St. Patrick Church and the Indian School

History 204 | History of Indian Education | The Public Relationship Between Dickinson and the Indian School | Prosopography of Indian Dickinson College Students | Insitute to Institute: Dickinson College and Carlisle Indian School | Bibliographic Information

An Essential Cooperation: The Relationship between the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and St. Patrick Catholic Church

In all the histories and accounts of the Carlisle Indian School, the relationships between the school the town of Carlisle are lost to the stories of the famous band and seemingly invincible football team. It is important to remember that the Indian School did not exist by itself. It was a part of a thriving town with a well established college only two miles away. In an attempt to rectify the fact that Carlisle is often forgotten in most accounts of the Indian School, this page examines the relationship between the Indian School and the town’s only Catholic Church, St. Patrick Shrine Church. This relationship is especially important because of the initial difficulties which surrounded it. Although Captain Richard Pratt, the Indian School’s Superintendent and founder, advocated a Christian basis for his teachings at the school, he was not at all supportive of Catholicism, or the Indians who came to him as practicing Catholics. The priest at St. Patrick, Henry George Ganss, fought with Pratt to allow the Catholic students to practice for almost a decade. Finally, at the turn of the century, a friendly, cooperative association between the Indian School and the church began.

It is also important to note that while this page examines the connection between the school and the town, a connection can be found between the school and Dickinson via St. Patrick. Three Dickinson students, Lawrence J. Butler, Harry Walter Gill, and Henry Nicholas Schleier, are listed in the college matriculation book as being Catholic. Since St. Patrick is the only Catholic church in town, it is not unlikely that these boys attended mass there. Since all three were students between 1901 and 1903, it is very likely that they worshiped along side Indian school students.

The Historical Context of the Relationship between the Catholic Church and Indians

A strong movement to anglicize Indians began in the early nineteenth century. The United States Government was willing to fund religious missions, despite the constitution's non-establishment clause (which prohibited the federal government from establishing a national religion ) because it saw an opportunity to assimilate the Indians into American culture by way of religious teachings in morality and civic responsibility. Many denominations took part in this campaign; baptists, Catholics, Lutherans, and Presbyterians, to name a few. The competition for government funding was fierce, especially in light of the anti-Catholic sentiment of the time.

By the mid nineteenth century, most Indians had been placed on reservations west of the Mississippi River. The Federal Indian Office (FIC) set up a network of contract schools, each administered by agents. However, because the Catholic church did not have a strong voice in the FIC, they were assigned a low number of agents. In 1874, Catholics coordinated their efforts in Washington D.C. and formed the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. This organization set up Catholic Contract Schools on the reservations in order to ensure that the education given to the Indian children was based in Catholicism. Mother Katherine Drexel, who founded the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament for Indians and Negroes, gave considerable economic support to these efforts.

Between the years of 1891 and 1918, over 100 Indians are listed as being baptized at St. Patrick Shrine Church. By 1908, about one third of the students at the Carlisle Indian School were Catholic.

Captain Pratt, a Protestant, and the founder and superintendent of the Indian School, was very adamant about his Indian pupils attending church services on a consistent, almost daily basis. Chapel services were held during the day on Sundays and occasionally during the week. Dickinson professors, including Lippincott, along with local ministers, came to the Indian School on these days to preach to the students. However, Pratt was unwilling to allow Catholic students, those children who had attended and been baptized Catholic on their reservations, to attend Catholic mass in Carlisle. Pratt’s bitterness towards Catholics stemmed from and caused the very same problem. The Catholic Contract Schools on the reservations were refusing to send their pupils to Carlisle because they knew that Pratt would not allow them to attend Catholic mass. So Pratt, upset that he was unable to get those Catholic students enrolled in his school, refused to allow Catholics to practice. When it became clear that the Catholic students were being forced to practice in Protestant churches, the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions stepped in. The director of the Bureau, Father Joseph Andrew Stephan, called Father Henry George Ganss and asked him to address the Catholic Indian problem in Carlisle.

Ganss came to Carlisle in 1891 as the new priest at St. Patrick Shrine Church. Starting that same year, eighteen Catholic Indians from the Indian school were listed as members of the church. Throughout the 1890s, Capt. Pratt wrote anti-Catholic sentiments in the Indian School newspaper, The Redman. On August 29, 1892 Ganss first wrote to Sister Katharine Drexel of Philadelphia and asking for money to fund a school for the Indian Students in Carlisle. By September 13, 1892 Ganss, in another letter to Drexel, wrote that Pratt “[had] shown a most commendable spirit of fairness” (Rockwell) indicating that the relationship between the Catholic church and the Protestant Pratt was improving. Ganss often admitted that Pratt was courteous to him, but allowed him very limited contact with the Catholic students. However, in 1893, in another letter to Drexel, Ganss called Pratt a “menace to the faith of…Catholic pupils” (Rockwell) for not better cooperating with him.

