My Dear Father...An Indian School Student's Letter Home
In January of 1883, an eleven-year-old boy from the Laguna pueblo in New Mexico Territory wrote a letter from the Carlisle Indian School to someone back home. Here is the letter:
Pictographic Drawings at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School
During its existence (1879-1918) and since, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School has been a subject of interest to students and scholars of history, sociology, ethnology, and education. The purpose of this paper is to explore yet another area of renewed interest - that of the pre-1900 pictographs (picture writings) done by the Indian students during their first several years at Carlisle. Today a few pictographs hang in the Indian School gallery at the Cumberland County Historical Society. They have been, understandably, overshadowed by other attainments of the school and its students such as Jim Thorpe's athletic prowess, Pratt's outing system, J.N. Choate's nineteenth-century photographs, and the school's twentieth-century native art projects. It was not until 1988 when the richly illustrated "art" of Frank Henderson, a student of the Carlisle School, appeared in exhibition in New York that the Society "rediscovered" its own collection of over forty pictographs.