Dr. Janine Pease will be presenting on the Crow students who attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial Boarding School in the years from 1879 to 1918. She will share the story of their lives after returning home.  The school was designed for maximum assimilation of Native cultures to white ways. This included the western education, cutting of long hair, refusal to allow the speaking of Native languages, and the changing of your own name. In the words of school founder General Richard Henry Pratt, the idea was to “kill the Indian, but save the man.” Crows experienced all these things, but the legacy was contradictory and bittersweet as many of them learned how to function in the white man’s society in learning trades and later had a major impact on Crow history.

Dr. Pease has been conducting research in the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, part of the Archives & Special Collections at Dickinson College in Carlisle Pennsylvania. In addition, she has conducted research in the Little Big Horn College Archives on the former students’ lives after returning home. Dr. Pease is the founding president of Little Big Horn College of
the Crow Nation, 1983 – 2000. She is presently on the LBHC Faculty for the Crow Oral History Project, to study the 1950’s to the 1970’s Crow Indian experience, 2017 -present.

Two programs from Dr. Pease are supported by sponsors: Thursday, April 18 at High Noon (12PM) at Western Heritage Center and then Thursday April 18 at 6:30PM at MSU Billings College Library room 148.

Thanks to our generous sponsors the S.S. Heyneman Foundation, Billings Community Foundation’s James Wrightson Educational Endowment Fund, Jim and Chris Scott, Mayor Bill Cole and Anne Cole, Billings Public Library Foundation, and First Interstate Bank.  Thanks to the MSU Billings Library and Eileen Wright for hosting the evening talk. Photograph Courtesy of Humanities Montana.