Recent News & Updates

Several members of the project team recently returned from a week-long digitization trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Project Co-Director Jim Gerencser was joined by Digital Projects Manager Don Sailer and project consultant Blair Williams to scan student records as well as administrative documents related to the operation of the Carlisle Indian School. We also explored more general records of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, looking to better understand the boarding school system that Carlisle was a part of. The team always looks forward to making new discoveries through these digitization efforts.

The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center site will be updating to the latest version of its software platform on Wednesday January 18, 2023 as our current system is no longer supported. 

Please note that search will likely not function for several days after the upgrade process starts on January 18. While the site's URL will remain the same and any saved links/bookmarks will still work, you will notice significant changes in the appearance and functionality.

If you have any questions or concerns, please reach out to us at cisproject@dickinson.edu.

Thank you for your patience as we work to improve the site!

It's hard to believe it's already been eight years since our first group of interns completed their summer work of scanning documents at the U.S. National Archives and then processing the files and posting the material to our website. It's also been four years since two of our team members spent two months compiling information about the Carlisle students who died while attending Carlisle in order to develop our Cemetery Information resource pages. As families continue their efforts to have their ancestors returned home from the Carlisle Indian School cemetery, and as Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland has announced an investigation into the Indian Boarding Schools and student mortality at those schools, our colleagues here at Dickinson College prepared a short video reflecting on the Digital Resource Center and our hope that it may continue to provide valuable information for families of Carlisle students as well as other researchers across the country and around the world.

Watch Video on YouTube

Several members of the Dickinson College Archives team recently returned from the latest in a series of digitization trips to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

Library Digital Projects Manager Don Sailer '09 was joined by project consultant Blair Williams and volunteer Martavis Washington to scan administrative documents related to the operation of the Carlisle Indian School. The team is looking forward to discovering more about Carlisle through this records series.

The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center is excited to announce that a new collection of enrollment records are now available online!

The Descriptive Statements of Pupils were created during the 1880s, 1890s, and 1900s to track groups of individuals sent or transferred to the Carlisle Indian School. This form would have typically been filled out by the agent or other government employee working at a particular agency or reservation, and then the form would have been sent along to Carlisle with the group of students. These forms were then forwarded along to Office of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. These records provide additional information about name variations, home addresses, health upon arrival, and other factors. 

These records are today held by the National Archives in Record Group 75, Entry 91: Letters Received by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, 1881-1907. The files were digitized in 2017 and 2018 by Dickinson College students and staff. More Descriptive Statements will be posted as they are processed.

Descriptive Statements of Pupils do not exist for every group of students who arrived at the Carlisle Indian School, and they contain varying levels of detail. They can be found by searching for "Descriptive Statements", or by using the broader Enrollment Lists tag.

Five members of the Dickinson College Archives team recently started the latest in a series of digitization trips to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

George Gilbert '19, Julia Bray '19, and Library Digital Projects Manager Don Sailer '09 are joined by project consultants Blair Williams and Frank Vitale '16 for a two week trip to scan administrative documents related to the operation of the Carlisle Indian School.  The team is looking forward to discovering more about Carlisle through this records series.

Thanks to a generous grant from the NHPRC, the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center has developed a teaching kit for use in schools, libraries, and other educational institutions in the United States. The teaching kit is comprised of color facsimile reproductions of a variety of photographs, newspapers, and booklets dating from the years of the school’s operation, 1879 to 1918. A full inventory of the materials included in the teaching kit is available here, along with PDF copies of each of the items so that you can preview the content and even download your own copies, if desired. The contents of these teaching kits also complement lesson plans and other materials available in the Teaching Resources section on this website.

The grant has provided funding for 250 teaching kits to be freely distributed to interested schools, libraries, and other educational and cultural organizations where people may be teaching about the Carlisle Indian School and the Indian boarding school movement. In order to request a free teaching kit to be mailed to your school, please complete the request form below. The materials for the kits are currently being printed, and we anticipate them being mailed out mid-summer so that they are available for use during the next school year.

UPDATE: All of the free teaching kits have been distributed. Due to demand, we have printed additional teaching kits, which are available for purchase through the Dickinson College Bookstore website.

Please feel free to share this announcement with any school, library, or other educational institution that may be interested in purchasing a teaching kit, and direct any questions to cisproject@dickinson.edu. 

Five members of the Dickinson College Archives team recently started the latest in a series of digitization trips to the National Archives in Washington, D.C.

George Gilbert '19, Friends of the Library Intern Rachel Suppok ’16, and Library Digital Projects Manager Don Sailer '09 are joined by project consultants Blair Williams and Frank Vitale '16 for a two week trip to scan administrative documents related to the operation of the Carlisle Indian School.  The team is looking forward to discovering more about Carlisle through this records series.

The Dickinson College Archives and Special Collections recently acquired a collection of 39 glass plate negatives from the studio of John Nicholas Choate, the famed photographer who frequently captured images of Carlisle Indian School students and activities. The collection includes individual and group portraits, most of which were not commercially sold. As a result, most of these images are rare and have never been publicly accessible before. Many of the people in these pictures have identifying captions, or have been identified by cross-referencing other photographs.

 All of the images are now digitized and available through our website. You can view the images here, or read through the collection finding aid here. If you have any new information about the images, please share through the "Submit corrections" button on the bottom of each image post.

The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center team would like to share a new resource, simply titled Cemetery Information. This resource aims to support the research of descendants, scholars, and others interested in the history of the Carlisle Indian School cemetery by providing easy access to a wide range of primary source documents about the cemetery and the Carlisle Indian School students interred there.

There is an individual page entry for each person interred (including those who lack a named headstone in the modern cemetery), and each page entry includes basic information about the person's name, Nation, and date of decease. Each page also includes a collection of primary source materials, attached as a PDF file, about the person's death and burial. You can browse or search these pages using the interactive table on the Cemetery Information homepage.

Also included in Cemetery Information are a number of resources about the cemetery space, including an interactive aerial map of the modern cemetery, downloadable tables comparing headstone inscriptions with recorded data, and a number of maps and a brief history of the original and modern cemeteries.

If you have any questions or comments, please consult our Research Methodology, or contact us using the email address on the left sidebar.