October 29, 2025
Join lecturer Derek Baron to learn about music education and performance culture at the Carlisle Indian School, including a nationalistic comic opera performed by Native students in 1909.
This talk examines the politics of music at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the flagship federal off-reservation boarding school for the compulsory education of Indigenous children, established in Carlisle in 1879. Examining the music education and performance culture at the Carlisle School, this talk considers a nationalistic comic opera, The Captain of Plymouth, performed by Native students at the Carlisle commencement exercises in 1909 in light of concurrent policies outlawing Indigenous musical and religious practices on reservations. It argues ultimately that, although music, dance and expressive culture were central concerns for federal assimilationist policy, music-making at Carlisle provided a groundwork for the emergence of an intertribal social formation that guided musical practices and self-determination movements of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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Further information
- Location: Weiss 235, Weiss Center for the Arts
- Time: 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
- Cost: Free.