Part 3
Killing the Indian, Saving the Man
Assimilation and the Tragedy of Boarding Schools
As the guns of the Indian Wars fell silent, a new strategy took shape—no less destructive, but cloaked in the language of civilization and progress. The U.S. government’s next mission was not to eliminate Native Americans physically, but culturally. This would be done through policy, education, and psychological warfare. The tool was assimilation; the battleground was the mind. And nowhere was this more apparent than in the Indian boarding school system.
The philosophy was summed up chillingly by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School: “Kill the Indian, save the man.” The boarding schools established across the country in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were designed to strip Native children of their identity. They were taken from their families—often by force—and placed in institutions where their hair was cut, their languages forbidden, their clothes replaced, and their spiritual traditions mocked.
What unfolded inside those walls was nothing short of cultural genocide. Children were beaten for speaking their native tongue. Siblings were separated. The food was meager, the labor harsh, and the curriculum designed to reprogram them into submissive participants in white society. Many children died of disease, malnutrition, abuse, or despair. Some were buried in unmarked graves behind the schools. Their parents often never knew what happened to them.
While some Native children did succeed by Western standards, many returned home alienated—unable to fully reintegrate with their tribe, yet never accepted as equals in white society. The system had created a generation caught between two worlds, belonging fully to neither.
In recent years, the unmarked graves discovered at boarding school sites in the U.S. and Canada have reignited public awareness of this forgotten atrocity. Apologies have been issued. Truth and reconciliation commissions have begun. But justice remains elusive. The scars of assimilation are still visible in fractured tribal languages, broken kinship lines, and the lingering trauma that affects Native communities to this day.
The attempted erasure of Native American identity wasn’t a footnote in American history—it was a central policy. And its effects echo across generations.
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