Carlisle Indian School Outing and Lancaster County

Join us for a lecture with Mary Ann Levine (Franklin and Marshall College), Jess McPherson (Circle Legacy Center), and MaryAnn Robins (Circle Legacy Center).

The Carlisle Indian School was established in 1879 to create an off-reservation boarding school to “civilize” native children. Before it was shuttered in 1918, over 10,000 children had been forcibly removed from all their relations and subjected to an educational and vocational training regimen designed to divest them of their languages, cultures, and identities as Indigenous peoples.

This presentation will discuss the role that Lancaster County played in executing the agenda of the Carlisle Indian School and report on multifaceted ways that Indigenous youth dealt with their forced assimilation in Lancaster. It will conclude with a discussion of Truth and Reconciliation events as a way to honor the resilience of those Indigenous children who were torn from their homes and brought to Pennsylvania, as well as the persistence of their descendants.

With the support from a Mellon Foundation grant awarded to Franklin and Marshall College, a team of two faculty co-directors, two community partners from Circle Legacy Center, and ten F&M students documented the ways that Lancaster County and the Carlisle Indian School were entwined through the Outing Program. It is their hope that this research may provide a model for York County to investigate its own connections to the Carlisle Indian School.

What's included

-A 1-hour history lecture

-Light refreshments