Students in a Classroom Studying Native American Culture [version 2], 1901

Male and female students posed in a classroom with a white female teacher. On the blackboard at the rear of the room at left is a drawing of a teepee and at right is another drawing. Hanging against the blackboard are Native American textiles, possibly clothing. Native American baskets or pots are sitting on the desks of the students in the front row. The students are reading from small books, and may be studying the poem "The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. 

Johnston took three similar photographs of this classroom. One other version can be seen in Related Images. The Cumberland County Historical Society's cataloging of the other image identifies this as a "Ninth Grade Class School Room." The third version has slight differences from this one and is also held by the Library of Congress: https://www.loc.gov/item/2008675528/.  

In 1901 the Bureau of Indian Affairs contracted with the photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston to document the school at Carlisle for an exhibit at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. Johnston visited the school in the spring of that year and took at least one hundred photographs. Johnston donated her personal papers, including 103 prints of the photographs taken at Carlisle, to the Library of Congress.  

A copy of this image can be downloaded from the Library of Congress website: https://www.loc.gov/item/98503023/