President Joe Biden chose his last White House Tribal Nations Summit to announce the creation of a national monument to honor Native American boarding school survivors.
“I don’t want people forgetting 10, 20, 30 years from now, pretending that it didn’t happen,” Biden told the gathering of tribal leaders on Dec. 9. “We don’t erase history. We acknowledge it. We learn from it and remember from it so we never repeat it again.”
In October, the president apologized on behalf of the federal government for the abuse of thousands of Native American and Alaska Native children who attended government-funded schools, going back to the 1800s.
The monument will be located on about 25 acres of the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School campus near Harrisburg, Pa. It was one of the first and largest of the federal boarding schools. Before it closed in 1918, more than 10,000 Native children had been taken away from their families and forced to attend.
United States Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland also announced on Dec. 9 that the Interior Department, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, and the Library of Congress are working to preserve stories the department collected on its national Road to Healing Tour, which included a stop in Anchorage.
Jim LaBelle was one of those who shared his experiences of abuse at the Wrangell Institute in Southeast Alaska, a school that was similar to the one in Pennsylvania.
“Carlisle served as the model for almost all of the other boarding schools that came afterwards,” LaBelle said. “And that was the military model.”
LaBelle is a retired Alaska Native studies professor at the University of Alaska Anchorage and board member of the National Native Boarding School Healing Coalition. LaBelle’s college courses have looked at the influence of the Carlisle school on other Native boarding schools. He says it was founded by Gen. Richard Henry Pratt, an Indian fighter in the U.S. Army who coined the phrase, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
LaBelle says many of the Alaska Native children who were sent to Carlisle had been orphaned by epidemics, and Pratt’s militaristic approach only added to their trauma.
“It was a process of getting your hair shorn, having clothing confiscated and burned, being issued government-issued clothing. It was all part and parcel of the Carlisle experience,” LaBelle said, similar to the forced assimilation he experienced at the Wrangell Institute, along with physical and sexual abuse.
LaBelle says new research has shown that Sheldon Jackson, the Presbyterian minister who promoted Native boarding schools in Alaska in the late 1800s, had a big influence on Pratt’s belief that imposing a military structure on the children’s education was a quick way to erase their Native identity.
LaBelle says he’s glad the former campus of the Carlisle School will become a national historic landmark. He hopes it also will recognize the other boarding schools, which include about a hundred in Alaska.
The Biden administration will use the Antiquities Act to create the monument on what is now the U.S. Army’s Carlisle Barracks. It will include buildings that made up the school, along with gate posts that were built with the labor of children at the school.
The National Park Service and the U.S. Army will jointly oversee the Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument. The Biden administration says they will be required to consult with Tribal Nations and the Native Hawaiian Community for its development and ongoing management, so that it tells the full story of the boarding school era — not just at the Carlisle School, but at other similar institutions.
