Class Photo, Carlisle Indian Industrial School

By Lucas Ierodiaconou

John Choate, Native American Boys and Girls at the United States Indian Industrial School. Carlisle, PA: J. Choate, ca. 1880-1890. Albumen print photograph. William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.

This is a photo of Native American boys and girls at the United States Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It was taken by John Choate. There is not much known about Choate other than that he took photos of Native Americans in the Pennsylvania area. This was photographed as a yearly photo of the students at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The purpose of boarding schools like Carlisle was to try to “civilize” Native American children and make them conform to white American norms. The original audience of this source was the school itself, as all schools have pictures of their students. The photograph demonstrates the attempt of the school to strip Native American children of their sense of identity to try to “reform” them into adhering to white American cultural values.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first Native American boarding school, founded by General Richard H. Pratt with the intention of changing the students by removing their “Indian values” and converting them into people who adhere to traditional white American customs. Pratt once said, “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. 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.” What this demonstrates is that the founder of this school’s goal was self-admittedly to strip these children of their identity and the values that defined them. This perverted sense of helping these children caused them to suffer through a confusing and miserable experience in Carlisle, being taught that everything they had ever known was wrong. Furthermore, this quote cements that those children were not even seen fully as human, because they still “had Indian in them.” This undoubtedly means they were not treated with the respect they should’ve been treated with.

The number one thing that stands out when looking at this photo is the uniformity of it all. All of the children wear the same clothes, all of the boys have the same haircut, and they all sit there with stoic expressions on their faces. This uniformity was undoubtedly an intentional goal of the school. The entire concept of this school was to “Kill the Indian and save the man.” The school wanted the Native Americans to conform to their expectations of how someone should behave. Therefore, by installing strict, regimented, practices, the children would learn to simply do as they are told instead of thinking for themselves. If instructors wanted to make Native American children adhere to their values, they would first have to eliminate the Native American values instilled in them. The best way to do this would be to strip them of any sense of identity. However, there is evidence that Native American Industrial Schools didn’t eradicate the identity of their students but rather reinforced it by creating new cross-tribal friendships and by motivating Native Americans to work harder to maintain their culture by maintaining contact with family and practicing cultural rituals.

Native American children who were stripped away of their families were forced to find new ways to stay in touch. As a result of this, there are vast records of letter correspondence between families and their children who were in school. Many of these letters lamented the school for the way children were being treated, and offered encouragement to maintain their traditional Native American values. These Native American Industrial Schools also sparked the formation of cross-tribal relationships. With Native American children from all different tribes being sent to the same places, children from tribes who had never before interacted with each other became friends. Furthermore, many graduates of these schools used their education to build up their tribes and give them more power. According to Davis, boarding school graduates from the Red Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota used their education to become prominent tribal leaders who worked to reinvigorate Indian political sovereignty and strengthen traditional cultures, on both a local and a national level. This shows the resiliency of the Native American community to counter the adversity they faced by coming together to preserve the values that they hold dear to them.

Citations

John Choate, Native American Boys and Girls at the United States Indian Industrial School. Carlisle, PA: J. Choate, ca. 1880-1890. Albumen print photograph. William L. Clements Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.

Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271.

Julie Davis, “American Indian Boarding School Experiences: Recent Studies from Native Perspectives,” OAH Magazine of History, Vol. 15, no. 2 (Winter 2001): 20-23.