“An Ordinary Case of Discipline”: Surveillance and Punishment at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879–1918

Chapter 1 analyzes the deputization of white Americans as the disciplinary agents of Indian women and men who were enrolled at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and punished between 1900 and 1918. This chapter reads across the grain of archival records made available through Dickinson College’s Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center to reveal how confinement, gossip, and other forms of discipline and punishment figured centrally as ordinary facts of everyday life at the institution. In so doing, it renews attention to the adult Indian people who attended off-reservation boarding institutions in the Assimilation Era, and it places their punitive experiences within broader struggles over race, power, and settler colonialism.