President Joe Biden recently announced the establishment of a new national monument acknowledging the history of the residential school system, which oppressed thousands of Indigenous children and their families during the course of more than 150 years.
Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument will honor the Indigenous children who were forcibly taken from their parents and communities and barred from speaking their languages or practicing their culture. In government-operated residential schools in the US, these children were also frequently abused.
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Approximately 7,800 Indigenous children from more than 140 tribes were sent to the former Carlisle Indian Industrial School between the institution’s founding in 1879 and its closure in 1918. However, federally subsidized residential schools for Indigenous and Native children continued to operate until the 1960s.
The residential school’s campus was designated a national historic landmark in 1961 and added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. In addition to 24 historic structures, the Carlisle School campus includes school road gateposts that were constructed through children’s labor.
Biden’s proclamation on December 9 acknowledged how thousands of American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian children were removed from their families and tribes, “often by force or coercion,” and sent to educational institutions like Carlisle under the federal government’s goal of assimilation. Indigenous children were subject to physical abuse, compulsory labor, corporal punishment, sexual abuse, inadequate medical care, insufficient nutrition, and non-consensual haircuts, as well as the removal of traditional clothes and names.
“Designating the former campus of the Carlisle School, with boundaries consistent with the National Historic Landmark, as a national monument will help ensure this shameful chapter of American history is never forgotten or repeated,” Biden said. “Establishing a national monument at the historic Carlisle School and 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 24.5-acre site will be managed by the National Park Service and the US Army, due to the monument being located with an active military facility. The announcement of the federal monument was made during fourth White House Tribal Nations Summit on December 9.
During the summit, the Biden-Harris administration also announced a government strategy for Native languages aimed at “expanding access to immersion language programs in schools, support community-led language education efforts, and promote Native language schools and programs.”