Charles Fox
Special to ICT
CARLISLE, Pennsylvania — Rain fell through the night, bringing a welcomed healing to land that still carried the despondent echoes of its days near the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School.
By morning, a cleansed landscape with blue sky and sunshine greeted the several hundred people gathered at Dickinson College. It was a day to heal and celebrate, to shed tears and exchange smiles and hugs.
The crowd gathered in a circle for a ground-blessing at the site where Dickinson College’s new Jim Thorpe Center for the Futures of Native Peoples will be constructed, a move that will allow the existing center to grow from a small location on a side street into an educational resource that will be “a place of healing, connection and restoration.”
The new center, made possible by a $20 million gift from alumnus and philanthropist Samuel G. Rose, will create a building in the center of campus offering spaces for ceremonial gatherings, classrooms, special programming, and an art gallery featuring Indigenous or Indigenous-themed works.
“It’s intentionally designed that when our Native people come here, there’s a space for us to gather and heal, and a place where we can celebrate Indigenous narratives through art and through story,” said Dr. Amanda Cheromiah, Kawaika/Laguna Pueblo, executive director of the current center and a descendent of seven students who attended the Carlisle boarding school.
It will bear the name of acclaimed Olympian Jim Thorpe, Sac and Fox, a Carlisle alumnus who won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympics.
“I’ve been waiting for this all my life,” said Sandra Cianciulli, Lakota, 77, president emerita of the Carlisle Indian School Project and former vice president of Circle Legacy, a Native organization based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
“Maybe this is a new beginning.”
Construction is set to begin following the college’s 2026 commencement.
‘A tidal wave’
To Native Americans, Carlisle will never be just another sleepy college town.
Despite its Americana façade, it will always be cloaked in negative connotations and traumas caused by the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which operated from 1879 to 1918. It was the first federally funded off-reservation boarding school and served as the model for similar schools in the United States and Canada.
The school grounds can produce a wrenching emotional journey. In some cases, visitors are retracing the footsteps of ancestors who never made it back to their families.
The school is a dark chapter in U.S. history that changed forever the lives of the approximately 7,800 Native students who attended the school, their families and communities. It is also a chapter unknown to many Americans, a chapter that some would like to see erased.
Its difficult history has made the task of creating an education center, museum, or memorial devoted to the subject matter, with the necessary funding, an arduous task.
In the past several decades, numerous ideas have been proposed for a building to house a center in this south-central Pennsylvania town. None ever came to fruition. They all had hurdles they could never overcome — Pennsylvania’s negative reputation for its treatment of Native Americans dating back to the mid-1700s, the lack of a federally recognized tribe in the state, no willing investors, little state or local government support, and a growing shroud of erasure.
An $800,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation in 2023 allowed Dickinson College to create the existing Center for the Futures of Native Peoples. The grant, however, provided strictly start-up funding for staffing, programs, and for developing Indigenous curricula, but did not finance any physical space dedicated to Native gatherings or special events. An older brick residence, Cook House, that was being used mainly for storage by the college on the edge of campus became the initial home of the center.
Even then-President Joe Biden’s announcement in 2024 that the school grounds would become a national monument failed to initiate plans for a National Park Service visitor’s center despite expectations that then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland could serve as an intermediary among the parties.
Hope was plunging in 2025 for those who spent decades lobbying and working for the creation of a special center. So when Dickinson College, a small, private college that houses the Carlisle school digital archives, announced on Oct. 29, that it would be constructing the Jim Thorpe Center for the Futures of Native Peoples, the unexpected news arrived like lightning over a dark horizon.
Credit: Courtesy of Dickinson College
It was, indeed, seen as a “Bright Path” to many — a reflection of the abbreviated meaning of Thorpe’s name, Wa-Tho-Huk, in the Sac and Fox language.
“When I read the news, it just came over me like a tidal wave. Thank God somebody was able to accomplish something,” said Cianciulli, who is a descendant of Geoffrey Chipps (Runs in the Clouds) who was in the first class at Carlisle in 1879.
“I literally felt the Earth shift,” she said. “I was just overwhelmed.”
The sentiment was shared by Barbara Landis, a local historian who for decades was the main source of information related to the school through her website and research at the Cumberland County Historical Society. Along with anthropologist Genevieve Bell, Landis had compiled student lists and other resources in the early 1990s for school descendants, such as a weekly step back in time with transcriptions of the old school newspaper, The Indian Helper.
