March 7, 2026
Indian Boarding Schools in America: The Carlisle Indian Industrial School
In 1879, Richard Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, the first federally supported off-reservation boarding school for Native American children. Designed to promote assimilation into American society, Carlisle became the model for the broader system of Native American boarding schools that spread across the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this episode, I explore how Carlisle operated, the federal policies that shaped it, and the lasting impact of the Indian boarding school system on Indigenous communities.
