The Schools That Tried to Erase a People

In 1879, a crowd gathered at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, to watch eighty-two Lakota children march in from the Dakota plains, their hair cut, their clothes replaced, their names exchanged for English ones. "Kill the Indian, save the man," Richard Henry Pratt liked to say. Behind that slogan stood a national policy: more than one hundred boarding schools, run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that took Native children from their families and tried to strip away language, religion, and kinship. Some children died of tuberculosis in dormitories. Some ran home across a thousand miles of winter. Some learned to read, then used that reading to sue the government. Drawing on school ledgers, congressional testimony, the 1928 Meriam Report, and the testimony of survivors and their descendants, this book follows the policy from its founding through the Meriam reckoning, the 1934 reforms, the WWII years, termination, and the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, showing how Native families fought back at every step and how their resistance still shapes the law today.