“In my wildest dream, I never would have imagined this,” Landis told ICT. “I was ready to walk away from a lot of this, but now I feel so differently because the work is going to continue …
“For so many years, Native descendants have driven by Carlisle but not been able to stop because they just couldn’t deal with being in this landscape that held so much pain,” she said. “And now there will be safeguards in place that are built into this whole project that will help them to deal with that.”
Past proposed settings for an educational facility or museum ranged from rescuing an historic farmhouse on the former school grounds to constructing a stand-alone heritage center with a façade that resembled one of the school’s historic buildings. Landis even toyed with creating her own center when a neighboring Carlisle home went up for sale.
Though Pennsylvania had once been home to William Penn’s Holy Experiment, it had become an unwelcoming place for Native people by the mid-1700s when his sons and grandson took over as governors and proprietors of Pennsylvania. The fraudulent Walking Purchase of 1737, massacre of the Conestoga in Lancaster in 1763, scalp bounties, vigilante groups,the French and Indian War, and political changes sent the message that Indigenous people should move elsewhere. Combined with the later shadow cast by the Carlisle school, it was difficult to attract tribal investment or the enthusiasm of state and local governments.
For Cianciulli, the low point came in early 2025 when a California businessman offered to fund the Carlisle Indian School Project’s heritage center they had been lobbying to build for more than 15 years — but only if a water park could also be constructed adjacent to help insure the investment would be profitable.
“I wasn’t sure what I just heard,’ Cianciulli said. “I don’t think I could face Indian Country again [if I accepted the idea] … A waterpark. That’s a cartoon.”
She continued, “I was tired of all these insensitive ideas that were strictly commercial with no concern for the generational damage caused to Native communities by forced assimilation… Nothing Indian ever came out of Pennsylvania except Indians themselves, you know. They were kicked out.”
Lightning strikes
The original center was designed as an initiative to better examine the Native American boarding school experiences, create a Dickinson College major in Native American and Indigenous studies, and to collaborate with Native American communities, scholars, and organizations on projects and symposiums.
Darren Lone Fight, 43, a citizen of the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation, was the founding director of the Center for the Futures of Native Peoples. Filling the role as an interim until an executive director could be hired, the associate professor in American studies saw himself as a grass dancer, one who dances on the pow wow grass to flatten the surface and prepare it for the dancers who will come.
Lone Fight, the first tenured Native professor at Dickinson, arrived at the college in 2020. He saw it as an appropriate time to redefine the college’s complicated history with the Carlisle school and with the origins of the Indian boarding and residential school systems, an opportunity for the college to move to the forefront of the conversation with “Indigenous leadership, acknowledgement, and vision,” he said.
“Dickinson College can be an innovative hub and locutionary center of the conversation around boarding school reconciliation in ways that no other institution can, and how we handle this history is critical to the college’s future and needs to be understood for the unique opportunity it presents to us to lead on an issue of national and international significance,” Lone Fight said in his Indigenous Futures Initiative he proposed to then-Dickinson Dean and Provost Neil Weissman in the spring of 2021.
“This history will remain ours regardless of our actions,” he said. “We can choose now how we tell this story, what actions we want to take regarding our history, and what and how we choose to articulate those actions to the world.”
Lone Fight saw the need to create a space where Native people could go and feel welcomed, and where the institution would be part of a college or university for stability and endurance in the years to come.
Lone Fight did not dance alone. The actions of past caretakers, descendants, and advocates, the failed attempts for a center, had prepared the surface.
“All of these earlier efforts were incredibly important and meaningful to the moment that we’re at,” said Lone Fight.
Then lightning struck when Samuel G. Rose and Dr. Amanda Cheromiah stepped in.
Rose, now 89, from Dickinson’s Class of 1958 and a real estate developer working primarily in Washington, D.C., has been Dickinson’s largest benefactor, entrusting more than $100 million to his alma mater.
“Sam’s life informs us all how to be better people, and that one person can indeed change the world,” Dickinson President John E. Jones has said of Rose.
In the fall of 2024, Rose met with Cheromiah, only a few months after she had taken over Lone Fight’s role as the center’s executive director, to listen to her plans for the Center for the Future of Native Peoples and her requests for program funding.
His reply was simple. “You’re thinking too small,” he said. “Think bigger.”
A program funding request soon transitioned to discussion of a building nestled in the heart of the campus. Lightning had struck in the form of the $20 million gift from Rose.
