When the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it had one goal: to force Native children to be assimilated into White society. Founded by Richard Henry Pratt, a Civil War general who convinced tribal leaders that their children needed to be “Americanized,” the government-run boarding school was driven by his guiding principle: “Kill the Indian in him and save the man.”
The Independent Lens film Home from School: The Children of Carlisle, which premieres on November 23 at 9pm on GBH 2, tells the story.
Thousands of Native American children from tribes, including Northern Arapaho, Blackfeet, Lakota, Cherokee, Apache and Oneida, were removed from their homelands, sent to the school and stripped of their languages, traditions and culture. Most children were left emotionally scarred and culturally unrooted with trauma that has echoed through generations. Some never returned home—there are more than 180 students buried right on the school grounds. Several gravestones had no names.
In 2017, a delegation of Northern Arapaho elders and youth traveled 2,000 miles from the Wind River Indian Reservation in Wyoming to the Carlisle School to bring home the remains of three boys from their tribe—Little Plume, Horse and Little Chief—who died there in the early 1880s.
Working as a Wyoming newspaper reporter in the 1980s, director and producer Geoff O’Gara developed personal connections with members of the Northern Arapaho tribe, including the Soldier Wolf family, whose ancestor was buried at Carlisle. He followed their unsuccessful attempts to reclaim the remains at the school, which is now owned by the U.S. Army. And he was there in 2017 when Northern Arapaho families were finally granted permission to bring them back to Wyoming.
“I knew this would be a moving story about people I really care about,” he said.
O’Gara collaborated with Jordan Dresser, associate producer and a member of the Northern Arapaho tribe. “I view this film as us telling our own story, doing it the way we want to do it,” Dresser said. “For me, it was like bringing our voice into it, which is very important.”
Sophie Barksdale also joined the team as co-producer and production manager. To show the damage that forced assimilation has caused for Native people, Barksdale dug into the research. Her investigation included information from the National Archives, the Library of Congress and the families themselves. In particular, Barksdale consulted with Yufna Soldier Wolf, whose family began the repatriation effort more than a century ago. “Yufna’s grandfather kept everything—he had crates of letters, news clippings, photographs,” she said. “Her family was so integral in getting this process going. And she was the one who was driving it in the end.”
At Dickinson College in Carlisle, archivist Frank Vitale discovered even more letters that had not been catalogued—correspondence between chiefs who sent their children to the school, even a letter from a priest on the Wind River Reservation asking Pratt about student deaths. “Finding those pieces was really incredible,” Barksdale said. “They could have sat in that box forever, and we would have never known about them.”
Each source was carefully referenced and archived. “When you work with Independent Lens, everything—every quote, every image—has to be backed up and documented properly,” O’Gara said.
But on the day the families arrived at the cemetery, with the cameras rolling, all did not go as planned. As the remains were being exhumed, O’Gara said that he and Vitale were nearby in the Army Education Center reviewing the location of the grave sites. “And it was then that we discovered as they were digging that it appeared they had the wrong grave.” They were looking for a 14-year-old boy. Instead they found the remains of two older teenage boys, he said.
For Dresser, who is now chairman of the Northern Arapaho Business Council, the mix-up was just another example of the disrespect that his people have been subjected to for centuries, which still continues today. “It showed once again how Native people are treated as invisible or less than,” he said.
Finally, in the summer of 2018, a second delegation from Wind River returned to Pennsylvania to secure the actual remains of Little Plume, the third Northern Arapaho child, and bring him to his permanent resting place on the Wyoming reservation.
Dresser said it’s important that viewers learn about Native American history from those whose families have lived it.
“We have experienced a lot of generational trauma, and boarding school is the root for a lot of that trauma.”
Watch Independent Lens’ Home from School: The Children of Carlisle,
on Tuesday, November 23 at 9pm on GBH 2.
