Impact case study database
Recovering and Returning Stolen Histories through digital archives: America’s campaign of educational genocide in Indian boarding schools
1. Summary of the impact
Between 1879 and 1918, thousands of Native American children were transported from their homes across the United States (US) to the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania (PA). Carlisle’s mission was to re-educate them in preparation for assimilation and American citizenship. The school’s motto was “Kill the Indian, save the man”. The history of Carlisle, the focus of prize-winning research by Professor Jacqueline Fear-Segal, is largely based on records held in the National Archives, Washington DC. These are relatively inaccessible to Native communities and little known amongst the wider American public.
Fear-Segal, with colleagues at Dickinson College PA, digitised the Carlisle records, creating the Carlisle Indian School Digital Research Center. This ever-growing resource holds over 20,000 student records, images and publications, and has impacted upon three key constituencies:
Native American individuals and communities who have learned about the hidden and untold histories of their ancestors, leading to deeply personal discoveries of lost relatives, often with dramatic impact. [* redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text *]
Native and non-Native teachers and students across North America have acquired new understanding of the history of the US government’s educational campaign, through workshops, a Teachers’ Institute and innovative lesson plans.
The general public has greater awareness of the impact of Indian boarding schools in North America, which has been deepened through conferences and media coverage.
2. Underpinning research
Fear-Segal’s prize-winning historical monograph, White Man’s Club (3.1), argues that with the founding of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (1879-1918), government officials embarked on an ambitious experimental campaign to destroy all manifestations of Indigenous cultures via a programme of educational genocide. They worked to rapidly re-educate Indigenous children in the language, behaviour, values and religion of white society, in preparation for assimilation and American citizenship. To achieve this, they transported thousands of Native American children from their homes across the US to a military-style boarding school in PA; Carlisle’s mission was, “Kill the Indian, save the man”. During its near forty-year existence, the school enrolled almost 10,000 children from every US Native nation, and beyond. Fear-Segal’s research demonstrates how this institution created the template for the federal Indian School system, established across the US, and later Canada, so affecting every Native American and First Nation community.
Her introduction to Carlisle Indian Industrial School: site of indigenous histories, memories and reclamations (3.3) locates Carlisle within its wider historical and international context; the macro-history. Her chapter 11 is a micro-history, showing how fragments from the archive can be pieced together to tell the story of two Apache children who were captured in Texas and deported to Carlisle in the late nineteenth century. These children’s descendant family only learned what happened to their ancestors when contacted by Fear-Segal (3.2; 3.3). Her writing sets the rigorous research standard for this innovative, multi-vocal collection, incorporating the perspectives and voices of scholars, poets, activists and Native American descendants of students. It stands as the published legacy of the 2012 Carlisle symposium she co-organised.
Fear-Segal’s research is deeply rooted in the physical site of the Indian School. She links the campus design, with its “panopticon” bandstand at the centre, directly to the surveillance that was inseparable from the school’s mission of educational genocide (3.1). Her carefully reconstructed historical and contemporary maps (3.6) enable modern-day visitors to make informed visits to the site and its cemetery, to see and understand the campus within its historical context. Her chapter on the school cemetery (3.3) provides clear particulars on its removal and recreation, as well as the misnaming and misplacing of children’s graves during this process; [* redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text *]
In meticulous analysis of the photographic archive (3.4; 3.5) Fear-Segal reveals these Carlisle photographs to be more than simple portraits of “progress” in the well-established reform tradition of before/after images; they are visual portrayals of the myth of “the vanishing Indian”. Indigenous elimination made realistically convincing through the medium of photography subtly legitimated seizure of tribal homelands; non-existent peoples did not need lands.
Fear-Segal’s research on Carlisle in the National Archives, Washington DC, gave her insider knowledge of sources and an understanding of their significance to many Indigenous individuals and families who remained uncertain about who in their community was transported to Carlisle. Information about how school life was lived by their ancestors − what names they were given, who ran away, who died, who was buried there and who survived to return home − has, until recently, remained in the archives, relatively inaccessible to Native communities. Mainstream American society knew little of the Indian boarding school established in Carlisle to eradicate Indigenous cultures, or the system of Indian industrial schools across North America for which it provided the template. The impact of this work has been to begin to reveal and address this injustice.
3. References to the research
- White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation
Jacqueline Fear-Segal. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007 and 2009), pp. xxiii + 395. ISBN: 9780803220249 & 9780803227880
- The Lost Ones: The Long Journey Home
Director Susan Rose. Researched and presented by Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Daniel Castro Romero. Documentary DVD [42 minutes] held on file at UEA.
( Dickinson College Community Studies Center, 2009).
