What are we talking about when we’re talking about orphans? In a sense, that is the animating query at the heart of my book. I’m trying to unpack why we’re still so attracted to certain kinds of stories about orphans (primarily in fiction, but also in real life), how we have used the figure of the orphan to work out our fears (about the family and children and motherhood and religion and Americanness), and how groups have wielded power by taking on the mantle of caring for orphans.
Within that question is another, more basic one: What is an orphan, really? If you’re new to, well, who I am, I’ll tell you this: I am an orphan in what I suppose is the “purest” sense—both of my parents died before I turned eighteen. I’m a “full” orphan. But many of the orphans that I’m writing about in my book—including the fictional ones—aren’t like me. That’s because we’ve always used the word “orphan” to describe not just children with two dead parents, but also for children with one dead parent. And some children we have thought of as orphans didn’t lose a parent at all, not to death anyway. In the 1800s, only about a quarter of children in American orphanages were “full” orphans. The rest had either one or two living parents—poor parents who turned to orphanages in a time of desperate need. Now, poverty is still a driving force behind family separation, but parents aren’t voluntarily leaving their children behind. Instead, the family-policing system (aka the child welfare system) is forcibly removing children from poor parents and putting them into the foster care system, which has replaced orphanages in this country.
This is all to say that an orphan is not an orphan is not an orphan—we have always used this label for largely symbolic reasons, to excuse or justify family separation, and to delineate those who are “deserving” from those who are not. Which leads me to why, in a book about orphans, I’m writing about Indian boarding schools.
At the same time that orphanages were blossoming across the U.S., Indian boarding schools—genocidal establishments that removed Native American children from their families to assimilate them into Anglo-American, Christian culture—were taking root. The Civilization Fund Act of 1819 provided federal funding to prop up these boarding schools, which were largely run by Catholic and Protestant groups, the same groups that ran the majority of orphanages. It might seem odd to include this history in a book about orphans—these were children with families and tribes who cared for them—but it is important in the larger scheme of who society deems worthy of keeping with their families, and who is considered to be a child in need of institutional care.
Two weeks ago, I visited the site of what was perhaps the most notorious Indian boarding school—the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. CIIS, which opened in 1879, was the first such school to be run by the government, serving as a model for a federal system of off-reservation schools. As Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose point out in Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, “it is an indisputable fact that the Indian School initiated a large-scale diaspora of Native children, and that the geo-spatial-cultural dislocation they experienced as part of settler colonialism was grounded in a new and foreign place-name that would soon become infamous in all Native communities as a major site of cultural genocide: Carlisle.”
Carlisle seemed to me to have an uneasy relationship to this infamous history. At the center of town, among many historical markers recalling events from the 1700s like the Whiskey Rebellion, sits one acknowledgement of CIIS—a stone “IN RECOGNITION OF THE ATHLETIC ACHIEVEMENTS OF JIM THORPE,” the Olympic gold medalist, professional baseball and football player, and one-time CIIS student. The stone does not name Thorpe’s tribe (he was a member of the Sac and Fox Nation) or acknowledge that his name at birth was Wa-Tho-Huk, or Bright Path. Unless you visit the Cumberland County Historical Society Museum a few blocks from that marker and see its exhibit on CIIS, you would not get even the slightest hint of the school’s dark history.
CIIS was founded on the site of the Army’s Carlisle Barracks, which had been in existence since before the Revolutionary War. After the Civil War—and after the Army went through the trouble of reconstructing the barracks, since Confederate forces burned all but one building—the Army stopped using the site, deciding it was no longer strategically located. That left it available for a new project by an Army officer who believed that education was the solution to the “Indian Problem.” Captain Richard Henry Pratt’s mantra was, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” In other words, from the start, Pratt openly and loudly espoused the school’s goal of genocide.
More than 10,500 children from more than 140 tribes attended CIIS from 1879 to its closing in 1918. They traveled to Carlisle by train after their families and tribes were convinced or coerced to send them to the school. Upon arrival, they were stripped of their traditional clothing and forced to cut their hair, adopt new names, and speak only English. They also had to attend church—the school touted freedom of religion, but this only meant a choice among Christian faiths. In addition to this forced assimilation, the children endured abuse, hunger, and solitary confinement. And some died, mostly of diseases like tuberculosis that spread rapidly in the institution. About 180 students were buried in a cemetery on the school’s grounds (it was moved to a new location on the grounds in 1927).
In order to visit the grounds, you need to pass a federal background check. That’s because the site of CIIS is still owned by the Army, and is now used by the U.S. Army War College. If you do go through the background check and walk the grounds, you’ll see that the Army barely acknowledges that CIIS had occupied this space for nearly 40 years. What little markers they do have up tout the school’s athletic history, lauding Jim Thorpe, of course, and Coach Glenn S. “Pop” Warner. There is also a stone with a bronze plaque honoring Pratt, which includes the quote, “The way to civilize an Indian is to get him into civilization. The way to keep him civilized is to let him stay.”
I was grateful that before I headed to the U.S. Army War College, I stopped at the historical society and bought a walking tour booklet complied by Kate Theimer, an archivist who is working with the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center out of Dickinson College. Otherwise, it would have been impossible to understand how the buildings still standing now were used during the CIIS days. I was also grateful to spend two days in the archives myself, at the historical society’s library, leafing through letters and yearbooks and student work, starting to piece together what life was like at CIIS.
The story of CIIS and Indian boarding schools more broadly echoes our country’s history of orphanages, orphan trains, and even foster care (children at CIIS were often “placed out” with local families). I’ll be exploring those echoes in my book, and digging into how CIIS created a blueprint for removing Native children from their families, tribes, and cultures in an attempt to eliminate Native Americans altogether.
Sadly, this issue remains pressing—Native children are still removed from their families at disproportional rates, and a week before I went to Carlisle, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that seeks to dismantle a federal law called the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) that aims to keep Native families together and keep Native children within their tribes. The case against ICWA is yet another example of using the care of “orphans” as an opportunity to wield or wrest power—it is an attempt to dismantle tribal sovereignty.
Recommended reading and listening:
Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations, edited by Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose
Kate Theimer’s blog and podcast on the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, and the center itself
Season two of Rebecca Nagle’s podcast This Land, which starts at the CIIS cemetery and explores the case (Haaland v. Brackeen) that seeks to dismantle ICWA
Rebecca Nagle’s recent article for The Nation on the the Haaland v. Brackeen case
xoxo Kristen