The Carlisle student records are not only quite valuable individually, especially given that the assignment of some surnames occurred at enrollment, but as a group as well.

In the National Archive records, three pieces of information are given for each student, in addition to their names.  First, their tribe, second the Indian agency they attended through, if applicable and third, the state where they lived.

After working with the nearly 7000 records, I noticed that the tribe and the state were not always what was expected.  After completing a spreadsheet for the students, I sorted by tribe, and by state, and created a summary document.  This is the first of 3 articles dealing with these records.  The tables show all of the tribes listed in the documents on the left side and the states where the tribes are found across the top.  This posting only goes through Florida.

You’ll  notice that some states are absent.  That’s because there were no students from these states. There were only students from where there were tribes, which by the late 1800s means reservations.

There are probably some surprises here.  There may be tribes that you have never heard of before.  You’re in good company.  Me too.  This is what we call a “teachable moment”:)

There are also other surprises.  For example if you look down the column for Arizona, you’ll see several tribes you would expect to find.  In addition, you find Chippewa, Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca and Sioux.  What were these people from East and Northern Midwestern/Plains tribes doing in Arizona?  And while we’re asking questions, what were the Cheyenne and Oneida doing in Alaska?  Could some of these records have been transcribed incorrectly?  Of course, but probably not great numbers of them.

By the way, I don’t have the answers, just more questions.