'Loss of Language and Culture'

By Andrew Metz | STAFF CORRESPONDENT

It began in Carlisle, Pa. with the philosophy: Kill the Indian and save the man.

This was the pedagogical mission of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the model for a system of forced assimilation that plucked children from reservations and tried to wipe out their native language and identity.

Founded in 1879 by Army Lt. Richard Henry Pratt, the government school was the alma mater to more than 10,500 American Indians during its 39-year existence, notably Olympic champion Jim Thorpe. For most Indian people, though, it remains the grim touchstone of an era where their tribal ways were shocked out of them.

"Carlisle was considered the elite of the off-'rez boarding schools because the father of them was the one who developed the policy," said Barbara Landis, the school's biographer for the Cumberland County Historical Society. "It was his experiment and Carlisle was the site of that first experiment."

While some children were shipped away by relatives or tribal officials who hoped they'd escape the despair of reservation life, many were forcibly enrolled in the schools by the government. Upon arrival at Carlisle or the scores of institutions it spawned in the United States and Canada through the turn of the century, students were stripped of their traditional dress, bathed, clothed in Western garb and made to cut their hair.

Pratt's intention was deprivation from all things native and total immersion in white society, a "baptism," as he once was quoted as saying in an address to Baptist ministers. "I believe in immersing Indians in our civilization," he said, "and when we get them under, holding them there until they are thoroughly soaked."

In the years following the U.S. military's defeat at the Little Bighorn, the schools became a key weapon in the campaign against the Indians, imposing an ethnic oppression that has traumatized native people even decades after most of the institutions closed or converted into more palatable places of learning. Carlisle was shuttered in 1918, however, the Bureau of Indian Affairs still funds several dozen residential schools.

"There is still a legacy from boarding schools," said Carmen Taylor, executive director of the National Indian School Board Association. "All the way from a lack of parenting to feelings of oppression, to say nothing of the loss of language and culture."