We need to know more about Carlisle, and the boarding school experience in general. There are students who attended Carlisle about whom it is difficult to learn much at all. There are students who are difficult to trace once they left the school. There are so many unanswered questions. But we must be on our toes as historians. We must be willing to be surprised, to admit that our hypotheses are flawed, our accustomed and popular assumptions incorrect, and that what we have been told is wrong. This is an exciting time to be conducting research on boarding schools. The events of the recent past have underscored how fundamentally important and relevant this topic remains, and I am excited to see what happens.
Annie Dibo and Susie Porter came to Mrs. Jacobs’ house because she was dissatisfied with the two Rosebud Sioux women who preceded them. Helen Kimmel and Grace Burnett arrived at Mrs. Jacobs’ place in April of 1910, and stayed only until the middle of June. Helen was nineteen years old when she arrived, and Grace Burnett was eighteen. They stayed with her in Oak Lane but not long enough to make it out to the beach in New Jersey.
Mrs. Jacobs told the Carlisle agent who visited her that Grace was an “inexperienced worker,” and that she was “indifferent to her work” and “does not try.” Helen, Mrs. Jacobs reported, “has never been contented,” and “is restless and anxious to return home.” Helen, “who neglected her work,” because of “her restlessness to return home” felt that way because “her father has recently placed money at Carlisle to buy her a ticket for her return home.” Grace, as well, had received “a letter containing money from her father to return home.” By June of 1910, Grace was on her way home. Helen did not leave Carlisle until October.
Grace Burnett’s review, reported by Mrs. Jacobs to the Carlisle visiting agent.
In each instance, the school noted as the reason for the discharge of the girls that they failed to return from their leaves of absence in 1910. Carlisle’s staff expected them to return but they did not. At first glance it seems that neither of the girls wanted to be at Carlisle. They both seem to have been unhappy, and wanted to get home at the first opportunity. As always, it is more complicated than that.
Helen’s file is pretty slim. She responded to the school’s request for information from her in 1912. She was at Rosebud, keeping house, renovating her family’s home, and working on the ranch. The family had 160 acres, 20 horses, 10 head of cattle, and a cat. We know that in September 1913 she married Lancelot DeCory, a graduate of the Flandreau Indian School, and moved with him to Valentine, Nebraska. DeCory was “engaged in the automobile business in Valentine,” according to the Carlisle Arrow, “where he has many warm friends, all of whom join in extending hearty congratulations, and best wishes, for a long and happy wedded life.”
And they seem to have had one. Both Lancelot and Helen were active in their community. Lancelot died in1938, but they had kids, Claude and Lancelot, Jr., who fought in the Italian campaign during the second World War. Helen lived into the 1960s, a very long and fruitful life.
Grace said a bit more about her time at Carlisle. She returned home to her parents’ house at Rosebud, “one of the largest ranches around here.” She filled her time with baking, sewing, and beadwork “to earn my pin money.” She had experienced some great sadness. “I am motherless,” she said, “and my grandmother died a year ago in July of 1911.” She had no women relatives and now wanted to return to Carlisle to graduate. She did make it back for a short stay.
She had hoped to return to Carlisle in the fall of 1912, she wrote in a letter dated January of 1913, for “now I am only an ex-student, and it is all my fault.” It wasn’t, and Grace was surely too hard on herself. “I wanted very much to return to Carlisle this fall,” she wrote, “but I could not, as there was lots of work to be done on our ranch and ‘hired men’ are scarce just about that time, so I had to help.” She did not get free until mid-December, and by then it was too late. So she kept doing housework, and spent her spare time riding horses, sleighing, and ice-skating. She said that she “got lonesome for Carlisle every time I read The Arrow, but I can’t do without the little paper.”
The Carlisle applications are a standardized document. They include a set of “endorsements” listing “the laws relative to the transfer of Indian children from reservations and schools.” The United States Statutes-at-Large said that “no Indian child shall be taken from any school in any state or territory to a school in any other state against its will or without the written consent of its parents.” Children could not be sent to a boarding school without the consent of his or her family, “and it shall be unlawful for any Indian agent or other employee of the government to induce, or seek to induce, by withholding rations or by other improper means, the parents of next of kin of any Indian to consent to the removal of any Indian children beyond the limits of any reservation.”
