Piecing Together the Past: Finding Student Stories (By Carolyn Brunell)

"Piecing Together the Past: Finding Student Stories in the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center" is designed as part of an 11th-12th grade course tracing American Indian history from the Precontact period until the present. It asks students to grapple with the question of the forms in which we preserve historical memory. In this lesson, each student will investigate the file of a single student from the records of the school preserved by the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center. Taking on the role of a historian, she will work to piece together multiple types of documents to reconstruct the stories her file reveals as well as those it might conceal.