“Kill the Indian, save the man”: Remembering the stories of Indian boarding schools
By Addison Kliewer, Miranda Mahmud and Brooklyn Wayland
Gaylord News
CARLISLE, PA.––Six rows of white tombstones––each belonging to a child who died while attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial School––stood firmly in the dewy Pennsylvania grass, bearing the names of children who lost their lives while being forced to assimilate to a new world.
Between 1,500 and 1,800 Native American students from Oklahoma attended the school in Carlisle, Penn., according to Jim Gerenscer, co-director of the Carlisle Indian School Project. Some never made it back home.
The purpose of Carlisle, as well as other boarding schools across the nation, was to remove Native Americans from their cultures and lifestyles and assimilate them into the white man’s society.
Carlisle, which opened in 1879, was one of the first and most well-known boarding schools for Native children, and its operational model set the standard for most boarding schools across the country.
For many tribes in Oklahoma, the horrors of the Carlisle model were experienced closer to home.
Riverside, organized in 1871 by Quaker missionaries, is the nation's oldest federally operated American Indian boarding school.
All that remains of the original campus, formerly known as the Wichita-Caddo School, is another eerily sparse graveyard atop a hill outside Anadarko.
Joe and Ethil Wheeler were educated there. Anthony Galindo, the grandson they raised, recalls hearing their stories about the school.
Ethil Wheeler was one of the many students who tried to run away from Riverside but was always sent back. Eventually, Ethil Wheeler was loaded in a cattle car and shipped by train in the dead of winter to Phoenix, where she stayed until she was 19. According to Galindo, Ethil Wheeler remembers huddling together in the car with other children to keep warm. Some didn’t survive the journey.
At Riverside, Joe Wheeler was abused. Galindo said he never forgave. He held onto his belief in the Creator from the Big Drum religion traditional Wichita people practice as much as he held on to that grudge.
“First they cut my hair, then they made me eat soap and then they beat me for speaking my language,” Joe Wheeler told Galindo.
When Joe Wheeler’s father found out his son was being tortured at the school, he got him out. Having completed the sixth grade, Joe Wheeler had learned English as a second language and began to act as an interpreter to his people to assist in the allotment dealings between the government and the Wichita people.
The trauma from Riverside Indian School stayed with Joe Wheeler all of his life. Galindo said his first and most prominent memory of being raised by his grandparents was his grandfather telling him the government’s intent was to wipe their people off the face of the earth through cultural assimilation efforts such as Riverside.
Thar was the same intent that inspired Richard H. Pratt, founder and superintendent of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, to strip Native children of their cultures.
“A great general has said that the only good Indian is a dead one, and that high sanction of his destruction has been an enormous factor in promoting Indian massacres,” Pratt said in an 1892 speech.
“In a sense, I agree with the sentiment, but only in this: that all the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” Pratt said.
Pratt coined the idea for Carlisle while serving as a soldier in Oklahoma territory, Gerencser said. While moving 70 Native prisoners of war to Florida, Gerencser said, Pratt began inviting Florida locals to teach the prisoners English.
“So that's where Pratt got this idea that, ‘Hey, if you isolate them from their families and their tribal life and you immerse them in standard American white culture, they'll be just like everybody else,’” Gerencser said.
Unlike other boarding schools, Carlisle housed older students, with some entering the school as late as 18 years old. Many boarding schools, including Riverside, recruited much younger students.
“The boarding school experience that many people had in other schools just doesn't seem reflected quite as much at Carlisle,” Gerencser said. “I mean, again, the concept is horrid, you know, why the school exists, but how you implement the assimilation process can be very different.”
By the time students arrived at the boarding school in Carlisle, most had already attended primary schools on tribal reservations, and many students had experienced assimilation schooling throughout their lives.
The majority of stories from boarding schools were negative, Gerencser said. However, letters written to Pratt in 1890 show that some graduates found the Carlisle experience to be positive.
“It's complicated. I mean, no matter how you slice it, it's really complicated and everybody's experiences can be very, very different,” he said.
The recruitment process for Carlisle was also different. In the beginning, Pratt traveled to reservations across the nation, speaking to tribal leaders about the boarding school and its purpose.
“We don't know exactly what he was telling the chiefs and headmen that were gathered there,” said Gerencser. “So we have no idea necessarily what kind of promises Pratt might have been making about his view of the importance of going to the school.”
Contributors to the Carlisle Indian School Project, however, visited a Nez Perce reservation last year to hear about tribal members who attended the school. One woman said her great-grandfather’s mother chose to send him to Carlisle when he was only 10 years old.
The woman said her great-grandfather was part of the Nez Perce that had been captured in the late 1870s. During this time, the American government and the Nez Perce were engaged in major battles after members of the tribe refused to relocate to a reservation.
“They are prisoners of war. They are living in terrible conditions. This woman's husband and older son had already been killed in the wars, and she's in a desperate situation,” Gerencser said. “So, yeah, she's making the choice, but what kind of choice is that?”
In Carlisle’s later years, the school began to gain an international reputation. With its band and football team going on tour across the country, as well as Jim Thorpe’s name being published in newspapers, the school created an application process in the 1890s to attend the school.
Gerencser, who is also the Dickinson College archivist in Carlisle, reiterated that, while Carlisle’s purpose was the same as other boarding schools, it operated in different ways.
“One of the things you always hear about is how no one's permitted to speak English and you'll be punished if you do speak your native language, right? Well, there's a newspaper article about three years after the school had started saying all the students want to learn Sioux,” said Gerencser. “That's not going to be printed in the paper if, you know, it's that taboo of a thing.”
While many chose to attend Carlisle, the intent of the school was, from the first day, to destroy tribal cultures. When the first group of students arrived at the school, Anglo-style names were written on a blackboard.
“The students would be handed a pointer and told to point at one of those names, and then that was written on a piece of paper and hung around their neck,” Gerencser said.
Boarding schools across the country made it difficult for tribes to preserve their cultures, practices and languages. While some adapted back into life on the reservation after graduating, the loss of indigenous cultures was widespread.
Perhaps the most famous images taken at Carlisle were of Tom Torlino, a Navajo student in 1882.
In one photo, Torlino is photographed arriving at Carlisle with long hair and wearing regala. In a photo taken six month later, he has short, styled hair and is wearing a suit.
“One of the other things that people often think is that every student that went to Carlisle would have this kind of before photo taken, and the fact of the matter is they only did that maybe two dozen times all together,” said Gerencser. “They just needed a few representative samples to use for their propaganda.”
About 8,000 students attended Carlisle, “and for every student there's a different story of how you got there, why you were there, what your experience was like,” Gerencser said.
On the tombstones in the Carlisle Indian Cemetery, the names and tribal affiliations of students engraved in marble are emotional reminders of the stories that have not been told.
To know the truth about the boarding schools, Gerencser said, a person must change their perspective.
“It is often not even talked about at all, but when it is talked about, it's always from the white person's perspective,” said Gerencser. “It's a very different story when you look at it from the perspective of people who were there first.”
