Pleasantville

As we approached our final stop, everything changed.

Captain Richard Pratt was a hero of the Indian wars. Left in charge of a large group of POWs, he seized upon a plan no one had considered before. The military had shown him that the best way to create a good solider was to break young men down with physical exertion, stress, and being yelled at while crawling through mud. What if those same methods were applied to Indians? Could they be reduced to bare humanity, then built back up as whites?

And so he began experimenting on POWs -- a sentence which probably is just as messed up as it sounds. When he felt he'd perfected his methods of reprogramming, he had a vision of the next logical step: if this procedure were applied to every single Indian, their race would finally be essentially exterminated.

But, as the wars had shown him, Indians were fierce and determined. Demoralizing and destroying the POWs had been difficult -- too difficult to try to repeat on a large scale.
The solution was to leave the warriors be: the ideal target was children under 10. Maybe, if action was swift and encompassing enough, the entire Indian bloodline could be converted into a nation of domestic servants and laborers within just a few generations. America would have an entire ethnic subculture of neo-slaves.

In 1879, Pratt received funding from the Department of War and governmental permission to begin seizing children and testing his methods; he founded Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania.


Our entire Journey has been a quest from the farthest reaches of the country, coming ever closer to the place where it all began. Ground Zero of a cultural genocide. Carlisle.


For the first several weeks, we expected Carlisle to be a large and powerful gathering. The buildings are still present, but they have been remade as a war college.

(Side note: Carlisle was set to become the premier war college in the United States; but, at the last minute, a crucial funding bill was rewritten and given to West Point. West Point has held that honor ever since.)

Then, for the last week, we started to expect Carlisle to be a disastrous stop. The paperwork for our presence started to be denied, the administrators became cold and dismissive, and we couldn't get clear answers over the phone anymore. Most critically, we felt it was important to end the Journey with a healing ceremony in the graveyard: the final resting place of almost 200 children and babies, including Lucy Prettyeagle, the first child ever killed in boarding school. The administration reluctantly gave us a concession: we could say a prayer in the graveyard, but only 8 people could attend.

This actually became partially my problem, as I looked for ways to get cameras into the graveyard and webcast the prayer live, something I've never tried to do before. We felt that visiting the children's graves was too important to do in secret.


And, standing on Carlisle's doorstep, we picked up some divine intervention in the form of a couple that dropped out of the sky. Raven had heard about White Bison indirectly, and only accidentally learned of our plan to visit Carlisle by curious web-surfing a few days before. She quickly convinced her husband, Teddy, that they needed to help. In almost no time at all, they used their influence to slice through the red tape and arrange nearly everything.

Through them, we received military passes to get past the gates. And, although the graveyard remained closed to non-military personnel, Raven carefully explained that every single attendee -- however many there may be -- would be a personal guest staying at her home on-base. As invited guests staying more than one day under her care, they would have more-or-less free access to large portions of the grounds, including the cemetary.


This is, as best as I can tell, divine intervention; and, thus, a good sign that we're doing the right thing. There are Native beliefs I don't understand, and a few things I don't agree with, but there's no real question that Don is doing holy work.

And so, with no time left remaining, the path to Carlisle was suddenly cleared for us.


The night we arrived, Raven and Teddy invited us to a backyard barbeque held at their friends' house. We drove past military structures of brick and stone; then we took a sharp turn and suddenly found ourselves in a street taken directly from the 1950s. Little rows of similar houses stared blankly at each other across the street, trees lined the little green rectangle set aside in the center, and a little metal slide waited for kids to climb its carefully-polished ladder. The Good Humor man wasn't there that instant, but surely he was just around the corner with a non-threatening smile and frozen treats that could be yours for a shiny dime.

The BBQ was great. I had two hamburgers, then watched the kids play Deadspace for a while. If I weren't happily full of beef, I might wonder about the perception of violence that comes from growing up surrounded by military leaders hard at work, then playing extraordinarily graphic games for entertainment. But I'm full, so I'll just say that I wish I had Deadspace. I miss video games.

As we were leaving, Marlin clapped me on the back and complimented me on how much fortitude I've gained during this Journey; once, I was catching cat naps at every gas station and interacting with the world through a veil of blurry fatigue. Now, I'm at least kind of alert some of the time. I thanked him, drew up a list of the projects I hoped to get done before morning, then fell asleep fully clothed at the hotel. Oh, well.