“We so mistreated the Native American people,” Rose said in a Dickinson College video produced at the ground-blessing. “I thought we owed them some good things.”
Rose has also labored for the restoration of bison in the American West, and supported the American Prairie Conservancy, Rare, and the Natural Resource Defense Council.
Landis praised Cheromiah’s efforts.
“She is connected to so many ancestors who were here,” Landis said. “Imagine the variety of experience her own ancestors had. That really can color her methods for pulling all this together. So I’m just thrilled. Nobody else could have done this.”
Cheromiah said forces finally came together.
“I believe that it’s by way of hundreds of thousands of years of ceremony sewn into this land, and it’s unfolding in this very powerful way right now,” Cheromiah told ICT. “The alignment of the people that are here … It is the perfect timing in all of this. All these perfect pieces are coming together and that’s how I believe this is coming to fruition.”
The design team for the building is led by Richard Olaya of O Z Collaborative, as the architect of record, and Johnpaul Jones, of Jones + Jones, as the design architect. Jones is of Choctaw, Cherokee and Welsh-American heritage and was one of the four Indigenous designers of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.
The design was described by Jones as “rooted in modern Indigenous design concepts, philosophies, and motifs, bringing forward symbols and elements of the Four Worlds gifts — the natural, animal, spiritual, and human worlds.”
Olaya described a building with spaces for learning, healing, ceremony, and art.
“Inside the building, we have gathering spaces, art galleries, and classrooms that include a palette of warm and welcoming materials with views and plenty of natural light,” he said. “Outside the building is surrounded with native plants, medicine gardens, a ceremonial ramada, and some incredible sculptures.”
A complicated history
The relationship between Dickinson College and the Carlisle school is not new. There were 10 students who matriculated to the college after their days at the school, and about 75 other students took classes at Dickinson’s now-defunct prep school division, Conway Hall (1905-1917), to prepare themselves for secondary education.
Frank Mt. Pleasant, a two-time Olympian and football star, was the only Carlisle student to graduate from the college, earning his degree in 1910.
The relationship between the two institutions remains complicated, with Dickinson’s support of Carlisle’s assimilation efforts. It was not unusual for Dickinson professors to be guest lecturers at the school, and in 1879, then-college President James Andrew McCauley delivered the sermon during the school’s first Christmas service. McCauley also created a charitable fund for the school, allowing donations to go directly to the school, bypassing the federal government.
The college also holds the dishonor of bestowing honorary degrees to two of the Carlisle school’s superintendents, including its founder, Richard H. Pratt, whose philosophy can be summed up with his infamous phrase, “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
At some point, the connection between Dickinson and the Carlisle school receded from view.
Professor Emerita Susan Rose, who is no relation to Sam Rose, would later teach classes on the subject. “I never heard of the Carlisle Indian School when I was a student here in the ‘70s,” she said. “It just sort of disappeared for a while.”
The professor feels it was the inquisitiveness of the grandchildren of Carlisle students, the third generation, who helped bring attention back to the subject and renew the relevancy to Dickinson.
“There’s this sense of a ghostly presence because of the absence of talking about it,” she said. “It’s the silence that speaks very loud to them. It’s the grandchild generation that really picks up the story and begins asking questions and looking at the research. So that’s really beginning to happen more and more in the last two to three decades.”
The past 15 years have renewed the bond between the two institutions.
In 2012, Dickinson hosted the first symposium on the Carlisle school. The multi-day event, organized by Susan Rose, Landis, and British professor and author Jacqueline Fear-Segal, brought together almost 300 storytellers, poets, musicians, and descendants, including N. Scott Momaday, G. Pete Jemison, and Maurice Kenny. It encouraged descendants to tell their stories and became the basis for the book, “The Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations.” The royalties of the book were originally intended to go towards the establishment of the Carlisle farmhouse as a heritage center, but they ultimately went to the center when the farmhouse restoration proved to be financially impractical.
The interest in the symposium was conceived following the success in 2011 of the documentary, “The Lost Ones: Long Journey Home,” produced by Susan Rose, student Manuel Saralegui and the Lipan Apache Band of Texas. The film documents the story of two Lipan Apache children captured by the 4th U. S. Cavalry during the “Day of Screams” and later taken to the Carlisle school.