Trailer: youtube.com/watch?v=_I4jF22bXeA
- Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories and Reclamations
Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan Rose eds. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016 and 2018), pp. xv + 400. ISBN: 9780803278912 & 9781496207692
- “Stolen Pictures Reframed by Warp and Weft: Shan Goshorn’s Carlisle Baskets”
Jacqueline Fear-Segal. Philip Earenfight, ed. Resisting the Mission ( Carlisle, P.A.: Trout Gallery, 2018) pp. 44-54. ISBN: 9780986126352
- “Facing the Binary: Native American Students in the Camera’s Lens”
Jacqueline Fear-Segal. Jordan Bear and Kate Palmer Albers, eds., Before-and-After Photography: Histories and Contexts ( London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017 and 2020), pp. 153-173. ISBN 9781474253116 & 9781350143074
Historical Maps of Carlisle Indian School
Jacqueline Fear-Segal. ( Dickinson Print Office: Carlisle, P.A., 2000) Available at carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teach/maps-carlisle-indian-school and held on file at UEA.
4. Details of the impact
Establishment of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (CISDRC) and the Carlisle Journeys Conferences
The 2012 Carlisle Indian Industrial School symposium, which was underpinned by Fear-Segal’s research and co-organised by Fear-Segal with [* redacted text *], demonstrated intense interest in the untold histories of those who attended Indian boarding schools during the 19th and 20th centuries. It brought over 290 delegates to Carlisle, including over 150 Native Americans from 36 tribes. Native and non-Native scholars, leaders, artists and community members shared their work, concerns and perspectives on the Carlisle Indian School at the symposium. This motivated Fear-Segal and [***] to open up the archives to a wider audience. A successful bid to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, collaborating with [* redacted text * redacted text * reda] Dickinson College, followed (USD700,000), to fund the digitisation of the Carlisle records and the creation of the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center (CISDRC) (5.2). The grant enabled 17,738 surviving Carlisle student records, 3,491 images and 1,726 publications to be scanned and placed online (as of 11/12/20), for access by descendant communities, researchers and teachers (5.3).
The CISDRC has surpassed 450,000 total individual visits since the project began and more than 3,000,000 page views (5.2) and continues to expand its primary resources to include newspapers and documents held in other repositories, with plans to offer individuals the ability to contribute their own digitized photos, documents, oral histories and other personal materials to the online collection. According to Michael Oberg in Native America: A History (2017), “The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center is digital humanities at its best” (5.9). Links to the site are given in a very wide range of educational sources, including: Indian Pueblo Center; Ohio’s Yesterdays; Navajo Preparatory Library School website; American Yawp Reader. The project has also inspired the digitisation of other boarding school archives, mostly notably of Sherman and Genoa, and the creation of a national database. [* redacted text *], the Director of the Genoa Indian School Digital Reconciliation Project writes that “the CISDRC was a model” for their Genoa project and applauds that “the CISDRC is working closely with the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in their efforts to create a national database of all boarding school records” (5.4).
[* redacted *], Director of Carlisle’s local historical society (CCHS) explains that in response to “the highly successful 2012 Carlisle Symposium”, he “initiated a series of biennial Carlisle Journey conferences … to continue the Symposium’s productive engagement” with a widening audience (5.4). In 2013, Fear-Segal helped create the new Carlisle Journeys Committee, which organised biennial conferences at the CCHS (2014; 2016; 2018). These drew 122 attendees in total (54 with Native connections), to discover and discuss boarding school histories. A native Nez Perce delegate attending in 2018 wrote about how the conference had changed her understanding of the “Beginning of cultural genocide ... the thinking behind the policies” enabling her to “ retell the story with [a] new voice of healing” (5.8).
Establishment of the CISDRC, along with the biennial Carlisle Journeys Conferences, has led to impact on three key constituencies: 1) Native American individuals and communities; 2) Native and non-Native teachers and students; 3) Members of the general public.
1) Impact on Native American individuals and communities
Personal discoveries of lost relatives
The Carlisle Journeys conferences offered Native Americans the opportunity to learn about the untold histories of their ancestors in the very place where many of their life stories unfolded. [*redacted text *], an Omaha Native American delegate, invited to speak at the 2018 conference, described how, “It was important in my own journey of understanding who I was, and where I descend from ... Being there offered me the opportunity to walk in [my relatives’] footsteps and understand what life must have been like for [them] ... It really drove home the pain, trauma, and strength of my ancestors. Visiting the cemetery was an especially powerful experience; to see so many head stones” (5.5).
In addition to experiencing a distinctly personal journey while contributing to the conference itself, [*****] was introduced to the CISDRC for the first time during her visit to Carlisle, which she called an “invaluable resource for research into my lineage. It captured the stories of my ancestors in a way that allowed me to reimagine their lived experiences”. As an illustration of this, she recounted how she “learned from the letters … that I had a Great-Grandmother that died at Genoa Indian School. I would never have known that if those letters were not accessible to me through the Carlisle digital archives” (5.5).