Some of the fine print.
It is not unreasonable to assume that laws like these existed for a reason, and that laws were intended to prohibit practices used to coerce Indian children to attend boarding schools. It does not take a deep dive into the records to see the heavy-handedness of federal policy makers. No doubt there was coercion employed at times and in places, and there were students whose experiences at Carlisle were horrific. Despite these cases, many students, and students’ families, saw much of value in a Carlisle education. These students, even when they felt lonely and ached to get home, missed the school greatly once they got home, and often they wished they could return.
This makes the story of Carlisle a difficult one that defies easy categorization. Different students had different experiences. We need to be careful how we talk about the boarding school experience. More news stories appear each week detailing horrifying tales of abuse and death. Just last week the New York Times ran a story about the Genoa Indian School under the headline of “Researchers Identify Dozens of Native Students who Died at Nebraska School.” Carlisle and the other boarding schools will give up their stories some day. We must prepare ourselves for stories that are complicated, full of heartbreak and cruelty to be sure, but also deeply ambivalent. Some Carlisle students loved what many of us wish they did not.
Susie Porter and Annie Dibo stayed at Mrs. Jacobs’ place from April 30 until August 27, 1909. The stayed at Mrs. Jacobs’ “delightful home” in Oak Lane until June, and then they made her way to the cottage in Ocean City, near the beach where Nora Printup died.
Both students’ files are pretty thin. Annie arrived at Carlisle from the Mohawk Akwesasne reservation in September of 1906 and stayed until June of 1911 when she graduated. She seems to have returned for one more year of training in nursing later that year, as a twenty-year old. We know little about her home life, though her file does contain her Mohawk name, rendered phonetically by one of the school’s clerks as “ha-nau-ka-rou-to-ra-ta.” Likewise, we know little of her life after she left Carlisle. She may have been the same “Annie Diabo” who, in 1947, received word that her son, a World War II veteran and a high steel worker in California’s Bay Area, was struck by a car while he crossed Highway 1 after a night of drinking. Diabo is a common Mohawk name, and Mohawks are known for their work in high steel.
A photo of Annie Dibo, 1911, in her Student File
Susie Porter came to Carlisle from the White Earth Reservation in Minnesota. She was 17 years old when she arrived in 1907. She married shortly after her return home in 1912. She was described during her stay at Mrs. Jacobs’ place as “a good trust-worthy girl, neat about her work, a good waitress, very satisfactory.”
One way to get at the experiences of these young women while they were at Carlisle is to search for their names in the school newspaper, The Arrow. Both girls were active in the Mercers and both were members of the YWCA. Annie gave a number of “Recitations,” on various subjects, while Susie seems to have loved to debate. She took the affirmative position in a debate on the proposition “that iron is more beneficial to man than gold” and the negative position on the proposition “that foreign immigration to the United States should be restricted.” Susie was a far more visible student than Annie. In the art room, Susie made “the most handsome blanket,” following a Pueblo design. “The soft colors, so carefully blended, for a color plan that is both pleasant and restful to the eye.” I wish I could see what it looked like.
There is a story in The Arrow that gives us our only glimpse into the life of the girls who stayed at Mrs. Jacobs’ place in Ocean City. It is easy to imagine that Nora Printup loved it there. Her life could not have been that different from Susie and Annie, who arrived four years after her death. Katherine Wolf, a Cherokee, was placed for her outing at a home in Ocean City not far from Mrs. Jacobs. Katherine found Susie and Annie, and the girls became friends. Susie, Annie and Katherine “went bathing almost every afternoon” and, “in the evening,” Katherine wrote, “we generally took a walk along the beach.”
Annie kept in touch with Carlisle after she left, but it is impossible to tell how much and to what extent. Susie left Carlisle, first for Wisconsin to keep house for her father, and then to Minnesota. She married, and continued to write to the school. She returned for graduation in 1912, and she sent letters asking for sheet music from the Carlisle song book that she wished to play at church. She was a devoted Christian, and a devoted Carlisle alum.
