Message from Museum of Civilizations (Italian Ministry of Culture) in Rome, Italy regarding Carlisle Indian School Photographs found in their collections

Message received in May 2024, from:

FRANCESCA MANUELA ANZELMO (Ph.D)

Curator of the Native American collections

Museum of Civilizations (Italian Ministry of Culture)

Piazza Guglielmo Marconi 14

Rome, Italy

museodellecivilta.it

"Together with my colleagues we are conducting a research on the evidence in Italian archives and museums related to the American Indian Boarding Schools in the United States between the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The starting point of our research are some photographs kept in the Archive of the Museum of Civilization, concerning the American Indian Boarding School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania and Hampton Normal and Agricultural Boarding School in Virginia. The files attached concerns the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.

 

These photographs had been donated to the Museum in 1913 by the Italian zoologist and anthropologist Enrico Hillyer Giglioli, who received them in 1883-1884 by Robert Wilson Shufeldt, when Shufeldt was honorary curator at the Smithsonian Institution (1882 - 1892). 

 

As you can see, the photos are a copy of the ones taken by Choate available at the https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/.

 

Thanks to the digitalisation work carried out at Carlsisle (https://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu), we were able to identify almost all the students of the Carlsisle's school in the photographs we have in our Archive. Only a few are left out. Of these we have not found any files.

 

We are trying to reconstruct the identities and biography of the all children in the photos kept at Museum’s Archive to finally bring them out of anonymity and inform any descendants, relatives, friends.

 

The aim of the research is also to reconstruct the historical path and the reasons that brought these photographs to Italy in colonial times, a few years after they were taken at Carlisle. Enrico Giglioli received them in 1883 – 1884.

But our desire is also another.

We would like to be able to let descendants, friends, relatives, know that some photos of their loved ones are in an archive of an Italian National Museum. We would like, of course if they are interested in doing so, to create a discussion with them to see how we can tell the story of their loved ones together.

These photos arrived here at that time because Italy, like other European countries, was a protagonist of the colonial culture. Therefore, we believe that it is important to make known, also to the Italians of today, the various ways in which Italy was involved in the culture of assimilation of other human beings."

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What follows are the images and captions describing the photographs.