WARNING: This story contains disturbing details about residential and boarding schools. If you are feeling triggered, here is a resource list for trauma responses from the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition in the U.S. In Canada, the National Indian Residential School Crisis Hotline can be reached at 1-866-925-4419.
Charles Fox
Special to ICT
The Carlisle Barracks in Pennsylvania — home to the second-oldest active military base in the United States — look tranquil from the outside, with carefully manicured landscapes and Mayberry-like streets lined with officer housing.
For many Native Americans, however, a visit to the former site of the notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School can be a wrenching emotional journey, a nightmare, as they retrace the footsteps of ancestors who may never have made it back to their families.
“The first time I visited the children’s graves at Carlisle was different than any other feeling of sadness I ever felt. It was like standing in front of my own murder. The graves laid in front of me like a crime scene,” Mohawk Bear Clan Mother Louise McDonald told ICT.
“I had no words,” she said. “My hands trembled as I ran my fingers over their names on the tombstones.”
The school grounds are “a portal to past whispers, shouts, laughter and tears,” in the words of author and retired Arizona State University Professor K. Tsianina Lomawaima — a desire on the part of the students who endured and sometimes died at the school to be recognized for their courage.
The barracks housed the Carlisle school from 1879-1918, where nearly 8,000 students from more than 140 tribes attended as part of a government assimilation program that separated them from their families, language and culture. It was the first federally funded, off-reservation Indian boarding school in the U.S., and it served as a model for boarding schools across the U.S. and Canada.
Since 1951, the site has been home to the U.S. Army War College, but it still contains a cemetery with the remains of more than 100 children who died at the school and never made it home. Forty-two students have now been disinterred and returned to their homelands, but the identities of more than a dozen are unknown.
Carlisle will soon be more accessible to visitors. President Joe Biden recently announced a proclamation establishing the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument on the site, to tell the stories of Native students who survived the boarding school era, and those who didn’t.
“I don’t want people forgetting 10, 20, 30, 50 years from now, pretending like it never happened,” Biden told tribal leaders at the White House Tribal Nations Summit on Monday, Dec. 9. “We don’t erase history. We acknowledge it, we learn from it, and we remember so we never repeat it again.”
For some, the initial visit to Carlisle comes at the most emotional of times — the act of repatriating a relative or tribal member from the school cemetery, forcing them to confront the darkest and most severe histories of Native boarding schools.
As part of ICT’s ongoing coverage of the Carlisle school and efforts by the Office of Army Cemeteries to return the buried remains of children to their tribes and families, ICT contributor Charles Fox spoke with a number of Native people over the past months about their emotional visits to the Carlisle site.
What follows are the words of those Native people, from various tribes, about their experiences. The participants range in age from 11 to 78
, and come from as near to Carlisle as Norristown, Pennsylvania, and Askwesasne, New York, and as far away as Browning, Montana, and Anchorage, Alaska.
Their thoughts are presented with a series of photo illustrations created by Fox, who used a combination of his own recent photos and historic images drawn from archives.
Louise McDonald, 63, Mohawk Bear Clan Mother
“The innocent children whose lives were taken from them may not have wanted to die but they had no choice due to the loneliness of their hearts giving out. The scene was intense … I whispered words of love as I sprinkled our sacred tobacco upon the cold wind whirling around me. I sobbed and asked creation to release them from their bondage. Let them travel safely along the rays of the morning sun so they can reach the place of their ancestors, and let them know the love that was robbed from them because of a greedy government who hid itself behind a greedy God of no mercy. May their spirits live forever in the arms of a kind and loving mother.”
Kirby Metoxen, 64, Wisconsin Oneida tribal councilman
Kirby Metoxen visited Carlisle for the exhumation of three Oneida students in 2019, but his first visit in 2017 affirmed his belief that the children needed to be returned to their homelands.
“As I am walking in the cemetery, I see an Oneida name. I see a Wheelock. I see a Powless. I see a Caulon. …On the 5th Oneida headstone I see Melissa Metoxen. I took a breath and I was just wailing. It’s that cry when you know somebody died. I just couldn’t catch my breath…I just sobbed. These were children. They didn’t ask to come here. How come nobody came and got them?”
Violet Metoxen Blake, 55, Wisconsin Oneida (unrelated to Kirby Metoxen)
Violet Metoxen Blake visited Carlisle for the exhumation of Oneida student Jemima Metoxen, whose remains were returned to her homelands in 2019 along with Sophia Caulon and Ophelia Powless. Violet is a great-niece to Jemima.
