A
reclaiming history mere few miles from Dickinson, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School (CIIS) was founded in 1879 to “civilize” American Indian children by teaching them to assimilate into American society. Over the course of 39 years, the school took in approximately 10,000 children from 140 tribes — many of them forcibly. Of those who attended, many entered careers as teachers, tradesmen and athletes — including Frank Mount Pleasant, Dickinson class of 1910, who competed in the 1908 summer Olympics in London. Others, cut off from their native languages, identities and families of origin, entered a legacy of trauma and disenfranchisement. All of them have stories to tell, and now, more than 130 years later, their descendants, as well as researchers and archivists, have unprecedented access to those stories. One of those descendants is Rene Garcia, who learned about her grandfather, Peter White, and other Mohawk ancestors who attended the CIIS, through the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, a Dickinson-hosted Web site dedicated to posting all available records of the children who attended the school between 1879 and 1918. The Dickinson team members behind this ambitious project include Susan Rose ’77, professor of sociology and director of the Community Studies Center; James Gerencser ’93, college archivist; Malinda Triller Doran, special collections librarian; and a multitude of students and recent alumni who have traveled to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) in Washington, D.C., to scan more than 4,400 CIIS student files so far, totaling about 60,000 pages of records — two-thirds of the total amount on file. Barbara Landis, historian at the Cumberland County Historical Society, as well other local CIIS experts, is lending her expertise. 35