Margaret Pickett, from Crow Agency, Montana, was Julia Peña’s roommate at Mrs. Jacobs’ place. Maggie, as she was called, stayed with Mrs. Jacobs from June until late in August in 1913. Born two decades after the defeat of George Armstrong Custer’s force at the Battle of the Greasy Grass, or Little Bighorn, Margaret was eighteen years old when she arrived at Carlisle in March of 1912. She would remain a Carlisle student for just under three years.
There’s a lot going on in Maggie Pickett’s student file. While she was at school her mother, and her only surviving parent, died of a “paralytic stroke.” In April of 1914, her aunt, Mrs. Little Daylight, requested that Carlisle send Maggie home to the Crow Reservation. She needed help. “My husband died last month,” she wrote, “and I have not been well since then after all my hardships and sorrow.”
O.H. Lipps was Carlisle’s superintendent. He told Mrs. Little Daylight that Maggie “desires to do whatever she can to be of assistance to you.” Prior to sending Maggie home, however, Mrs. Little Daylight must obtain the permission of the reservation agent, a petty tyrant named Evan Estep. He reported to Lipps that “I am inclined to think there is a sinister purpose behind the scheme to get Maggie to come to them.” Estep thought Maggie had been doing well at school and he hated the idea “to have her come here and go back to the old Indian life.” Furthermore, Estep said, “She has no people here.” Her mother and father were dead, and her brothers had all left the reservation. For these reasons, Lipps decided to refuse Mrs. Little Daylight’s request.
That was April of 1914. One month later, Maggie began working at Todd Hospital in the City of Carlisle. She was learning to be a nurse. She would stick it out at Carlisle, but she wanted Estep to know that she would like to return home, and help her people, as soon as a position opened up on the reservation.
Todd Hospital, Carlisle PA.
Lipps was impressed by what he heard about Maggie’s work, so he recommended her to Estep in January of 1915. “It is Margaret’s desire to do something for the people at her home in a capacity similar to that of a Field Matron.” She was young for so important a job, Lipps admitted, but her nurse’s training worked in her favor and “She is competent, energetic, and willing.”
Perhaps Maggie asked Lipps to enquire once again about opportunities at home because conditions at Todd Hospital had become unbearable for her. Mrs. Wile, the “Chairman of the Board of Managers” at the hospital, reported that Maggie “had not been doing as well as they knew she could do.” Maggie, Mrs. Wile reported, “was not on good terms with the head nurse, Miss Kruger,” and one other nurse on the hospital staff. They accused her of writing a threatening letter to that nurse, and said that Maggie “received boys from the school as visitors.”
Maggie defended herself. She told Lipps that she did not threaten anyone. She was going to report the nurse for some type of misconduct. She said that, yes, boys from the school visited her, “but it was only as any lady would receive calls.” These letters were exchanged during the third week of February in 1915. Things moved quickly. My the 28th of February, Maggie was at last on her way home to Crow Agency.
Whatever the reason for her departure, Maggie’s supporters at Carlisle had high hopes for her success. She seems quickly to have disappointed them. Within a month of her arrival in Montana, Maggie married Thomas Tobacco. Estep sent word of the ceremony for inclusion in the Carlisle Arrow. In a separate note addressed to Lipps, Estep shared his thoughts more freely. “There is certainly ample room,” Estep wrote, for Maggie “to do some ‘up-lift’ work on her husband, who is a long-haired worthless piece of humanity.” Thomas had been in and out of jail, and Maggie had made a mistake in marrying him. “I believe she hit bottom the quickest of any returned student I ever knew,” Estep wrote, “but if she was to hit it at all I suppose she had just as well go the limit and have it over.”
Estep is an unlikable bigot. He was determined to control the Crows on the reservation even after it was clear he lacked the power to do so. His disdain for the people whose lives he supervised is transparent. Lipps, however, valued his insight. He passed Estep’s note along to have read to the Carlisle girls during the evening prayer meeting. “There was not a more promising girl at Carlisle last year than Margaret,” Lipps wrote. “She frequently assured me of her ambition to be an example of worthy imitation and a force for the up-lift of her people.” He had expected her to return to Carlisle in the fall, continue her studies, and work at Todd Hospital. “I am grieved and disappointed by the way she has turned out.” Maggie, he had hoped, would “prove that the Crow Indians, who are proverbally [sic] a bad lot, were not all bad or worthless.” That Maggie “has yielded to he first temptation,” he concluded, “should be an example to the other girls.”
