Letter from Trumpland — a visit to historic Indian boarding school in Pennsylvania reopens an old ache

Jim Thorpe, also known as Wa-Tho-Huk, was a citizen of the Sac and Fox nation who attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. In 1912, he became the first Native American to win Olympic gold for the United States, in pentathlon and decathlon. (Photo: Glen Retief)

By Glen Retief

20 May 2025

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School was the first Indian boarding school deliberately established off-reservation, with a specific mission to cleanse students of their home cultures. For four decades it also served as a flagship for similar cultural-assimilationist schools across the US and Canada.

‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” That was the grisly, unapologetic motto of the North American Indian Boarding School Movement, from the 1870s until the 1960s.

Today, Donald Trump may be on a mission to sanitise US history as he issues executive orders requiring publicly funded museums to celebrate an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty”.

Yet no matter how much white Americans may want to look away, history’s darkness keeps sounding a tragic undertone to the cheery amusement park melodies of much of contemporary US life – the 100,000 STEAM games, the city-sized malls, the yachts, ski resorts and recreational vehicles.

Recently, I visited the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, located about an hour away from my adoptive home of Sunbury, Pennsylvania.

This school, founded in 1879 and operational until 1918, was the first Indian boarding school deliberately established off-reservation, with a specific mission to cleanse students of their home cultures. For four decades it also served as a flagship for similar cultural-assimilationist schools across the US and Canada.

In recognition of its importance, in December 2024 President Joe Biden proclaimed the old grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School to be a national monument.

Indian boarding school assimilation The old hospital building at the boarding school, which is today an army hotel. (Photo: Glen Retief)

The Carlisle school was founded by Richard Henry Pratt, no relative of the South African David Pratt who shot and wounded Hendrik Verwoerd. Richard Pratt, a former military officer, was inspired by his experiences teaching Native prisoners of war to assimilate Indigenous youth into white American culture, believing that this would offer these children their best life opportunities.

The school was founded on a former military camp from the US Civil War, and after the school was closed the site returned to being a military barracks. Today, the monument is co-administered by the National Parks Service and the US Army.

I began my visit at the Cumberland County Historical Society, on a leafy street in the quaint, 300-year-old centre of Carlisle. I went there to buy a copy of their booklet titled “Walking Tour of Grounds of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School”, the only such guidebook currently in print.

It was on something of a whim that, after my purchase, I took the lift up to the second floor to view their small museum. There, amid the displays of folk art wood carvings and antique clocks, to my surprise I found an entire room dedicated to the industrial school, with information about its accomplishments in sports, music and vocational training.

The house of the football coach for the school, affectionately nicknamed ‘Pop Warner’. (Photo: Glen Retief)

But it was the wall-sized picture that caught my attention. Here, I also got my first clue that this exploration was going to be less a dispassionate intellectual journey than an emotionally charged confrontation with my South African past.

Looking out at me was a sea of several hundred faces, Indigenous children all in the woollen, buttoned-down uniforms of the Carlisle school. Some certainly looked happy: say, the debonair boy with a tuft, towards the back middle of the crowd

But then there were the majority: the young girl with frizzy hair, apparently on the verge of tears. The young boy, so numbed out he seemed on the verge of falling asleep.

And then, most horrifying of all, a second young boy, staring into the camera, shaved head, wide-eyed, his face communicating, what exactly? A vast, almost incomprehensible loneliness. The trauma of being torn from those who loved him.

Closeup of a face from the group picture on display at the museum of the Cumberland Country Historical Society. (Photo: John N. Choate)

Close-up of a face from the group picture on display at the museum of the Cumberland Country Historical Society. (Photo: John N Choate)

Oner of the children in the group picture on display at the museum of the Cumberland Country Historical Society. (Photo: John N Choate)

I had my own brush with boarding school suffering, from ages 12 to 17, a much shallower wound than those of the children I was now looking at, but enough, now, to reopen an old ache in my chest, and to leave me uncontrollably weeping at this vision of mass mistreatment of children. (Luckily I had the museum to myself, and I could cry away beneath the display cases of moccasins and athletics trophies and the photograph of legendary Carlisle football player Jim Thorpe kicking up at a near-vertical angle).

My parents lived in Skukuza village, in the Kruger National Park. Those were the final years of apartheid, and the nearest white, English-speaking high school was an hour and a half away, in Nelspruit. So every Monday and Friday I climbed on a green and white bus, for the trip down the R40, to or from Lowveld High Hostel, with its tall brick buildings and wire fences.

To me, it was a nightmare. Older boys were responsible for maintaining discipline in the passages, and they did so by administering daily beatings with cricket bats. Somehow they pegged me, correctly, as gay, and so they subjected me to a special range of humiliating initiations, designed to cure me of my effeminacy: thrashings with pillow slips filled with athletics spikes; baking summer afternoons, confined to bed under piles of blankets, and surrounded with electric heaters.

I had no idea what steamroller of hatred had hit me. In the early mornings, I climbed to the top storey of the east classroom building, and looked towards my parents’ home, fantasising about the angels who might grab me if I jumped, and ferry me home across koppies and savannahs.

Carlisle Indian Industrial School was famous, too, for its violent punishments. When children spoke their own languages, teachers washed their mouths out with lye soap. Teachers caned boys and girls for mistakes on tests, or for forgetting their homework.

