Mary Annette Pember and Jourdan Bennett-Begaye
ICT
WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Joe Biden announced the creation of a new national monument on the site of the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School to honor the tens of thousands of students who attended boarding schools as part of the government’s brutal efforts at forced assimilation of Native people.
The proclamation designating the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument was released on Monday, Dec. 9, at the fourth and final White House Tribal Nations Summit in Washington, D.C.
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The proclamation came just six weeks after Biden issued an historic apology to Native people for the government’s ugly boarding school history, in which Native children were often forced from their families to attend a school where they were stripped of their culture, families and language.
“By establishing a new national monument at the site of the former Carlisle school, President Biden is acknowledging the federal boarding school era, advancing healing and commemorating the resilience of tribal nations and Indigenous peoples,” the White House said in a press release Monday.
“The new national monument will tell the story of the oppression endured by thousands of Native children and their families at this site and the harmful legacy of the broader Indian boarding school system that the federal government operated or supported across the country for more than 150 years,” officials said.
The monument will sit on 24.5 acres of land encompassing the historic buildings and structures that made up the campus of the Carlisle School, including School Road gateposts that were built by Native youths at the school. The gateposts still stand today as a marker of the removal and separation of children from their families, tribes, and homelands.
The monument, however, will not include the Carlisle Cemetery, where the remains of children are still buried as the U.S. Army works to return them to their tribal communities and families.
“No single action by the federal government can adequately reconcile the trauma and ongoing harms from the federal Indian boarding school era,” Interior Secretary Deb Haaland, Laguna Pueblo, said in a press release issued by the Department of the Interior.
“But, taken together, the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to acknowledge and redress the legacy of the assimilation policy have made an enduring difference for Indian Country,” said Haaland, whose great-grandfather and grandparents were taken from their families and forced into boarding schools.
“One of the reasons I launched the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative was to ensure that this important story was told. Through the National Park Service – America’s storyteller – people can now learn more about the intergenerational impacts of these policies as we, as a nation, continue to take steps to heal from them.”
The two-part boarding school investigation concluded with recommendations for an apology from the United States for the boarding school history and for a national memorial to recognize the survivors and those who did not return home to their families. Biden personally issued the apology in October at the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona.
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Deb Parker, a citizen of the Tulalip Tribes and executive director of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Project, known as NABS, who attended the summit, said the monument will honor the survivors as well as those children who died at the school and never made it home.
“We at NABS are pleased to know that this will be taking place in honor of the children, children who never came home from these boarding schools,” Parker told ICT.
The Carlisle School, established in 1879, was the first federal Indian boarding school in the United States and operated until 1918. About 7,800 Native children from more that 140 tribes were forced or coerced under penalty of law to leave their homes and live at the school as part of the federal government’s assimilation policy. The stated goal of the government’s coercive education policy was to obliterate tribal culture, languages and spirituality as a means to divest Native peoples of their lands and resources.
The Carlisle school served as a model for the federal Indian boarding school system, which operated into the mid-20th century with more than 400 federal schools as well as hundreds of similar institutions operated by religious organizations that also received federal funding.
Carlisle and its successors served as models for Canada in later establishing that country’s Indian residential school system.
Carlisle, with its military-style, regimented culture set the tone for subsequent schools in which children routinely endured physical, emotional and sexual abuse. Students were separated from family, beaten for speaking their Native languages and often subjected to hard labor.
At least 973 children died at Indian boarding schools, according to the Department of the Interior’s Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative investigation. But Interior leaders noted that the number of deaths is likely far greater.
About 180 children died at Carlisle and were buried in the school cemetery. The school site, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, now houses the U.S. Army’s Carlisle Barracks.
Today, the barracks, one of the country’s oldest military installations, is home to the U.S. Army War College. The Army is currently implementing what it calls its Carlisle Barracks Disinterment Program, which has disinterred and returned 41 children to their families.
The program is overseen by the Office of Army Cemeteries which has been the subject of a lawsuit by tribal nations for failing to follow the rules of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, known as NAGPRA, by adhering to military regulations regarding the return of the remains of children who died at Carlisle.The Office of Army Cemeteries oversees the Carlisle Cemetery along with other military cemeteries.
Neither the White House, the Office of Army Cemeteries nor Haaland’s office responded to requests from ICT for comment on why the student cemetery was omitted from President Biden’s designation.
The new national monument will be cooperatively managed by the National Park Service and the U.S. Army. The National Park Service, in coordination with the Army, will work with tribal nations in developing a plan for ongoing management of the monument.
The goal is to ensure the monument tells the full story of the Carlisle Indian school and similar institutions from the boarding school era, according to a statement from the White House.
The Army will transfer administration of the gateposts to the National Park Service and sign a memorandum of understanding to guide management of the monument.
The Carlisle monument is President Biden’s 12th national monument designation under the Antiquities Act, which authorizes presidents to declare historic landmarks, historic and pre-historic structures and other objects of historic interest that are situated on federal lands.
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