Boarding School Voices: Carlisle Indian Students Speak

By Arnold Krupat
University of Nebraska Press (2021)
402 pages

Review by Farina King

Literary scholar Arnold Krupat organizes and analyzes this collection of original writings and words of students from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School between the late 19th century and early 20th century, including many sources from the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. Krupat introduces “Carlisle Indians” who faced difficult decisions and struggles in their lives. He renders the names of the students who appear in the book in bold type, listing them and their tribal affiliations in an appendix. Many may have heard of Olympian jim Thorpe, but other notable alumni include Mike Burns, Siceni Nori, and many others.

As Krupat points out, these sources are invaluable as they reveal the complexities of the boarding school experience, but most importantly, they shed light on the impact that education had on the students’ lives. The Indigenous youth who attended Carlisle only spent a sliver of their lives there. Krupat focuses on many alumni sources, including letters and questionnaires, which differ from sources produced during their schooling such as student publications. Krupat could better define what he means by “Carlisle Indians.” Is he referring to the alumni—a community that stems from the survivors and those who identified as more than survivors?

Krupat stresses that Carlisle Indians were not “hybrid creations,” but “tribal,” and neither traditional nor modern. But he does not explain how they were not hybrids. Some Carlisle Indians became advocates for their people, including interpreters and intermediaries. Charles Chickenny (Menominee) writes to Richard Henry Pratt at Carlisle about the “trouble” that his people were facing with the appointment of a new agent. He said he would “[fight with his family] as hard as we can and I am not going to have any one run my tribe like a mule or a dog.” A set of accompanying images, including several family photos, also illustrates how some Carlisle Indians form and stand with their families and multiple generations. Emma Hands Means, for example, married an “educated person,” although he was not from Carlisle like her, and she later separated from him. She shares how she was growing her own future and family, even if she still attempted to meet the expectations of boarding school. She and other Carlisle Indians shaped their own journeys.

The colonizing system of boarding school education, such as Carlisle, was a machine to sever Indigenous youth from their people and cultures; and some students never left the school alive. The Carlisle Indians who Krupat directs our attention to are among those who did survive, and he traces the ways that they survived in their own words, including their abilities to code switch and address colonizers to bridge more understanding and live for their people.

Farina King, PhD (Diné) is an associate professor of history and affiliated faculty of Cherokee and Indigenous studies at Northeastern State University, author of The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century, and co-author of Returning Home: Diné Creative Works from the Intermountain Indian School.