I am not certain that Maggie knew how much she disappointed Lipps. Three weeks after her marriage, she wrote “to inform you that I have started in to do four ourselves.” Her husband was the son of Tillie Eagle, an ex-Carlisle student. She asked that Lipps send her the money in her school bank account. She was not coming back to Carlisle.
Lipps set her the money, but he could not help but mention the marriage. “When you left here you seemed to be sincere in your desire to continue the same ideals that made you one of the most promising girls Carlisle has had enrolled.” Her marriage to Tom Tobacco while wearing Indian dress “was so prompt a dropping of your ideals that I cannot understand at all.”
No more letters appear in Maggie’s file until February of 1917, almost two years later. “I am getting along nicely and hope every body their [sic] at Carlisle are the same.” She mentioned the cold weather, and the Crow delegation in Washington, fighting attempts to allot the reservation (You can read about those efforts in Chapter 8 of Native America. Maggie said she had some bad news. “Our home was filled with grief over the death of our dear little baby girl the 20th of January.” She was less than a month old when she died from pneumonia. “Mr. Lipps,” she wrote, “I think that days was the saddest days of my life.” She signed her letter “Mrs. Thomas Tobacco.”
Maggie Pickett was training at Todd Hospital to become a nurse. She had wanted to return even before she began working at the hospital. Conflict developed with the other nurses. She went home, married, had a child. She does not show up much after 1917. Her husband Thomas still got in trouble on occasion, but he also was a leading member of the Peyote religion at Crow. She was criticized by Lipps, most harshly behind her back. She worked at making a living on the reservation. She buried a child. But still she took the time to write to Carlisle to wish her fellow students well.
Julia Peña was part of the ensemble cast of The Captain of Plymouth. Like Ethel Daniels, she played one of the “squaws” in the 1909 Carlisle Graduation pageant.
The “Squaws” in The Captain of Plymouth. One of these women is Esther Daniels, and another is Julia Peña. I do not know which ones.
Julia, a “Mission Indian” from Southern California, had a lot of experience with boarding schools. At the age of 8, she began attending the St. Boniface Indian School in Banning. She was there from 1900 until 1907. She spent one year at the day school in Pala, California, before traveling across North America to begin attending Carlisle in 1909. It was a family affair. Julia’s older brother Nicholas had attended Carlisle from 1895 until 1905. Years later, in 1913, he was known as the “best Indian farmer in Pala.”
Julia’s story is similar to that of the other young women who attended Carlisle, and who passed through Mrs. Jacobs’ house. She was active in student organization at Carlisle, playing a leading role in the Girls Holy Names Society. She performed in school plays, and attended sporting events from her outing placements when she had the time. The year before she arrived at Mrs. Jacobs’ house, Julia wrote to one of her teachers, Miss Georgenson, to announce “that she has a very pleasant home near the Susquehanna,” and that “everything is so pleasant that a person just can’t help enjoying life.”
Some of her patrons were satisfied with Julia, and others were disappointed. She stayed with the Engles family in Moorestown, New Jersey, from September 1909 until the end of August in 1910. To Mrs. Engles, Julia was “not satisfactory.” At times she did good work, but “at other times, careless, rude and impertinent, not honest.” Julia had apparently stolen some things from the Engles. Because she apologized, the patron would keep her through August but no longer. Another patron, one year later, though that Julia “is willing and tries.” She was a good worker, but her vision was so poor that she needed glasses badly. Once fitted, she wore her glasses all the time and performed much better work. We don’t know what Mrs. Jacobs thought of her.
