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Susan
Rose '77 (right) with Barbara Landis (left), Jackie
Fear-Segal and dog Tico. |
She
was a Lipan Apache, daughter of a tribal leader, living on
the border of Mexico and Texas. In 1877, at age 10, her
band was almost wiped out by U.S. soldiers. The uprooted
girl and her younger brother, now prisoners of war,
eventually were sent to the Carlisle Industrial Indian
School, where more than 12,000 Indians from all over the
United States would be enrolled between 1879 and 1918, for
assimilation into the white world.
A
few—like Montreville Yuda, father of George Yuda ’47 (see
Page 33)—settled in non-native
communities. But Kesetta, as the Apache girl became known,
spent most of her ill-starred life in and out of the
school, which trained her to be a domestic. In fact, she
was the longest-enrolled student.
Kesetta’s is one of the most “extreme and brutal Carlisle
Indian School stories,” according to Jacqueline
Fear-Segal, author of a new, much-hailed book, White
Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian
Acculturation. Fear-Segal, an American-studies
professor at the University of East Anglia, spent the 2000
academic year at Dickinson on a faculty exchange laying
groundwork for her book. She was back this past academic
year as a Community Studies fellow doing preliminary work
for her next book, which will examine the photographic
records of the Indian School and explore what those photos
mean to descendants of the students.
The
power and impact of photos became clear to Fear-Segal as
she worked on that first book. Compelling images of
Kesetta and son Richard, who was fathered but
unacknowledged by a white man, add to the poignancy of
White Man’s Club.
One
reviewer remarked after seeing a photo of Richard:
“Standing barely visible and unnoticed on the bandstand in
a photographic image of the Carlisle parade ground on page
272 is a little uniformed young man maybe four or five
years of age. The author, utilizing student and family
records, reveals the identity of this student, and she
constructs a history of his family and their importance to
the school that otherwise would have been lost in the
multigenerational ruptures that were produced by
attendance in off-reservation boarding schools.”
Essential players in the reuniting of Kesetta’s and
Richard’s stories were Susan Rose ’77, director of the
Community Studies Center and professor of sociology, and
Barbara Landis, Cumberland County Historical Society’s
Indian School biographer. As Rose says, the three were all
a part of solving “the historical detective story” of the
Indian mother and the son who never knew his origins.
Rose’s connection, perhaps, is the most tangible of the
three women’s. She bought her 22-acre property from the
estate of Richard, whose surname Kaseeta, was a variation
of his unknown mother’s first name.
When
his mother died in her late 30s in Lahaska, north of
Philadelphia, Kesetta left behind Richard, 3. He was moved
to the Indian School, where he was dubbed “the Carlisle
baby.” Taken in by a wealthy local family, he lived in
Carlisle until his death in 1970 and was known as one of
the two “Carlisle Indians,” the other being the
aforementioned Montreville Yuda. Richard managed then
inherited the beautiful property along the Conodoguinet
Creek, which had been the thriving Bellaire pleasure park
in the early 1900s.
Rose
often visited with Richard’s widow, Helen, before
purchasing the remains of Bellaire Park, and has had many
chats with Helen’s niece, Tess Eichelberger, who was
raised by the Kaseetas. From Tess she obtained photos of
Richard as a youngster, which have proved helpful to
Fear-Segal. And it was Tess, hoping to help Fear-Segal
piece her uncle’s story together, who drove to Lahaska to
find Kesetta’s grave.
Landis, who worked with Fear-Segal during her first stint
at Dickinson, helped the British scholar make some early
linkages between Kesetta and Richard, particularly through
Genevieve Bell’s early-1990s dissertation.
”Jackie was able to dig into that research and came up
with family connections to this particular Lipan Apache,”
Landis says. “All roads led to this story. It’s really
amazing. Librarians call it serendipity.”
Fear-Segal’s puzzling together of the pieces of Kesetta’s
life eventually led her to Kesetta’s great-great nephew, a
Lipan Apache in Texas. He was overjoyed when he and
Fear-Segal connected, for the tribe had never forgotten
the children who had been stolen in that 1877 attack.
Every August the family has a secret ceremony to honor the
memory of the lost ones.
“I
was happy to be able to bring the whole story together and
make connections with Kesetta’s people,” says Fear-Segal.
She invited Kesetta’s nephew and a ceremonial elder to
Pennsylvania this spring “to bring resolution to the
story.” Apache ceremonies at the graves of Kesetta and her
brother Jack, who is buried in the Indian School cemetery,
were planned along with a reading of Fear-Segal’s book
chapters about Kesetta and her family. But the Lipan elder
fell ill before making the journey. Fear-Segal still hopes
to complete the circle. “I would really like the healing
to occur” for the fractured family and community.
Fear-Segal, who will return to her home in Norwich,
England, later this summer, is hoping to forge further
connections between Dickinson/Carlisle and the descendants
of Indian School students. She would like to see Dickinson
students travel to Indian reservations to do work in
American studies and the grandchildren of Indian School
students to “come to Carlisle and work on their family
histories. Carlisle was the central institution for Indian
re-education. It’s a very key place for Indian people from
all nations.” |