“I get goose bumps when I tell people how beautiful and spiritual it was. Our elders tell us those are ‘goose bump hugs’ ” — from deceased ancestors — ‘because they’re there with you.’ I knew they were with me the whole time.
“When we were at Carlisle and going through the whole tour of the jail cells that had Army mannequins (since removed), I truly envisioned our people in there… I’m so grateful that my grandmother, who went to the boarding school in Tomah, survived.
“I remember the sadness I felt while I was trying to say the first prayer for Jemima at the cemetery. I never knew that I could feel such a loss for someone who I have never met. Yet I did… That year was a lot of learning and feelings that are so much more than I could have ever imagined. Viewing Jemima’s remains made me feel like I knew her forever. I felt sadness, gratefulness, angered and peacefulness that she’s home. I later buried my mom next to her aunty Jemima. I visit them often. I know they are okay in the sky world.
“One of the other memories that stays in my thoughts is the woman at a (Carlisle) restaurant that wanted to know why we had tobacco pouches on and their significance. She literally cried and apologized because she never knew about the boarding school.”
Chris Eagle Bear, 26, Rosebud Lakota
Rachel Janis,23, Rosebud Lakota
Chris Eagle Bear and Rachel Janis with the Sicangu Youth Council of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe stopped at Carlisle in 2015 following a youth event in Washington, D.C. Their visit would initiate the movement to repatriate the remains of the students buried in the Carlisle Cemetery. Eagle Bear is now a tribal councilman in Rosebud.)
Chris Eagle Bear: “When we got there, we put pieces of candy on each grave. We read all the names that we could. We found the ones from our area, and then we said a prayer, and we offered a song … We were just kids with a curious question, ‘Why aren’t we doing something to bring them home?’
“So we started walking out of the cemetery back towards the school bus and out of nowhere, hundreds and hundreds of fireflies just came out of the ground, came out of the air itself. There were so many of them … It was like a surreal feeling. It felt like you’re in a TV show, or a movie, you know. It felt magical, and like you had to be there to experience it.”
Rachel Janis: “As we were leaving, going up to the bus, we had our fireflies all over us, and we didn’t want to kill them, because we understood there was a spiritual concept to them. And so we told them, ‘We’ll be back. We’re going to let you go, but we’ll be back.’ And I called this firefly friend. “We’ll see you again, friend’… There was a relative buried there, and his name is Friend Hollow Horn Bear, and to me, that was a sign.”
Chris Eagle Bear: “I’ve been there four times, and each time is just as heavy as the last, if not more. It’s one of those things that you can’t explain what you can feel. And the best way to explain it is like walking through a fire.
“Every time I’ve been there, it’s been specifically for those children, and you can’t help but feel this heaviness around you. You say a prayer, sing a song, and then the heaviness kind of fades away for a little bit, but it’s still there. It’s like something doesn’t want you to leave. Something feels good in your presence… It means that our children are still very much here in this world. Maybe not in the physical sense, but they’re still in the spiritual essence. …
“It’s a place where people learn the art of war. And you’ve got to ask yourself a question, ‘How many of those people that have resided there know the history of the place that they’re on?’ Because I very much feel like the history, the big history of Carlisle, isn’t shared.”
Kelley Bova, 61, Dakota
Kelley Bova was born Rose Anne Owen, a Dakota infant taken from her family at birth and moved to Rosebud, South Dakota, where she was placed for adoption with a suburban Philadelphia dentist and his wife through Catholic Charities.
“When I was adopted, I was brought down to Rosebud (South Dakota) for my first three months. …There was a girl at the Carlisle cemetery and on her gravestone was Rose. And that was the name my [biological] mom gave me. And when I saw that it said ‘Rose,’ and it said, ‘Sioux,’ it just made me cry, because it’s like, we’ve made the same exact journey. … Just seeing that grave with her name, my name, on it, Rose, was very significant, very touching for me, and I thought about the same journey that we took. But yet, she never got to go home.
“It was very emotional, of course, but I think more instead of being sad, I was angered that it actually happened. Angry that not a lot of people knew about it … angry and upset that a lot of people don’t even care. You know, to them, it’s what it was in the past. Like, kind of a get-over-it kind of thing.”
