DECOLONIZING YOUR NEWSFEED
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Helen Daylia Luther and her husband James Reid Luther, circa 1915, San Francisco, CA
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EADLE KEATAH TOH | 10.31.21
For James Reid Luther, returning to Laguna Pueblo after attending the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School was a timeline met with innocence more than anything else. His student records chronicle his re-entry back on the rez.
"Bachelor yet," James described in one correspondence which he sent from Casa Blanca, New Mexico in 1912. At age 26, he had resorted to calling himself "Jas." Photos of him at the time make him
appear just as cool.
The following year, though, the dispatches were more straightforward. In one update sent from a roundhouse in Riverbank, California, "single" was all he wrote to the Carlisle superintendent. He signed it, losing Jas, and instead reverted back to his proper name "James."
Weighing the two dispatches - I got the sense that my great-grandfather, James "Jas" Luther, was like so many Lagunas I know: hard-working, exceptionally bright, and incredibly adaptable no matter where we find ourselves in this world. He was serious and silly all at once - evidence I later found sorting through my family's collection of photographs that chronicle all that Carlisle tried to erase.
It's a story that, for me, begins with James.
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The Rose Bank Winery, one of the farms belonging to the Cornell's of Bucks County
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This month, I paused my climate journalism in the North Arctic to trace my great-grandfather's time spent in Pennsylvania ahead of what will be 142 years since Carlisle opened its doors on Nov. 1, 1879. Monday marks this dubious dateline.
I spent a great deal of my reporting speaking with elders of Newtown, Pennsylvania where my great-grandfather carried out most his time as a Carlisle student as a paid farmhand affiliated with the school's dubious Outing
Program.
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Like most things lost across generations, so few today have ever even heard of these Outings let alone the boarding school, in general. For many, Carlisle merely comes to mind when casually discussing Jim Thorpe, the Sac and Fox Olympian who became a sports star while attending Carlisle.
In today's start-up world, we'd call the Carlisle Outing Program an "accelerator" to the government's grand assimilation agenda. Thorpe and my great-grandfather were among the thousands of Native students who took part in the program where they were placed with white families to work as
housekeepers and laborers across the East Coast. Some students, like James, flourished on these Outings. Many others fled, died, or disappeared.
For my family, there is a remarkable twist to this complex history - one that has shaped my family's entire sense of home at Laguna. By the time that James met and eventually wedded my great-grandmother Helen Daylia Luther, they had a son and named him after the boy James had bonded with like a brother in Newtown - Raymond Cornell.
I couldn't have been more than eight years old when I recalled meeting Raymond in Laguna. He had journeyed all the way to our white HUD home at the end of a bombed out cul-de-sac near the elementary school. Today, there's a photograph of his visit where he stood with my great-grandma Helen, long-widowed after James' passing in 1926.
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It's difficult to know what she was thinking when I see that photograph. Was she annoyed standing there with this tall, lanky, white man? She certainly raised her children to assimilate, including her daughter, my grandmother who spoke of how she was bullied for the
way she spoke Keres in her adult life. It's hard to know such emotions when the backstory is so rich - so rich I had to write about it. And I'm still writing.
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My article will be published Monday. Please check our Twitter feed for the link - and if you're a member of the media, please consider republishing the piece or giving it some coverage. It's paired with an open call for a reporting project Indigenously is organizing with a few partners. It's all explained in greater detail in this week's endorsement down below.
Today also marks the start of COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, United Kingdom. So you know what that means - all tee'd up for next week.
Until then,
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Number of years the Carlisle Indian Boarding School operated: 39
Estimated miles Jim Thorpe ran back to Carlisle from an abusive Outing: 18
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Carlisle Indian School had barely been open a year by the time a school newspaper started to circulate in the region. It was called Eadle Keatah Toh
a Lakota phrase loosely translating as "morning star."
It's fascinating for me to absorb how a school whose very mission it was to erase Indigenous languages would devote its first chronicling to such linguistics. It's no surprise that these pages under this name didn't last long.
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By the time Carlisle ramped up its program for a third school year, it had adopted the English phrase "Morning Star" to mark its masthead. In all, there'd be about a dozen various newspaper names over the course of the school's 39-year-old history. Two of the most popular, The
Carlisle Arrow and Red Man, ended up sharing the last newspaper title upon the school's closure in 1918.
By then, the front pages all but glorified its Outing Program depicting Native students on idyllic Pennsylvania farms as they reminisced of old ways back home.
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As part of my personal family investigation into the little-known Outing Program, I'm launching a narrative reclaiming project to reveal all that has been omitted these well-documented experiences.
Please spread the word, especially if you're a member of the media.
The Arrow Reporting Residency seeks five individuals with ancestral ties to the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School and its experimental Outing Program. Over the course of five months, storytellers will receive a small stipend, virtual training, and ongoing mentorship to achieve a publishable piece of paid reportage centering
Carlisle Outing memory with modern impact. This is a pilot project exercising resistance to systems of colonial representation, extraction, and exploitation of the Indigenous narrative - a reflection on the past to reveal connections that bind not only Native Americans but all Americans.
Applications are open Nov. 1 through Nov. 30. Apply here.
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