Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, along with Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks Shannon Estenoz and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs Kathryn Isom-Clause, visited Carlisle, Pennsylvania as part of the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative. This initiative, launched in June 2021 by Secretary Haaland, aims to address the legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies and their impact on Indigenous communities.

The Carlisle Indian Industrial School operated from 1879 to 1918 as the first off-reservation boarding school in the continental United States. Approximately 7,800 Native American children attended this school, which was designed to assimilate them by removing their cultural identities.

The former campus is located within the U.S. Army Carlisle Barracks. The officials toured sites designated as part of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School National Historic Landmark. They also visited the Carlisle Barracks Post Cemetery, where many American Indian and Alaska Native children who died at the school are buried. The Army continues efforts to honor family requests to "disinter" remains from this cemetery.

The leaders also engaged with Dickinson College through a roundtable discussion at its Center for the Futures of Native Peoples and toured its archives related to the school's history. The college hosts an online repository of records about the boarding school.

As part of acknowledging these assimilation policies' legacy, Department leaders have traveled across 12 communities nationwide to hear survivors' experiences from federal Indian boarding schools. In April 2024, Tribal consultation sessions were held to discuss how the National Park Service might help preserve this history.