Skating Pond Tragedy Essay

students possessed brutish dispositions. Assaulting the students’ speech abilities was not the only instance in which McKnight ridiculed the students. Later, McKnight discusses activities that took place at a graduation ceremony in which students seemingly embarrassed themselves in a variety of public spectacles such as climbing a greased pole and attempting to catch a greased pig; all of this happening while townspeople looked on and watched in amusement.
The interaction between the students and the Carlisle residents depicts an inherent contempt and resentment of the Native American children when they visited the town. That disdain contradicts the pride mentioned in the school’s accomplishments. Had the local residents truly taken the school’s goal to heart, the students would not …show more content…
The story of the ice conflict is often recounted by the modern residents of Carlisle, who likely heard it growing up but never personally saw the skating ponds. Among the population that actually experienced it, it is barely mentioned, only Wardecker explicitly mentions it in his interview. Therefore the skating pond conflict has evolved into almost a form of folklore, a story from a bygone era of mean teenage Indians bullying the ancestors of today’s Carlisle residents. This collective memory has jumped a generation, from the group that experienced it to the generation that heard it recounted. This phenomenon of the story mostly retold among modern residents, so scarcely mentioned in the interviews, and Helen Norton’s spirited search for evidence of it, leads one to question the authenticity of the story at all. It is possible that the Indian students claimed ownership of the best ice and ran off the local residents, but it is also likely that this was an isolated event in Wardecker’s narrative that grew into a folk