Eleanor Hadden, 72, Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshianan
Since the Office of Army Cemeteries began the process of returning the remains of students buried at Carlisle, the number of unknown remains has increased because some of the remains found in the graves have been inconsistent with the age and sex of those supposedly buried there.
“Back in the mid-1980s, we were moving to Italy. We decided to take a trip down the Blue Ridge Mountain road. I told my parents the route we were taking, and Mom said, “Oh good, you can stop at Carlisle Indian School and see if there is any information on Grandma’s sister Mary Kininnook, my great-aunt. This was my first hearing of Grandma’s sister, Mary, attending Carlisle at the age of 7. My maternal grandmother, Elizabeth, told Mom that ‘Sister Mary went away to school and she died there and is buried there.’ That’s the only information Mom had to begin the search for her Aunt Mary.
“Mom connected with an anthropologist friend, and a friend at the county’s historical society. They searched through avenues Mom didn’t know about and finally found evidence of Mary attending Carlisle and dying there. We went to the Carlisle archives and the archivist there couldn’t find any paper trail of Mary. She finally pulled out a drawer filled with small black-and-white photos. She asked, “Do you think you can find your grandmother’s sister in these photos?
“I told them that I had no idea what my grandmother looked like as a little girl. How did they expect me to find a little girl that I had only learned about a few days prior to going to Carlisle?
“We continued our journey and went to Gettysburg. There were markers all over the field identifying the regiments with specific information regarding the individuals who had died at Gettysburg. I was hurt, angry and baffled as to how the Army could locate where each man had fallen in battle but could not find 14 “Unknown” children at Carlisle.
“I had to call my mother that night and let her know we didn’t find anything. As soon as my mother answered the phone, I told her, ‘Mom, I couldn’t find her. We sobbed over the phone because we felt we had just lost a close family member. Indeed we had.’”
K. Tsianina Lomawaima, 70, Muscogee (Creek) Nation and German Mennonite descent
“I’ve only visited Carlisle once. To my knowledge, no relatives were enrolled there. My dad, Curt Carr, was a survivor of a similar school, however: Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Oklahoma. Established in 1879, Carlisle has always symbolized a sort of ‘ground zero’ of the federal off-reservation Indian boarding school system. Carlisle’s history, buildings, cemetery, and grounds carry a distinctive weight.
“With a small group of friends — fellow boarding school historians, some Carlisle descendants — my husband and I walked the Carlisle grounds: the old football field, the farmhouse, the cemetery, the guardhouse. Every site, every vista there is freighted with emotion, sedimented through history. The place where I was unexpectedly struck dumb, rooted to the ground, was the bandstand. That graceful gazebo-like structure at the center of campus caught me by surprise. I’m not sure why that place felt like a portal to past whispers, shouts, laughter and tears. Maybe because it functioned as the center of surveillance, of control, of the attempted (sometimes achieved) erase-and-replace transformation of Native names, hairstyles, dress, posture, emotional structure, favorite foods, language, religion – just everything.
“It brought to my mind what I think ought to be the quote most closely tied to [school founder] Richard Henry Pratt, who epitomized settler colonial certainty: ‘Knowing as I do that I am supremely right, it would be wicked to falter.’”
Sandra Cianciulli, 76, Lakota
“In 1954, when I was 6-years old, my father took me to the Carlisle Barracks on the first of our many road trips. Dad told me what little he knew about our ancestors. He didn’t know their names or when they went to school there, but he remembered hearing about them from his family when he was growing up. We started walking around where, I would someday learn, was the parade grounds, the area where they took many group pictures of the students. All I knew at the time was I was walking with my dad, holding his warm, calloused hand. He told me if we walked around enough that at some point we would be walking in the footsteps of our ancestors.
“As a little girl, I remember looking at my feet and imagining a relative standing beside me. Then we found Indian Field, where we just stood together as if in awe of the greatness in the person of Jim Thorpe who honed his incredible athletic skills on this very ground. … I looked up at my father’s face and saw a tear roll down his cheek. When I saw that I realized this meant far more to my father than just hero worship. So, I just hugged him as hard as I could, hoping it would make him feel better, just like he always did for me.
“Now, 70 years later, even though my father is no longer here, I know our relatives’ names. I know when they went to school there and I have seen the photos. … I stand in the very place where my ancestor, Geoffrey Chipps, stood with all the other boys of the first class at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School on Oct. 6, 1879.”