The history of St. Patrick centennial celebration book says that Pratt’s military career had not prepared him for negotiations with Ganss. It was not until Ganss alerted the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions to the discrimination that was taking place at the Carlisle Indian School that Pratt took action to correct his mistakes. In 1898, Ganss wrote to Drexel again, expressing his high hopes for the future of Catholic Indians in Carlisle. Drexel then donated $8000 to St. Patrick so that they could build a school for the Catholic Indians and Negroes in Carlisle. The school was completed in 1901 and was dedicated St. Katharine’s Hall.

When the contract schools were shut down in 1899, Pratt yielded a bit more in his tolerance of Catholicism at the School. The “Carlisle Plan” was finally reached, and Pratt not only granted permission for the students to go to St. Patrick, he also allowed missionaries to come to the school itself and give religious instruction. Pratt left the Indian School in 1904, but his successors continued a friendly and cooperative relationship with Ganss until his departure from St. Patrick in 1910. In a letter to the then superintendent, Mr. Friedman, Ganss expresses his sincere thanks for the “uniform aid, unbroken courtesy, and kindness and helpfulness”1 that he received from the Indian School officials. He also mentions that while his relationship with Pratt started out with “slight friction”1, he found Pratt to be “most friendly and ever ready to aid”1 him in all his efforts to teach the Catholic Indians. Friedman’s reply letter was just as polite; he cites his “deep regret”2 in learning that Ganss has been relocated, and extends his thanks, on behalf of the government, for the work he did with the Catholic students at the school.

Father Ganss composed several masses and often toured the country giving organ recitals in order to earn money for the Bureau of Catholic Indian Missions. In his efforts to reach out to the Catholic Indians at the school, Ganss often asked the students to sing at various church events. A 100 voice Indian chorus sang at the 1894 dedication of the newly built St. Patrick. Every year at Christmas time, 275 pupils sang at mass. Additionally, the students of the Indian School donated a stained glass window of St. Paul to the church, and there is a painting of Blessed Kateri Tekawitha, an Indian who converted to Catholicism placed in the sanctuary to honor the memory of the Indian children who attended the church. (pictures)

Two Catholic Indian students stayed with the church after they completed their studies at the school: Monsignor Louis J. Yeager (1922) and Sister Mary Germaine Barron (1910).

St. Katharine's Hall

With the completion of St. Katharine’s Hall in 1901, the formal religious education of up to 300 Indians at a time, began. Various groups of nuns came and went from St. Patrick, first the Sisters of St. Joseph in 1901, and then in 1906, the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, of whom Mother Katharine Drexel was a member. Drexel held weekly religion classes for the Indian pupils: “large boys” on Mondays from 6-7, “small boys” on Tuesdays, and girls on Wednesdays. The students also went to St. Katharine’s Hall at 9:30 on Sunday mornings for instruction, stayed for 10:30 mass, and then returned back to the school where they received additional instruction at 2:30pm.

The Outing System

Besides the knowledge that there were Catholic students at the Indian school who were not practicing Catholicism, the issue that prompted Ganss to begin contact with Pratt was the outing system. As a part of the vocational instruction at the school, Pratt organized an outing system in 1880; he sent the Indians to live with families in nearby towns and states and work for them, usually on a farm, but in various other vocations. The families repaid the students with lodging and food, as well as a small remuneration. Between 500 and 1,000 students participated in the outing system annually. Ganss learned that Catholic students were being placed with Protestant families and were thus unable to practice Catholicism during the two or three months that they were “out”. Part of the Carlisle Plan was that Pratt would make and effort to place Catholic pupils with Catholic families, and when this was not possible, he required the families who housed Catholic pupils to allow those students to worship in a Catholic church. Still, by 1918, the year that the Indian School closed, the outing system was flawed in regard to Catholic tolerance. An April 27th, 1918 article from a Carlisle newspaper begs Catholic families to host Indian students. The article pleads with Catholic families and tells of the “grave anxiety felt for the Catholic young men and women” who with the help of Catholic families, may be “steered clear of the dangers to which they are exposed” under the practice of sending Catholic students to Protestant homes.

Photos

In this section, there are pictures of people and places that are important to the story of the relationship between the Carlisle Indian School and St. Patrick Church. There are also photos relevant to the larger section, including photos of the Carlisle Indian School athletic teams.

Footnotes

1 Henry George Ganss, Carlisle, to Superintendent M. Friedman, Carlisle, 18 April 1910. St. Patrick Church Drop File, Harrisburg Roman Catholic Diocese Archives, Harrisburg, PA.

2 Superintendent M. Friedman, Carlisle, to Henry George Ganss, Calisle, 20 April 1910. St. Patrick Church Drop File, Harrisburg Roman Catholic Diocese Archives, Harrisburg, PA.