It is these very personal stories, revealed through the digital archive, that lie at the heart of this project. [* redacted text *, the Kiowa Pulitzer Prize winning poet and writer, who has an enduring commitment to Carlisle noted: “This archive … is going to be indispensable to people who are interested in Carlisle, and everyone should be interested in Carlisle” (5.5). Carlisle closed in 1918, when Americans’ belief in the capacity of Indigenous Americans to assimilate was faltering. The 2018 conference marked the 100th anniversary of this closure, [* redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text *].
Fear-Segal’s long-standing relationship with the CCHS and her research in their photographic archive (3.5), instigated the opening of the largest holding of Carlisle photographic images to on-line viewing on the CISDRC. [* redacted text *] wrote: “Jacqueline’s expertise and research integrity convinced me to allow the Cumberland County Historical Society’s extensive photographic collection to be digitized and included in the CISDRC database” (5.4). These photographs enable family members to both see and crucially, to share images of their student ancestors, often for the first time. [*****], after posting links to the photographs on social media, recorded how “Many people were reduced to tears at seeing the faces of their long-lost relatives/ancestors. With the photographs and accompanying [information] in the student files, they saw their own faces and were able to read the stories of their beginnings. Although heart breaking, for many this offered a glimpse into the ancestral trauma and memory that we all carry” (5.5).
The repatriation of buried children to traditional homelands
The CISDRC team has specifically assembled data on the sensitive topic of the Indian School Cemetery (5.3). [* redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text *
2) Impact on Native and non-Native teachers and students
New perspectives in school and college curricular
Native and non-Native teachers and students across North America have acquired new awareness of the historical government educational campaign and the impact upon the lives of the individual Native students who were its subjects. In particular, teachers, students and curriculums have been impacted in the following ways:
In 2016, Fear-Segal and [***] ran pilot workshops at seven reservation schools in New Mexico and Arizona, to increase awareness and extend use of the CISDRC’s digital resource by Native schools and communities (5.2). Further workshops, supported by a National Historical Publications and Record Commission (NHPRC) grant, were organised in more than 18 separate communities, making direct contact with 557 community members, 355 students, and 62 teachers (5.7, pp.5-10 ). All workshops screened “The Lost Ones” film to introduce Carlisle (3.2).
The CISDRC team, supported by the NHPRC grant, organised a week-long Teachers’ Institute at Dickinson College in 2017, attended by 20 Native and non-Native teachers from across the USA, with Fear-Segal’s White Man’s Club (3.1; 5.2) distributed as the main reading (5.7, p.21 ). [* redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text * redacted text *]
Lesson Plans were created to increase the visibility and impact of the online resource and raise awareness of this lost part of Native American histories (5.2), for which Fear-Segal’s research was key (3.3; 3.5). The 250 Teaching Toolkits (created with NHPRC support) were distributed to schools across the USA, free on request (5.7, pp.3-4 ). Teachers reported the influence on their teaching of the toolkits, lesson plans and other materials provided online by the CISDRC, with one teacher describing the extract on the CISDRC from Fear-Segal & Rose’s (eds.) Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories and Reclamations (3.3) as “the essential text to begin any lesson on Indian boarding schools” (5.2).
3) Widening public awareness of Indian boarding schools
The contribution of the CISDRC to wider public awareness of how Indian boarding schools inform contemporary issues, like Native adoptions, was noted in the New York Times in 2019 (5.1). Non-Natives participating in events in Carlisle report a new understanding of shared histories leading to healing. For instance, one non-Native delegate at the 2014 conference wrote that: “It has opened my eyes … I want to educate myself as much as possible about Native peoples’ history, so that I can then educate my children” (5.8). Broad and growing public awareness is garnering support for the recent (September 2020) Congressional Bill (H.R. 8420), introduced by Representative Debra Haaland (Laguna Pueblo) and Senator Elizabeth Warren, to establish a Truth and Healing Commission on Indian Boarding School Policy in the United States, to address what Haaland calls “the traumatic history of genocide and forced assimilation by the federal government” (5.10).
5. Sources to corroborate the impact
New York Times article. Jan Hoffman, ‘Who Can Adopt a Native American Child?’, 5 June 2019.
Letter from Co-Directors of the CISDRC.
CISDRC website, with access to: student records, photographs, teaching resources, Fear-Segal maps and texts: carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/ with specific data on the cemetery: carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/cemetery-information.
Letter from Director of the Genoa Digitization Project; Affidavit from Director of Cumberland County Historical Society.
Interviews with Omaha Native American delegate at Carlisle Journeys, 2018; Kiowa Pulitzer Prize winning author (digital file held by UEA).
Teachers’ Feedback after using the teaching resources and lesson plans on the CISDRC; Google analytics for hits on the CISDRC.
Report of CISDRC to National Historical Publications and Record Commission , 30 September, 2018.
Feedback from Carlisle Journeys Conferences (2014, 2016, 2018).
Press articles on CISDRC.
Truth and Healing Commission Bill and press articles.