Julia, like most of Mrs. Jacobs’ girls, missed Carlisle once she left. On her way home she sent postcards from the places she passed through to her former classmates and teachers. When she moved from Pala to San Diego, she continued to send postcards to her friends in Pennsylvania. She sent to Carlisle a dollar so that she could join the Carlisle Alumni Association. In April of 1915, now married and back in Pala, she wrote that “I am getting along very well at my new home. I used to live in San Diego, but I like it better here, as I am living on a farm. I am always glad to hear about the progress Carlisle is making, and I hope it will continue. I will close with best wishes for success to the Alumni Association, not forgetting all my classmates.”
Another student who left Carlisle, stayed in touch, and continued to support the school’s programs. Carlisle, as it did for Ethel Daniels and Esther Reed, made a huge difference in Julia Peña’s life.
Ethel Daniels was Esther Reed‘s roommate at Mrs. Jacobs’ house between April and August of 1908. Ethel, a Ute from White Rock, had arrived at Carlisle in 1904 when she was twelve years old. She graduated in 1909 and immediately returned home. Mrs. Jacobs’ house was her last outing placement.
Ethel started sending postcards to friends at Carlisle on her way home. She missed the school as soon as she left it. As soon as she got home she reported that she “is enjoying western life” and that her brother Albert “is now a proud father of a cute little boy.”
Why share these details of her personal life? Ethel wrote to the school’s superintendent, Moses Friedman, and he would place excerpts of her letters in the Carlisle Arrow, the school’s weekly student newspaper. The Arrow was filled with small pieces of news like this from her and from many other students. At one level these updates served as propaganda–Carlisle graduates were succeeding when they returned home–but it seems to me that this is an explanation that is incomplete and ultimately unsatisfying. Students who returned home wrote back to Carlisle in numbers that at first surprised me, letting people back in Pennsylvania know what they had been up to. Ethel quite clearly loved her time at Carlisle. She said it time and again. So did so many other former students. She was proud, she wrote Friedman, to think that she had been the first president at Carlisle of the “Mercers Literary Society.” In that capacity she practiced her oratory. She was a student in the school’s art department, and was skilled enough as an artist that an Albany businessman purchased a rug that she made. She participated in a musical pageant, “The Captain of Plymouth,” in which she played one of a number of unnamed “Squaws.” Carlisle was an important part of her life.
By August of 1910, Ethel was engaged, living on a ranch with her mother, with “forty acres of land, one team, two riding ponies,” and “eleven head of cattle.” She asked that the staff at Carlisle continue to send her copies of The Arrow. She updated students at Carlisle on her family life. She married Donald Cobbs, and soon gave birth to sons named Loyde and Manferd. In 1914, she was living at Fort Duschesne in Utah, and let Superintendent Friedman know that she and the family were well, and that she was “always anxious for the dear Arrow to read the news of dear Old Carlisle.”
A photograph from Fort Duschesne late in the 19th century.
She reported in a letter to Friedman that she, Daniel, and the boys were preparing to move to a new allotment. “We have taken another allotment up away from the River bottom,” she wrote. They had bought a new team, after the old team died. “We felt lost with out a team but we just kept courage up, and now we have another team I am glad to say.” Her kids were cute, and she lived near her brother and his family, too. Ranching was hard work but she seemed happy. She reminded Friedman once again to send the Arrow. “It has so many news of how dear old Carlisle is improving.”
Files like Ethel Daniels’ are not uncommon. They do not square easily with the horror stories unearthed at Canadian residential schools, and they do not square easily with the accounts given today of American boarding schools. There is ample evidence of cruelty, neglect, illness and sadness at Carlisle, and we shall get to those stories in the coming segments. But there were also many Indigenous peoples for whom Carlisle provided exciting opportunities, a community of friends, a chance to learn a trade, to perform, to play sports, to make art. Carlisle changed lives, to be sure. Sometimes it devastated, and sometimes it transformed, but it always left a powerful impression on the lives of those who attended.
![Female students as "Indian Squaws" in "The Captain of Plymouth" [pose 3], 1909](https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/sites/all/files/styles/display_images/public/image-photo/CCHS_PA-CH3_114.jpg?itok=drzE8DzH "Female students as \"Indian Squaws\" in \"The Captain of Plymouth\" [pose 3], 1909")