In the summer of 2013, the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, the world’s most comprehensive digital archive on the school, was unveiled with funding from a Mellon Foundation grant for work in the digital humanities. It made the local archives available to distant audiences and brought the stories of Carlisle students to life. The site now gets 10,000 to 20,000 visits a month and typically sees one million page views each year. Cheromiah calls it the “foundation” of Dickinson’s efforts.
“I had this idea that we could build a website that would digitize records and photographs and documentation about the Carlisle Indian School so that the kind of people that Barb Landis was supporting on a regular basis wouldn’t have to travel all the way to Carlisle,” said college archivist Jim Gerencser. “They would have access to more than just what’s at the [Cumberland County] Historical Society. They would also have access to what is at the National Archives in D.C.”
With the second Mellon grant in 2023, the older brick residence, the Cook House, became home to the center. Also used for storage by an on-campus restaurant, Lone Fight said it was not unusual to have carts of restaurant provisions wheeled through the hallways during meetings.
Cheromiah would later nickname the building, “Grandma’s House,” after her attempts to make it more comfortable and inviting.
The ground-blessing
The crowd gathered in a circle outlining the proposed site of the new building during the ceremony on Nov. 8.
“It takes a lot of bravery and a lot of courage for Indigenous people to come here, this very place, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, because it’s a place of significant remembrance where what happened at the Indian school between 1879 until 1918, completely changed our communities forever,” Cheromiah told the crowd. “And there’s a lot of living history here… It’s like visiting your trauma.”
Four of Jim Thorpe’s descendants traveled from Oklahoma for the event. Jones, the college president, honored them as distinguished Dickinsonians.
“Wa-Tho-Huk [Jim Thorpe] continues to shape this place through a bright path of hope and love that uplifts his people and opens the way for indigenous futures,” Jones said as he handed the descendants framed certificates.
“His light endures, reaching far beyond his own community to inspire generations across cultures and nations,” Jones said. “He and his family hold a place of deep honor within the heart of Dickinson College.”
After the event, Thorpe’s granddaughter, Mary Thorpe, expressed her feelings.
“It means to me a chance for our people to heal,” she said. “They’re going to be able to come up here and experience their emotions and be able to go to a place where hopefully they can pray and heal, and that generational trauma will begin to fade for our people. … I think my grandfather would be very honored and very happy about what’s going on today.”
It was also the opportunity, for those gathered, to express their affection and gratitude to Samuel Rose for his vision of a center for Native people. He was presented with and wrapped in a blanket featuring a bison motif.
Gerilyn Tolino, 51, Diné, is the great-granddaughter of Tom Torlino, as his name was spelled as a student, will always be associated with the Carlisle school and its attempt to assimilate Native students.
Tolino, a member of the advisory board of the center, spoke emotionally after the event. Like many, she saw the building as more than bricks and mortar.
“It’s so powerful and moving and it was time,” she said. “It was time to have a permanent residence available to the storytellers, to the knowledge keepers and then to also have it as a place of healing for family, relatives, clan members, communities to come together and to come and pay homage, do meditation, do what they need to do to take care of themselves for the ancestors and for the future generations.”
She continued, “I think in the past, for protective reasons, they went underground so a lot of our ceremonies were done secretly… It is time not to mute those or censor them. It’s time that we really address the hurts and the traumas.”
The fall leaves on the surrounding canopy of trees painted the backdrop for the ceremony, with yellow and orange as they made their last autumnal stand before the change of seasons. It was a time for reflection especially for those who had been involved in the decades-long process.
Susan Rose felt gratitude and amazement that this historical moment was finally happening, a moment of “honored lives lost and reclaimed.” She also recalled those who paved the way to the day, “the grass dancers” Lone Fight referred to.
“I feel grateful for how this work has evolved, often as a labor of love, and to all those who continue this hard work,” Susan Rose said. “I am grateful for the Center for the Futures of Native Peoples and what may yet unfold. I am thankful to all the wonderful people I have met through this journey, thoughtful, creative, generous people who have worked together in so many fruitful ways — Indigenous people and communities, allies and institutions sharing stories and sharing experiences both painful and joyful.”
They felt that a “bright path” had been prepared with prayers and tears consecrating the land. There was now a path to lead from the trauma of the past to find healing, a guiding walkway to the future.
“When I think about the Thorpe Center for the Futures of Native Peoples, it’s really meant to be a long-term home for the work that Indigenous people are already doing around governance and education and data and scholarship and art,” Lone Fight said.
“It’s not intended to be a memorial to a tragic past.”