Dianne Desrosiers, 66, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate Tribal Historic Preservation Officer
Dianne Desrosiers visited Carlisle in 2023 for the disinterment and repatriation of the remains of students Amos LaFromboise, Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate, and Edward Upright, Spirit Lake.
“There was a six-foot-long box lined with red fabric. And he (Edward Upright) was all laid out … I became emotional because it really hit home…
“I tried to imagine in my mind his face and his smile. …It was just the emotions and sadness that came over me. It’s still hard to talk about.
“He became real. He became a child. He became my child…’I’m going to make sure that they do right by you because we’re taking you home.’ It was kind of like a silent commitment.”
Savannah Foley, 11, Standing Rock Lakota
“I feel calm, good and proud to be a part of my culture. It means so much to me to dance for these kids that were my age and died in sadness. Carlisle is a special place for me. It’s where I can dance, honor and pray for these kids who were taken away from their families and forced to be taught customs and language that wasn’t theirs.”
Leon Chief Elk, 70, Blackfeet
Rhonda Boggs, 53, Blackfeet
Leon Chief Elk, a boarding school survivor, and his cousin, Rhonda Boggs, made a trip to Carlisle in 2018 to participate in the disinterment and repatriation of a Blackfeet boy, George Ell, who died at the school in 1891. Boggs cut her hair in a traditional act of mourning, and the boy’s remains were placed on her hair for the return home.
Leon Chief Elk: “I have been going to boarding schools since I was 10 years old. Visiting Carlisle brought back many dark memories. I was mortified and furious when on the tour we visited the cell where at times students who behaved in not-accepted behavior were locked up. On the walls were scribblings and writings as the students attempted to write on the walls. …Some were trying to run away, but to where? Did they have any idea where their home was?
“They had no means of getting home even if they knew where to go. They would have to cross a country that was hostile to Native Americans, during a time when massacres were happening.
“This brought feelings of a cold evil. How could a Christian people think it was ok to literally hold these students like this? Treat them in such a brutal inhumane manner?
“We were the Palestinians of the time. I’ll carry a sadness for these students until it’s time to make my journey.”
Rhonda Boggs: “Thinking back six years on what I felt on the repatriation of George Ell [her great-uncle], I remember standing vigil after his skull was unearthed, waiting patiently as his bones were collected one at a time. … His wake started the minute his skull was placed in the travel casket. Standing vigil and looking at George, I thought, ‘He was someone’s child, he had the ability to breathe fresh air, run, ride horses, and have a happy life.’ I was trying to picture his mother giving birth to this child I never met. It must have been a happy event. I felt sadness knowing his life was cut short, because the government felt Native children needed to be educated.
“For eternity I will always be with George. I like to think he is protecting me, just as much as I’m protecting him. George will always be a part of me, not just biological, but in spirit, too.”
Leon Chief Elk: “We can’t describe what it was like to remove him from the ground, to take him and hold him before anybody touched him. You realize it is not about you. It’s about him and getting him home. … We were doing a thing of love. We were bringing a little boy home.”
Gerilyn Tolino, 50, Diné
“My great-grandfather Hastin Tohaali became known as Tom Torlino (Tolino). You may not know his name, but you may recognize him by his iconic before-and-after photographs taken while at Carlisle Indian Industrial School. He arrived in October 1882. Six years ago in October 2018, I embarked on the journey of healing for my Torlino (Tolino) family, a journey that began 136 years ago.
“I am a descendant of three generations of survivors of U.S. government Indian boarding schools. Talk about the boarding school experience was hidden. There was so much trauma and pain that affected survivors and generations that followed. Great-grandfather Tom Torlino is a true Dine’ Naabaahii, a protector/warrior. A Naabaahii is someone who understands what is sacred and the sacrifices this entails while on their path. They know their part in the journey involves traditional knowledge, medicine, and their heart.
“I now understand my part in this story: it is to educate. When I speak of my great-grandfather, it serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of history and adding a voice to his photo. He has a name, his tribe, his clan and his family. He survived so that we (his children) could thrive.”
Eugene M. Black Crow Sr., 69, Oglala Lakota, who now lives in Philadelphia
“December 2021 was the first time I stopped there…It was a cold, chilly day. I was on my way back to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. It was the kind of windy day where I had to pull my hat down to keep it from flying off. I walked into the cemetery and saw the military-style gravestones that had the names of children of all nations buried far from their homelands – far from grandmas, grandpas, uncles, aunties, brothers, sisters, cousins, who would never see these young children of different tribes ever again.
