Thanks to a grant from the NHPRC, Dickinson College will host a Teachers' Institute on the Carlisle Indian School and the continuing impact of Indian boarding schools. The institute will be held July 30-August 4, 2017 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Specialists in American Indian education and 12 secondary school educators will come together to confront and interrogate this important history. Participating teachers will develop lesson plans that use the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center and other available sources. These lesson plans can then be used in native and non-native classrooms, community centers, and libraries around the country. Travel, room and board expenses will be paid for by the grant, and teachers will also receive a stipend for their participation. People interested in the summer institute should download the attached document for more information and submit an application according to the instructions. Please feel free to share this announcement and application form with any one who may be interested in applying, and direct any questions to cisproject@dickinson.edu.
Recent News & Updates
The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center has recently received a wonderful donation of 11 original images related to the Carlisle Indian School from the family of Brockey (Charles W. Buck) (Piegan). Brockey attended the school from 1890 to 1895 and collected these items during his studies. The photographs include images of the Carlisle Indian School Band and the school's display at the World's Fair Columbian Exposition in 1893, as well as many familiar scenes in and around the school (including the graduating class of 1894). These photographs, along with a copy of an obituary of Brockey, will soon be available on our website!
After three years and nine team research trips to Washington, DC for digitization of Carlisle Indian School content, we have completed processing and posting online all of the student file folders from Series 1327 from the National Archives. Series 1327 is the largest collection of individual student records, composed of 155 boxes and more than 6100 individual folders. These folders collectively hold roughly 125,000 pages of material, now fully available to everyone for use! There is still much more to come for the project and additional material is posted daily, so check back regularly for new content.
Five members of the Dickinson College Archives team have recently begun the latest in a series of digitization trips to the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Linda Genser '17, Paige Hamilton '17, and Fiona Keane '19 are joined by current Friends of the Library Intern Suri Smith '13 and next year's Friends of the Library Intern Frank Vitale '16 for a week-and-a-half long 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.
A team of student interns, Rachel Kruchten '16, Justine Cenzer '18, and Frank Vitale '16, led by Friends of the Library Intern Suri Smith and Library Digital Projects Manager Don Sailer, are currently undertaking a three-week long scanning trip in the National Archives in Washington, D.C.! The team hopes to scan all remaining student files for the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, and to capture images and scans of various administrative and ephemeral records. The team is excited to be back in Washington and at the National Archives.
A fifth trip to continue scanning student files at the National Archives in Washington, DC is underway! Dickinson College student interns Rachel Kruchten ‘16, Joelle Paull ‘17, Matthew Ferry '17, Luke Kang '16, post-grad assistant Meghan Abercrombie ‘15 join Friends of the Library Intern Katie Clark and Library Digital Projects Manager Don Sailer for a two week research trip. The team hopes to scan 15 boxes of student files for the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.
Most of the student interns on this trip have previously worked on the project and are excited to be back at the National Archives!
We are pleased to add a new photograph to our collection of Carlisle Indian School images, thanks to the generosity of Laura Bullock. The photograph on this postcard shows students who are members of the Class of 1909. Unfortunately, the individuals in this photograph have not yet been identified. This item will be available in the Image collection soon. We want to thank Ms. Bullock for her generosity in donating this image to our collection.
Additional browse and filter options have again been added to the site! After you click on a tag, such as for nation, a format, or a person’s name, you will notice some additional tabs near the top of the page. These allow you to limit results to “Student Files Only” or “Images Only.” With these new tabs, you will have access to all the filter options you enjoy on the main browse pages on the site, except now additionally limited to whichever tag you clicked.
For example, if you were looking at the Sarah Mather Student File (see example screenshots; click the image for more). You see that she was a member of the Sioux nation, and you want to see what else you can find in the Digital Resource Center for that nation. Clicking the tag, you are given a list of all the records currently tagged with “Sioux” in the Digital Resource Center — as of March 2015, over 500 records. From the main tab near the top (“All records”), there is not much you can do besides scroll through all 500. However, if you wanted to explore only student files, by clicking the “Student Files Only” tab at top, you can get access to all the same filter options as you would have on the main Browse Student Files page. So, for instance, you can limit the results to those students who entered in 1879, the same year as Sarah Mather. You can also view just images with the “Images Only” tab, and again use additional filter options. For instance, you can limit to the 1870-1879 time period, during which Sarah Mather entered the school. This currently provides you with only one result: an image of “FIRST SIOUX GIRLS – AS THEY CAME TO CARLISLE OCT. 6TH, 1879.” Since her student information card indicates that she, too, entered on October 6th, Sarah Mather is likely among the girls pictured in this image.
We hope these additional tabs and filter options will allow you to explore the materials presented in the Digital Resource Center in new ways, and make new discoveries. If you have any questions or comments, please let us know by clicking the feedback tab on the right-hand side of any of the pages on this site.
, 
A fourth trip to continue scanning student files at the National Archives in Washington, DC is off to a snowy start. Dickinson College student interns Linda Genser ‘17, Joelle Paull ‘17, and Meghan Abercrombie ‘15 join Friends of the Library Intern Katie Clark, for a two week research trip. The team hopes to scan another 30 boxes of student files for the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center.
Linda and Joelle have previously done work editing and posting scanned copies of student files to the website, so they are enjoying the opportunity to work with the original, physical documents. Meghan recently curated a small display of Carlisle Indian School publications for the Dickinson College Archives, and she is now excited to be learning more about the students themselves.
In the process of describing and uploading thousands of documents to this website, mistakes occasionally slip through our review process. With this in mind, we have added a button for submitting corrections. The button appears at the bottom of each posting on the site for student files and images. Please let us know if you find any typographical or other errors in our descriptions and tags for these documents and photographs so they can be corrected for future users. Simply click the button and fill out the brief form provided (see example screenshots).
In some cases, the information recorded on the old documents themselves may be in error. Students' names, birthdates, family members' names, and other facts may have been written incorrectly by the staff members who worked at the Indian School and filled out many of those documents. We do not yet have a way to share information that corrects those types of errors, but we are considering some options. Please stay tuned.
Thank you for helping to improve the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center!