For fun, the younger boys were made to run “belt lines” where they were whipped by older lads. If students sneaked off the school grounds to, say, perform their cultural rituals in the woods, they were locked for days in the guard house, with nothing to eat but bread and water.

I gathered myself emotionally over lunch, then drove out to the Carlisle Barracks where I followed signs to the office where visitors undergo a background check before receiving a pass to visit the monument.

Lucky for me, I’m a dual citizen of South Africa and the US. Later that weekend, at an academic conference focused on the legacy of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, I would meet an Italian museum curator who was denied entry because the office was unable to complete an FBI background search. But after getting my clearance in five quick minutes, the guard at the gate waved me right into a miniature, fenced-off suburb, with a commissary, human resources building, athletics stadium, hospital and the US Army War College.

Presidential proclamation be damned: I could not see a single sign to the historical monument. Nor was the map on the inner back cover of the Historical Society booklet much help. It simply showed the base as a giant, featureless semi-rectangle, with the old school grounds protruding from the bottom left.

After driving around for a few minutes, I parked in a visitor’s bay and decided to ask for directions. But then I ran into what I struggle, in hindsight, to see as anything other than the great American habit of historical erasure. I asked, first a young man in uniform, carrying a book satchel; then a blond middle-aged man cleaning his car; and finally an elderly fellow mowing the football fields.

“No clue,” said the student, even when I showed him the booklet with the pictures of the buildings still standing.

“Never heard of it,” said the car washer.

The lawn mower just shook his head.

Laboriously, I oriented myself with the map, then, at last, I was in luck. Outside the post office, a soldier said: “Just keep going down this road until you hit the guard house.”

And once I found the old school, the booklet came into its own. There are 14 buildings still standing out of an original 32, all of them now repurposed. The old hospital has become an army hotel. The teachers’ quarters have become flats for junior officers. Only the sports centre, with a display honouring Jim Thorpe, remains a gymnasium.

For severe infractions, like sneaking off the boarding school grounds, students were locked in this old guard house for several days, eating only bread and water. (Photo: Glen Retief)

And now, again to my surprise, I found something oddly familiar, even comforting, in the buildings themselves. There, right on the edge of the base stood the coach’s house, looking cute and inviting, with its white siding and Greek-revivalist porch pillars. In later years at Lowveld High, I got invited into teachers’ homes like these, with my friends. I remembered the vice-principal having me over for supper; the hostel head teacher inviting me to watch PW Botha’s “Rubicon” speech in his living room, and saying after it: “God knows what happens now.”

Likewise, viewing the Carlisle school’s old music centre, I remembered practising at Lowveld High for a cameo appearance in Strauss’s Die Fledermaus. In one scene, I accidentally kicked a beach ball off stage into the audience, and someone batted it back to me.

Music, like literature, was a corner of that community where I could be myself. Was that true, too, for members of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Band, which performed at presidential inaugurations? More importantly, did some of the devastated-looking kids from the photographs eventually find a measure of peace even in this place of cultural genocide? Did they eventually return home to build fires in their Southwestern kivas, or dance for the green corn harvest in the Appalachian mountains?

I finished the tour and returned to my car. There, I plugged the address of my hotel into Google Maps. One block forward, one right turn and I’d left the army base by a back route, no papers or checks in the outgoing direction.

When we sneaked out at boarding school, we always had to climb out of a window, then down a fire escape and through a hole in the fence. The 20-minute walk to the Nelspruit restaurants was both exhilarating and terrifying, the latter because of the canings that would come our way if someone saw us.

Jim Thorpe, also known as Wa-Tho-Huk, was a citizen of the Sac and Fox nation who attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. In 1912, he became the first Native American to win Olympic gold for the US, in the pentathlon and decathlon. (Photo: Glen Retief)

“If you want to see me well and strong again,” wrote Luzena Swaney to her mother, a Cherokee living more than a day’s train ride away, in North Carolina, “you will have to help get me away from here.”

But for many Carlisle students home was unreachable – half a continent away. In addition to the cultural assimilation, the US government appreciated the leverage boarding schools gave the government over adult Native communities. After all, no Apache warriors or Choctaw protesters were going to oppose the federal government too vigorously with their children held hostage in Carlisle’s dormitories. As a result, boarding school officials discouraged trips home, even over long summer breaks.

When Richard Henry Pratt died in 1944, he was buried in Arlington National Cemetery, alongside presidents and generals. By contrast, the approximately 180 children who died at Carlisle Indian Industrial School – of tuberculosis, influenza, homesickness and suicide – were buried on-site.

Today, their graves line Claremont Road; commuters drive past them to the skyscrapers of nearby Harrisburg. Many names are misspelled. All the graves are adorned with crosses, whether or not the children they commemorate worshipped their conquerors’ gods. These children, at least, never recovered. They never got to go home, to heal, grow or reclaim their cultures.

I imagined them lying, close to death, in that hospital that is now a hotel. I pictured them, praying in Cherokee, Navajo or Ojibwe, to the Great Spirit: “Please, get me out of here. Please send me an ancestor to lift me up and take me home.” DM

Glen Retief’s The Jack Bank: A Memoir of a South African Childhood, won a Lambda Literary Award. He teaches creative nonfiction at Susquehanna University and recently spent a year in South Africa as Fulbright Scholar.

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