This chapter focuses on the under-examined corpus of Carlisle poetry, viewing it as a vital archive for theorizing the role of the American Indian intellectual tradition in negotiating Americanization discourses at the turn of the twentieth century. Materials published in newspapers and magazines at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania (1879–1918) include “Carlisle poetry,” which encompasses original poetry by Native American students, reprints of poems by Indian authors, poems by school personnel, and poems by well-known American authors. This poetry, along with the letters and articles published in Carlisle newspapers and magazines, is complicit with the ideological underpinnings of the institution’s ambitious goals of “making” Indian students into Americans, even as elements of this literature critique the Americanization that Carlisle boarding school demanded of its students.
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