Biden Designated Carlisle Indian Boarding School a National Monument

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On Monday, December 9, the Biden Administration officially designated the Carlisle Indian Industrial School campus in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a national monument. It’s the seventh new national monument that Biden has created since taking office in January, 2021.

Founded in 1879, the Carlisle School was one of the more than 400 Indian boarding schools that were a cornerstone of U.S. efforts to forcibly assimilate Indigenous peoples. The new monument will memorialize the 7,800 children from 140 tribes who passed through the Carlisle School, as well as the thousands of children and communities that were impacted by forced assimilation policies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

“It is in the public interest to preserve and protect the objects of historic interest associated with the Carlisle School and its prominent role in the story of Federal Indian boarding schools instituted under the United States policy of forced assimilation of Native children,” Biden said in a statement.

Survivors of the Carlisle School and other Indian boarding schools describe being forced to change their names, wear Western clothing, cut their traditional long hairstyles, speak English, and practice Christianity. Attempts to continue using their tribal languages or customs, or to escape, were severely punished. Many survivors describe physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. The schools were usually run by third-party organizations and religious groups, but were funded by the federal government. The Carlisle School officially closed in 1918, when the facility became a hospital for the U.S. Army.

“Designating the former campus of the Carlisle School […] as a national monument will help ensure this shameful chapter of American history is never forgotten or repeated,” the announcement said. “Acknowledging the Federal Government’s policies aimed at destroying Tribal and Indigenous political structures, cultures, and traditions—including through the Federal Indian boarding school system—takes a step toward redress and national healing in the arc of the survival, resilience, and triumph of Indian Tribes (including Alaska Native Villages) and the Native Hawaiian Community.”

The Carlisle School joins the six other national monuments designated by Biden: Avi Kwa Ame in Nevada; Baaj Nwaajo I’tah Kukveni in Arizona; Camp Hale-Continental Divide in Colorado; Castner Range in Texas, Emmett Till and Mamie Till-Mobley in Mississippi and Illinois; and the Springfield 1908 Race Riot National Monument in Illinois. The Biden Administration also restored or enlarged the boundaries of other monuments, including Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments in Utah and the San Gabriel Mountains and Berryessa Snow Mountain monuments in California.

The Carlisle School monument will encompass the same land and buildings as the campus that was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1961. The school is situated on the United States Army’s Carlisle Barracks. Not included within the monument boundaries is a cemetery where many of the Carlisle School students who died are buried. The army is already in the process of disinterring their remains and returning them to their communities.

The declaration also details a co-management framework between the National Park Service, the Army, and tribal partners, similar to the co-management structure in other recently designed national monuments like Bears Ears.

This designation is the latest in a series of actions that the Biden administration has taken to begin to address the historic wrongs perpetrated by the U.S. government against Indigenous people, including a historic apology in October. Many of these efforts were spearheaded by Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, who has sought to bring attention to the dark history of Indigenous boarding schools during her tenure. Haaland, a member of the Pueblo of Laguna, is the first Indigenous person to lead the department that oversees the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Her great-grandfather and grandparents were forced to attend boarding schools.

In 2021, Haaland launched the Federal Boarding School Initiative, which started with a federal study of the schools—the first of its kind. The findings were published in a two-part report detailing how many children had attended Indian boarding schools, how many had died, the number and location of burial sites, how much federal funding the schools had received, and suggestions for moving forward. Haaland and other officials also traveled the country on a 12-stop listening tour to hear firsthand from survivors how their time at the boarding schools had impacted them. More survivors are being interviewed as part of an oral history project.

“No single action by the federal government can adequately reconcile the trauma and ongoing harms from the federal Indian boarding school era,” Haaland said in a news release applauding the new national monument. “But, taken together, the Biden-Harris administration’s efforts to acknowledge and redress the legacy of the assimilation policy have made an enduring difference for Indian Country.”

The Carlisle School itself was closed in 1918, but Federal Indian boarding schools stayed open well into the 1960s. Some still operate today, under the same names and on the same campuses, but with radically reformed practices.