Richard Henry Pratt
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General Richard Henry Pratt (December 6, 1840–April 23, 1924) was an American soldier and educator. The oldest of three sons of Richard and Mary (Herrick) Pratt, was born on December 6, 1840 in Rushford, New York. In 1846 the family moved to Logansport, Indiana, where Richard grew up near the banks of the Wabash River. He served in the Union army during the American Civil War and then in the Indian wars in the West, where he became interested in the cultural problems of the Native Americans.
Best known as the founder and longtime superintendent of the influential Carlisle Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, profoundly shaped Indian education and federal Indian policy at the turn of the twentieth century. Pratt's long and active military career included eight years of service as an army field officer on the western frontier. During that time he participated in some of the signal conflicts with Indians of the southern plains, including the Washita campaign of 1868-1869 and the Red River War of 1874-1875. He then served as jailor for many of the Indians who surrendered. His experiences led him to dedicate himself to now highly controversial turn-of-the-century Indian education policies, and from 1879 to 1904, still on active military duty, he directed the Carlisle school, believing that the only way to save Indians from extinction was to remove Indian youth to nonreservation settings and there inculcate in them what he considered civilized ways.
He experimented in educating Native Americans, believing that they must be taught to reject tribal culture and adapt to white society. In 1879, he founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, a nonreservation school for Native Americans. As head of the school, Pratt stressed both academic and industrial education. He believed that if the Indian was to claim his rightful place as an American citizen, he must renounce his tribal way of life, abandon the reservation, and seek education and employment among the "best classes" of Americans; it was because of this loathing that he harbored for Native American culture that he sanctioned beatings and other tortures to force Native children to stop speaking their respective languages.
Pratt became an outspoken opponent of tribal segregation on reservations. He believed that this system as administered and encouraged by the Bureau of Indian Affairs was hindering the education and civilization of the Indian and creating helpless wards of the state. These views inevitably led to conflicts with the Indian Bureau and the government officials who supported the reservation system. Long standing animosities came to a head in May of 1904 when Pratt strongly denounced the Indian Bureau and the reservation system as a hindrance to the civilization and assimilation of the Indian. This controversy, coupled with earlier disputes with the government over civil service reform, led to Pratt's forced retirement as superintendent of the Carlisle School on June 30, 1904. This did not, however, end Pratt's long career as a crusader for Indian causes. A tireless speaker and letter writer, he waged a vigorous campaign for the fair and humane treatment of the American Indian.
From his home in Rochester, New York, during his retirement years, Pratt continued to lecture and argue his viewpoints, but without great success. He died on April 23, 1924, at the army hospital in San Francisco and was buried in Arlington National Cemetery.
In the 2005 miniseries, Into the West, produced by Steven Spielberg and Dreamworks, Pratt is played by Keith Carradine.
[edit] Bibliography
- Pratt, Richard Henry (2004). Battlefield and classroom : four decades with the American Indian, 1867-1904. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. ISBN 0-8061-3603-0.
- Eastman, Alaine Goodale (1935). Pratt, the Red Man's Moses. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. LCCN 35021899.
- Haley, James L. (1976). The Buffalo War: The History of the Red River Indian Uprising of 1874. Garden City, New York: Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-06149-8.
- Richard Henry Pratt Papers. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
