Michael Oberg, writer and distinguished history professor at SUNY Geneseo, visited Binghamton University last Thursday to discuss the Onondaga people’s resilience and perseverance at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. He was invited to speak for the History Department’s annual Shriber Lecture.

A scholar and professor of Native American history, Oberg has written seven books on the topic and received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching in 2003. His talk, titled “Surviving Carlisle: The Onondagas at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,” centered on the Onondaga Nation, a member of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

The talk covered the Onondaga people’s resilience during and after their stay at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, despite attempts by the federal government to systematically dismantle Indigenous cultures.

Located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, the industrial school was the first off-reservation boarding school in the continental United States. Approximately 7,800 Native Americans attended the school during its operation from 1879 to 1918. Used by the U.S. government as a model for boarding school policies directed at erasing Native American culture, language and religion, the school is now part of the U.S. Army War College’s campus and a designated national monument since 2024.

Oberg said the school’s initial mission was to erase Native American cultural identity, pointing to an 1892 conference speech made by Richard Henry Pratt, the school’s founder, where he endorsed forced cultural assimilation by saying “kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”

“These schools were part of an all-out assault by the federal government on Indigenous identity,” Oberg said. “And this included all kinds of things. There were bans on dancing on reservations, bans on expression of religious belief, demands for English-only and patriotic education.”

In his lecture, Oberg shared the story of Isaac Lyons, a student at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, who found success as a football player before returning home to the Onondaga Nation. Lyons became ill in 1911and was treated by a doctor, Enoch Soanodoah, who attended the school in 1883. Soanodoah believed that Lyons’ wife was a witch and caused the illness. According to newspaper clippings preserved in Lyons’ Carlisle file, he was thought to have died in a Syracuse hospital.

Oberg said that this account demonstrates how the Carlisle school failed to eradicate Indigenous spiritual beliefs.

“The Lyons and Soanodoah story shows that the Carlisle Indian School, it took and it gave, but it neither destroyed nor erased the Onondagas who attended it between 1879 and 1918,” said Oberg.

Carlisle was part of the federal government’s Native American boarding school system, which kidnapped thousands of Indigenous children from their homes. Students at residential schools were given English names, forced to cut their hair and prohibited from speaking their native languages. A 2024 U.S. Department of the Interior report called on the government to apologize for the widespread abuse and deaths of at least 973 Native American children within the nationwide system.

Since 2017, the bodies of 58 students who attended the Carlisle school have been repatriated from a Pennsylvania cemetery. The cause of death listed in school records included tuberculosis, spinal meningitis and typhoid fever, while other reports did not list a cause. However, many records were contradictory and lacked important personal information about the deceased students.

Oberg claimed that many students applied to the Carlisle school, including some who viewed it as an option to escape “troubled family backgrounds,” continue their education or learn a trade.

“So Indigenous people interested in assimilating, in learning trades and crafts, found Carlisle an attractive option,” he said.

In an interview with Pipe Dream, Oberg said he chose to focus less on the trauma and abuse inflicted at the boarding schools because “a lot of the problems in these communities are a product of dispossession and land” rather than directly from the schools. He claimed that many students used skills they learned at the Carlisle school in their resistance and he wanted to show how enrollment in the school was “complicated.”

BrieAnna Langlie, an associate professor of anthropology, told Pipe Dream that compared to Binghamton University’s Latin American Caribbean Area studies program, which is over 50 years old, the University lacks a similar educational program for Indigenous studies, despite the campus being located on historically Onondaga land.

Tonya Shenandoah, assistant director for Native American and Indigenous student initiatives at the Multicultural Resource Center, attended the lecture. She told Pipe Dream the University should find ways to encourage more Native American students to apply, as there are currently only about seven students at the University who identify as Native American and no scholarships for Indigenous students are offered directly by the University.

The University’s fall 2025 enrollment data reported that 38 students identified as American Indian or Alaskan Native as one of their ethnicities.

“It’s an important and critical undertaking,” said Shenandoah. “But it also takes a collective community to create and cultivate a space where students are going to be supported and feel a sense of place and belonging here on the campus.”