The Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Historical Impact, Enduring Legacy
Prepared for the Center for the Futures of Native Peoples by Elizabeth Rule, PhD December 5, 2025
The Carlisle Indian School opened its doors in Carlisle, Pennsylvania in 1879, making history as the first off-reservation, government-operated boarding school for Native American students in the United States. In the nearly 150 years since its founding, the Carlisle School has become emblematic of the trauma, loss, and devastation foisted upon Indigenous Nations and Native children, as well as their contemporary descendents, as a result of nationwide efforts to “kill the Indian, save the man.” Carlisle remains unique for its historical role in setting the stage for the national expansion of federally-backed boarding schools and for its ongoing significance as a nationally visible site of study, healing, and awareness-raising.
The Carlisle school emerged out of Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt’s military experience overseeing Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Kiowa prisoners incarcerated at Fort Marion in Florida where he implemented a regimen that combined military structure, educational training, and manual labor into what he determined to be a “savagery”-to-“civilization” program for Native Americans. At Carlisle, Pratt’s infamous policy directive to “kill the Indian, save the man” manifested as an assimilationist imperative which held that, in the wake of warfare between the United States and Tribal Nations, Indigenous peoples should be assimilated into EuroAmerican society rather than eliminated or excluded from it. In practice, thousands of Indigenous children were brought to Carlisle from all corners of the United States, including as far away as Alaska, where they were intentionally separated from their families, identities, cultures, languages, spiritualities, and communities, and instructed in ways that would bring them in, albeit never as equals, into the American fold. This Carlisle model was used as inspiration for the development of similar schools across the country, and the U.S. Department of the Interior reports that 417 institutions made up the Federal Indian boarding school system, which operated from 1819 to 1969 across 37 states/then-territories (the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition has identified an additional 109 boarding schools run primarily by religious organizations) (Newland, 2024; National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition.)
Over the course of its 39 years of operation between 1879 until 1918, upwards of 10,500 students representing hundreds of distinct and diverse Indigenous Nations attended the school, many of whom were forcibly or coercively taken from their families (Fear-Segal and Rose, 2016.) Upon entering the school, staff notoriously cut the long hair of incoming children, dressed them in military uniforms, and issued them new names. For attendees, daily student life was marked by a strict regimen, English language instruction, and, for many, corporal punishment, systemic neglect, and physical and sexual abuse. Carlisle’s distinctive “outing program,” whereby the school assigned students to work in the homes of local families, in particular, showcased how Carlisle’s curriculum was less about providing education and more about cultivating a second-class labor force. Perhaps most telling of the atrocities committed at Carlisle, in addition to the testimonies of survivors themselves, is the presence of an on-campus cemetery--the final resting place of almost 200 Indigenous children who perished while away from home. Often, the school’s official records and the details of their deaths are inconsistent, vague, or contradictory, which itself points to patterns of medical neglect, unhygienic conditions, physical harm, malnutrition, and more. Indigenous experience is human experience, and so while Carlisle has indeed inflicted immeasurable horrors on Indigenous peoples, resilient Indigenous children and youth within the system also found ways to build community.
Sports history particularly illuminates this story, such as in the case of Jim Thorpe, who was once regarded as the “greatest athlete in the world” and certainly remains “the most famous Indian athlete of the twentieth-century” (Maraniss, 2023; Child, 2016). Born 1887 in Indian Territory (later, Oklahoma) and raised within the Sac and Fox Nation, Thorpe attended Carlisle Indian School, where he rose to prominence as an All-American football player, famously leading the Carlisle team in victory over the West Point Army team in 1912. His illustrious career continued on to include positions within the National Football League, Major League Baseball, and becoming the first Native American athlete to win an Olympic gold, which were given for his performance in the 1912 Stockholm Olympics decathlon and pentathlon (Maraniss, 2022.) Louis Tewanima, a Hopi student from Arizona, attended Carlisle alongside Thorpe, and similarly represented the United States in the Olympic Games, competing as a runner in 1908 in London and winning the silver medal for his 10,000-meter performance in 1912 in Stockholm (Gilbert, 2018.) Thorpe and Tewanima are upheld as prominent examples of both Indigenous and American excellence and achievement on the world stage, but the context in which their stories unfold--as students at Carlisle and within the broader history of Indigenous oppression that led them to that institution--must never be forgotten.
In recent years, the Carlisle Indian School has gained renewed public attention, particularly as the United States and Canada have made new strides in grappling with the histories and enduring legacies of residential boarding schools. Since 2017, for instance, a number of Indigenous Nations have undertaken repatriation processes designed to bring home the bodies and spirits of the nearly 200 Indigenous children at the Carlisle cemetery (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.) The most recent repatriation took place in 2025, where an effort heralded by the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes resulted in the return of the remains of 16 children to their ancestral homelands; critically, not all of the children who the Tribes intended to repatriate were found in their marked graves--a devastating outcome that reifies the original intentions of Indigenous erasure undertaken at Carlisle. In 2024, President Joe Biden paid tribute to these challenging histories at Carlisle by recognizing the school grounds as the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument. Several Indigenous novelists, including acclaimed writers Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa), Tommy Orange (Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes), and Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Sioux), to name a few, have incorporated the Carlisle Indian School into their recent works.
Despite these important developments, as well as the ongoing presence of the Center for the Futures of Native Peoples at Dickinson College, however, many in the American public, including in the immediately surrounding town of Carlisle and central Pennsylvania region, remain uninformed about the importance of this place. Acclaimed Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday has compared the sacredness of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School to that of the battlefields of Gettysburg (Fear-Segal and Rose, 2016.) As Momaday suggests, Native American history is American history, and no discussion of Native American history is complete without addressing the impacts of boarding schools. It is likewise virtually impossible to reflect on boarding school histories without a recognition of Carlisle’s role in shaping this trajectory. But the story of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School lives not only in the past. Its legacies--both of pain and of perseverance, of suffering and survival--live on through the descendents of former students, who continue to grapple with all that Carlisle means to them and to the world.
Works Cited and Resources
- Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/teaching
- Center for the Futures of Native Peoples. https://www.dickinson.edu/homepage/1660/center_for_the_futures_of_native_peoples
- Child, B. J. (2016). Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (2nd ed.). University of Nebraska Press.
- Erdrich, L. (2020). The Night Watchman. Harper. Fear-Segal, J., & Rose, S. D. (Eds.). (2016).
- Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations. University of Nebraska Press. Landis, B.
- Carlisle Indian School. https://www.carlisleindianschool.org/
- Maraniss, D. (2022). Path Lit by Lightning: The Life of Jim Thorpe. Simon & Schuster.
- National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, List of Indian Boarding Schools. https://boardingschoolhealing.org/list-of-indian-boarding-schools/
- Newland, B. (2022). Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report: Vol. I.
- U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs. https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/dup/inline-files/bsi_investigative_report_may_202 2_508.pdf
- Newland, B. (2024). Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report: Vol. II.
- U.S. Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs. https://www.bia.gov/sites/default/files/media_document/doi_federal_indian_boarding_school_initiative_investigative_report_vii_final_508_compliant.pdf
- Orange, T. (2024). Wandering Stars. Alfred A. Knopf.
- Power, M. S. (2023). A Council of Dolls. Mariner Books.
- Schmidt, M. (2018). Hopi Runners: Crossing the Terrain between Indian and American. University Press of Kansas.
- Cheromiah, A. The Indigenous Revolt. Podcast. Center for the Futures of Native Peoples. https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-indigenous-revolt-carlisle-pa-and-beyond/id17 73338731