“I said a prayer and offered the extra food (given to me by mistake at a nearby McDonald’s drive-through) to the children. I couldn’t stop the tears, so I left.”
Boe Harris, 78, Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, Spirit Lake Dakota Oyate
Boe Harris attended honoring ceremonies at a powwow at the Carlisle school grounds in 2000.
“I had never been on these grounds before or any boarding school grounds, not even my father’s. The idea of children dying while being at a school didn’t seem possible to me. How, why, became my questions and my quest.
“After the honoring ceremonies were done, I walked into the cemetery. I immediately felt feelings that did not have words. A sense of a calling from the graves, crying out not to be forgotten filled my being. I knew then that I needed to learn about my own father’s boarding school experience and the experiences that other tribal children had. My journey began….
“Every time I visit Carlisle I still hear the cries of those in the cemetery that have not returned home. … Many of us will always remember them, and I feel visiting the cemetery brings the children’s spirits some comfort to know they have not been forgotten.”
Roberta Capasso, 71, Oneida
“When I first arrived at the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School grounds in 2003, I was very surprised to see a cemetery in the front of the grounds. I became very upset when I realized this cemetery was full of deceased Indian students. I was sad. I felt much sorrow for these children who arrived at the Carlisle School, only to die there …
“I grieve for these deceased children. My great-grandma Sophia Huff arrived here in July 1891. Sophia slept on the porch of the dormitory because there wasn’t enough room to house new students. Sleeping on a porch, 900 miles away from Oneida, Wisconsin, had to be upsetting for Sophia. I was outraged, with a heavy heart, to learn Sophia was forced to attend Carlisle, to become Christianized and assimilated into the White culture.
“My great-grandmother survived attending this school. Since when does a child attend school in survival mode? My heart, it hurts, to know she was sent away from her parents, stripped of her Oneida self and beaten if she tried to be who she was, an Oneida Indian from Wisconsin.”
Michelle Schenandoah, 49, Oneida, founder of Rematriation
“Indian residential schools reveal the long history of legalized racism designed to eradicate Indigenous identity and connection to the land, to our own cultures and families. This horrifying history is felt among our communities, our families and our bodies today in the form of intergenerational trauma.
Raised by the hands of the U.S. government or the church, our children were told that their lives, families and cultures weren’t worthy of mere existence. ‘Kill the Indian, save the man,’ was the motto of these schools. Our peoples’ children were denied the most basic and foundational need of love and familial connection. The connection most of these children experienced was the physical, emotional and sexual abuses from those who ran the schools.
“Walking through the gravesite at Carlisle made me think about the loss of lives and the resulting devastation that our communities continue to feel to this day. Imagine those hundreds and thousands of children who died, had they lived, how many more Indigenous families would be here today? Our populations are significantly reduced today because of the actions by the U.S. government and churches that allowed our peoples’ children to perish under the inhumane genocidal policies they enacted.
“Countless children’s gravesites are still unknown across the country. We may never know just how many children’s lives were stolen.”
How we did it
A note from the author
The images are compilations of photographs, both historical and from the present, combined with overlays to create texture for artistic purposes and in some cases to replicate the look of early photographic methods. Through these Photoshop methods, I was venturing into new visual territory for myself. As a newspaper photographer for more than 40 years, I was manipulating images in a way that I had not done before. Had it not been for the need to recover from back surgery this past summer, and the patience and willingness of my son, Bryn, to teach me new Photoshop techniques, it is likely this project would have remained on the back burner.
I wanted to create images that would give a renewed appreciation for what the students at Carlisle endured and a new life to historical images that had become commonplace to many. My original idea was to take historical images and rephotograph in locations at the Carlisle Barracks where they were originally taken, but it became too limiting and led me to consider other options and techniques. While we are fortunate that so many photographs were taken at Carlisle, especially by John N. Choate, most of these were group shots and studio portraits due to the technical limitations of photography during that era. The journalist in me also wanted to create the images that were never taken – students disembarking from the train, saying goodbye to their parents along the Missouri River.
Special thanks to the National Anthropological Archives of the Smithsonian Institution, the Cumberland County Historical Society, the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center, and Princeton University Library for their permissions with the historical photos. -Charles Fox/Special to ICT
*Correction: The people who spoke to ICT about their visits to Carlisle Indian Industrial School ranged in age from 11 to 78 years old. The range of ages was incorrect in an earlier version of the story.
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