Dispossession by a Thousand Discourses: A Critical Discourse Analysis of the Discourse Legitimating the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and the Discursive Practices of Indigenous, Puerto Rican, and Filipino Students

The purpose of this critical discourse analysis was to confront the utilitarian discourse legitimating the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. This research first studied newspapers of 1879 to call into question utilitarian discourse at the macro level. The research then evaluated utilitarian discourse at the micro level and studied the discourse pertaining to Carlisle found in speeches, policies, writings, newspapers and letters and the discursive practices of Lakota, Puerto Rican, and Filipino students of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Analytical concepts from settler colonial and decolonial thought were used in tandem to confront Carlisle as a transnational site of dispossession from a planetary lens. The findings of this research were presented in three groups. First, I sought to analyze referential, semantical, lexical, and syntactical meanings of the concepts of useful and wasteful within utilitarian discourse found in U.S. newspapers published in 1879. Second, I confronted the discourses of dispossession through an analysis of the concepts of use and waste and the verb forms within utilitarian discourse found in creation and perpetuation of Carlisle. Third, I analyzed the discursive practices of three former Carlisle students: Luther Standing Bear (Lakota), Juan José Osuna Rodriguez (Puerto Rico), and Stephen Redleaf (Philippines). The discussion of this research employed decolonial theory to explain the normalized relations of power perpetuated by utilitarian discourse. Through this analysis, the underbelly of the utilitarian discourse legitimating Carlisle exposed the normalcy established in racializing Carlisle students to legitimate separating children from their families to attend school. With the inclusion of Lakota, Puerto Rican, and Filipino students, this research destabilized Carlisle as an exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian and sought to resituate Carlisle as a site of dispossession within a transnational imperial project perpetuating coloniality/modernity.

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