Boarding schools such as the Genoa Indian School in Nebraska focused on industrial education and cultural assimilation. TCU visitors to the CFNP can explore boarding school experiences through a wide array of resources.

The Center for the Futures of Native Peoples (CFNP) at Dickinson College has created a dedicated boarding and residential school collection. This collection of 117 books, movies, and other resources is part of our Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) Lending Library and is available to students, faculty, and staff at tribal colleges and universities (TCUs).

Dickinson College is a small liberal arts college in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Through a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, the CFNP opened in July 2023. The building includes several offices, residency space for visiting scholars, a conference room, kitchen, lending library, and study space for students. Broadly, the CFNP is dedicated to advancing the understanding and appreciation of the futures of Indigenous peoples in their myriad forms, promoting the study of North American Indigenous experiences, and fostering a robust national conversation on the past, present, and future of Native American issues.

The boarding and residential school collection was created to serve visiting tribal delegations as well as the college’s own students and community members. Since the late 2010s, tribal government delegations have been regularly traveling to Carlisle to repatriate their children from the former boarding school’s cemetery. Many of these delegations include faculty, students, and alumni from America’s TCUs. The center’s staff had already been building an NAIS-focused lending library, but several particularly meaningful visits with delegations from the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate and the Fort Belknap Indian Community convinced the CFNP of the need for a dedicated set of resources about boarding schools. After securing a generous $1800 grant from the Center for Civic Learning and Action, the center identified, purchased, and organized a far-reaching collection.

The boarding and residential school collection includes a wide variety of resources. Visitors can read biographies and memoirs of survivors, including accounts by Basil Johnston, Francis La Flesche, Bev Sellars, Theodore Niizhotay Fontaine, Adam Fortunate Eagle, Luther Standing Bear, Tim Giago, and Augie Merasty. The community histories section is made up of texts which focus on the relationship between specific Indigenous communities and boarding schools. Visitors will find specific histories of individual schools, including Carlisle, Chemawa, Chilocco, Haskell, Kamloops, Rainy Mountain, Rapid City, Sherman, Shubenacadie, and Stewart. The collection also includes a significant amount of First Nations children’s literature as well as books about the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The parallel carceral structures section explores institutions that were not boarding schools but attempted similar erasures of Indigenous cultures, including asylums, orphanages, hospitals, and adoption programs.

Today, tribal colleges and universities are the antithesis of boarding and residential schools. TCUs are not only spaces designed according to Indigenous values and ways of knowing, but they also foster new learning and ideas. Where boarding and residential schools sought to silence Native languages, TCUs are at the center of revitalizing languages. Moreover, TCU faculty, staff, alumni, and especially students frequently contribute to their communities in powerful ways. It is the hope of the CFNP that its boarding and residential school collection can be one more resource for TCUs.