Genevieve Bell

This dissertation remembers the Carlisle Indian Industrial School--the flagship of the American Assimilation era's education program. From 1879 to 1918, the United States government operated the Carlisle Indian Industrial School at the military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. It was the first government-funded, co-educational, secular, non-reservation Indian School to be established, and its design became the template for at least twenty-five additional non-reservation boarding schools during the Assimilation era, 1880-1924. This dissertation revisits the Carlisle Indian Industrial School with three interrelated goals: (i) to understand how the school functioned as a site at which State policies were articulated and employed; (ii) to examine the ways in which those State policies shaped student experiences of school; and (iii) to recall the impact that Carlisle had upon individual student lives after school. Some 8,500 students from at least seventy-five Native American Nations spent time at Carlisle, learning basic academic skills as well as receiving vocational training. These students were not only learning how to read, write and have a trade, they were also learning how to be Indian. That these lessons were not always voluntary, that their reception was uneven, and that their content shifted over time in no way diminishes their impact. It is these lessons about identity that this dissertation explores.

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