This is the third of 3 articles including the state by state and tribe by tribe analysis of the student locations who attended the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pa.  This groups includes the states of North Dakota through Wyoming.  A total of 42 states are represented, also some states such as Georgia, Maine and Florida only have a handful of students.

The post populat states are Washington State, New York and Oklahoma.  The Dakotas along with Montana also represent another large pool of students.

In terms of the number of tribes represented, clearly, Oklahoma leads the way.  Oklahoma was the old Indian Territory where all the tribes were “settled,” so one would expect to find remnants of all the tribes who were removed to Indian Territory.  A total of 52 different tribes of 146 represented in the student population are found in Oklahoma.  In the West, Washington is the most populous with 31 tribes represented.  In the East, it’s New York where many tribes were granted reservation land. In the 1700s and 1800s, other tribes from other states including Virgnia and North Carolina joined the tribes in New York and on into Canada.  New York had 43 different tribes represented.

North and South Dakota along with neighbor Montana were a somewhat different situation.  While they only had about 25 tribes represented, they had a very large number of students.  The Sioux was the second largest student population in the school, second only to the Chippewa.  Both the Sioux and the Chippewa were found in a widely dispersed area, far moreso than would have been expected.  For example, the Sioux, a northern plains tribe, was found in Arizona, California, Idaho, Illinois, Montana, Minnesota, Nebraska, New York, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Washington and Wisconsin.

The message here seems to be that Indians traveled, moved and visited a lot more than we think they did – and sometimes covered vast distances, but kept their original tribal designation.  We find them where we don’t think they should be, based on the location(s) of their home tribes.  So no matter what, we can think, we can hypothesize, we can ponder,  but we can never, ever assume.