The History of America’s Indian Boarding Schools: Ep 12 of Crash Course Native American History

Richard Henry Pratt, a US Army officer, founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, which became the model for dozens of other federally supported off-reservation boarding schools. Thousands of Native children were forcibly removed from their families, sometimes hundreds of miles away, and made to abandon their cultures, languages, religions, and even their names. Defiance led to beatings, and many suffered from malnutrition, disease, and abuse. Luther Standing Bear and others recounted the destructive nature of these schools, where children were taught to imitate rather than develop their inherent traits, leading to deaths and a sense of displacement for survivors.

While some Native parents enrolled their children with hope, many were forced, often relinquishing custody. Resistance was evident, such as the 19 Hopi men incarcerated for refusing to send their children to school. Critics like Yankton Sioux writer Zitkála-Šá, who taught at Carlisle, exposed the superficiality of 'civilization' offered in these schools, highlighting the underlying 'long-lasting death' of culture. Despite such resistance, boarding schools only assimilated children, leaving the adult population unaffected, leading to further assimilation policies.

Senator Henry Dawes, a 'Friend of the Indian,' believed land ownership was key to adult assimilation. In 1887, he and Alice Cunningham Fletcher co-drafted the General Allotment Act, or Dawes Act, which divided reservations into individual parcels (allotments) for tribal members. This policy aimed to break up tribal unity, open land to settlers, and encourage Native men to farm and women to keep house. Accepting an allotment and relinquishing tribal allegiance also offered US citizenship, further pushing assimilation. Chief Angonga of the Omaha nation foresaw the devastating impact of this policy.

The Dawes Act resulted in a catastrophic loss of Native American land, with two-thirds of the 138 million acres controlled by Native nations before the act being lost by 1934. Any non-allotted land was deemed 'surplus' and sold to non-Native settlers. The act also introduced 'blood quantum' to measure tribal membership, creating arbitrary racial divisions. Those with lower 'blood quantum' (assumed mixed-race) gained immediate control of their land, while those with higher 'blood quantum' (presumed 'incompetent' due to lack of European blood) faced a 25-year waiting period, often leading to forced sales due to inability to pay property taxes. This resulted in the 'checkerboard' ownership patterns seen on reservations today, hindering tribal autonomy and traditional activities.

The legacy of assimilation and allotment continues to be felt generations later, with fractured land ownership and complex inheritance issues leading to hundreds of owners for single allotments. Dr. Denise Lajimodiere, a poet and citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, describes these policies as 'cultural genocide,' sharing stories of her parents' experiences in boarding schools, including physical punishment for speaking their tribal language. Despite this trauma, healing efforts are underway. Survivors emphasize that language is medicine and culture is treatment, leading tribal nations to revive traditional languages and practices in their own school systems, a stark contrast to the boarding school era. These efforts aim to reclaim cultural identities and heal generational wounds.

In 2024, President Joe Biden delivered an unprecedented formal apology for the federal policy that forcibly separated Native American children from their families and placed them in boarding schools for over 150 years. While some Native people acknowledged this formal recognition, others, like Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier, felt that 'Sorry is not enough' due to the widespread destruction of their generation and future.

By 1883, after generations of broken treaties, wars, and forced removal, Native Americans faced unprecedented hardship. White 'progressives' known as 'Friends of the Indian' pivoted from discussing treaty honoring to advocating for assimilation, believing Native Americans should adopt settler lifestyles. This approach, which aimed to make Native people live and think like settlers, was seen as a solution to the 'Indian Problem' and paved the way for policies that would 'civilize' them, with the brutal motto 'Kill the Indian, save the man' coined by Richard Henry Pratt.