Indian Boarding Schools
* From the late 1870’s until today, many Native children were sent to federal boarding schools. For the first 50 years, these schools were designed to forcibly assimilate them, make them culturally white by “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” Starting in the late 1920’s and especially with the start of the Indian New Deal, forced assimilation programs ended. (See Section Eight.)
* But for about 50 years, Native children were often kidnapped, stripped of their cultures, language, religions, and heritages. The regimen at the schools was brutal. Natives as young as five years old faced military discipline, fourteen hour workdays of forced labor, and physical punishment that included whippings and being chained to their work stations.
* The effects were catastrophic. Since that time, greater than nine tenths of Natives cannot speak a Native language. Graduates returned home alienated from their people, unable to even speak to their own families, turning in despair to alcoholism and suicide. Very few were able to find work with the skills they acquired, due to continuing prejudice.
* Not only that, there was a high death rate at boarding schools from disease, up to six and a half times that of other ethnic groups. At a single boarding school alone, Carlisle, deaths numbered in the hundreds. The boarding school program caused thousand of deaths of Native children. In Canada, their very similar boarding school program has often been called genocidal.
* So why was it not included? US boarding schools were federal. But the blame has largely been directed at one man, Captain Richard Pratt. Pratt began the first boarding school programs at Carlisle, running the school as a model program for almost three decades.
* There was certainly blame enough to go around. Self appointed Friends of the Indian, largely well off dilettantes at philanthropy, became the dominant voice in the debate over what should be the fate of Natives once forced onto reservations. Congress repeatedly approved the schools, and the Supreme Court repeatedly restricted the rights of Natives over many decades. Even many Native parents themselves played a role, voluntarily sending their children to the schools, hoping they would be better fed and clothed than the deep poverty and neglect of reservation life.
* Presidents' roles in the boarding schools were minimal. There is little evidence that most presidents after Grant and before Franklin Roosevelt gave much thought to Indian policy, especially the schools. Into that vacuum stepped Congress, Friends of the Indian, and above all, the operators of the boarding schools, like Pratt. The deaths of thousands of Native children is rightly blamed on them, and the memory of what they did is remembered by tribes in memorials. Their experiences are a clear warning on the dangers of forcible assimilation.