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Robbed children of their culture
- The Native American boarding school system — a decades-long effort to assimilate Indigenous people before they ever reached adulthood — robbed children of their culture, family bonds and sometimes their lives.
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May 29, 2024 · For 150 years, U.S. policy forced Native American children into boarding schools built to eradicate their culture and assimilate them into White society.
- Overview
- HISTORY Vault: Native American History
Native American tribes are still seeking the return of their children.
“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”
That was the mindset under which the U.S. government forced tens of thousands of Native American children to attend “assimilation” boarding schools in the late 19th century. Decades later, those words—delivered in a speech by U.S. cavalry captain Richard Henry Pratt, who opened the first such school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania—have come to symbolize the brutality of the boarding school system.
The history of this forced assimilation is far from settled. On August 7, 2017, the U.S. Army began exhuming the graves of three children from the Northern Arapaho tribe who had died at Pratt’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the 1880s. The children’s names were Little Chief, Horse and Little Plume—names they were forbidden to use at the school.
Students at Carlisle and the roughly 150 other such schools that the government opened were susceptible to deadly infections like tuberculosis and the flu. During Carlisle’s operation between 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 other children were buried in the same cemetery as the Northern Arapaho boys, according to The Washington Post.
Carlisle and other boarding schools were part of a long history of U.S. attempts to either kill, remove, or assimilate Native Americans. In 1830, the U.S. forced Native Americans to move west of the Mississippi to make room for U.S. expansion with the the Indian Removal Act. But a few decades later, the U.S. worried it was running out of places to relocate the country’s original inhabitants.
From Comanche warriors to Navajo code talkers, learn more about Indigenous history.
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- Becky Little
Mar 8, 2019 · Thousands of Native American children were forced to attend boarding schools created to strip them of their culture. My mother was one of them.
Oct 24, 2024 · In the 19th and 20th centuries, the U.S. established federally funded Indian Boarding Schools that aimed to strip Native American children of their culture.
4 days ago · The purpose of these schools was to strip Native American children of their Indigenous names, languages, religions and cultural practices. The U.S. government operated the boarding schools ...
Aug 30, 2023 · The Native American boarding school system — a decades-long effort to assimilate Indigenous people before they ever reached adulthood — robbed children of their culture, family bonds and...
Oct 20, 2023 · Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal...
