How Boarding Schools Tried to ‘Kill the Indian’ Through Assimilation

In the late nineteenth century, the United States government forced tens of thousands of Native American children into boarding schools built not to educate them, but to remake them. Children were taken from parents and homelands and pressed into an English-only, industrial regimen that treated their languages, names, religions and kinship systems as obstacles to be removed. The most influential of these institutions, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, opened in 1879 under U.S. Army Captain Richard Henry Pratt, and became the template for roughly 150 other schools the government opened. The wounds did not close when the schools did. A century later, Native nations are still searching for the children who died far from home.

From Removal to Re-Education: The Road to Carlisle

The boarding school era did not appear out of nowhere. In 1830, the United States forced Native nations to relocate west of the Mississippi River under the Indian Removal Act, clearing the Southeast for American expansion. A few decades later, as white settlement pushed steadily westward, the government found it was running out of land onto which people could still be moved. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, growing white populations in the late 1800s created “increasing pressure on the recently removed groups to give up some of their new land.” With no new frontier left, federal policy pivoted from removal to assimilation. In 1885, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Hiram Price explained the logic without sentiment: “it is cheaper to give them education than to fight them.” Anyone tracing the historical purpose of Native American boarding schools runs into the same calculation — the ambition was to dissolve Native nations by dissolving Native children’s sense of who they were.

Inside the Carlisle Indian Industrial School

Carlisle opened in 1879 in surplus Army barracks at Carlisle Barracks, founded by Pratt, who had earlier overseen Native prisoners held at Fort Marion, Florida. It forcibly separated children from their parents. Students from nations across the continent were brought there; the photographic record includes Chiricahua Apache children whose families had been imprisoned after the 1886 surrender of Geronimo’s band.

Names, Haircuts and Forbidden Tongues

Children were given new Anglo-American names, clothes and haircuts, and told they must abandon their way of life because it was inferior to white people’s. Their own names — such as Little Chief, Horse and Little Plume of the Northern Arapaho — were forbidden at school, as were their languages, religions and cultural practices. The Carlisle photographer John N. Choate produced the images that became the system’s most effective propaganda: paired portraits of Tom Torlino, a Diné (Navajo) student, in traditional dress and long hair on arrival, and later in a stiff suit with cropped hair. Presented as proof of “civilization,” the photographs are in truth a record of coercion.

Labor, Classrooms and the School’s Public Face

Daily life combined academic instruction with industrial and domestic labor. Archival images dated between 1899 and 1904 show boys in uniforms, classes in clothes mending, laundry, cooking and metalworking, an English penmanship lesson, a classroom experiment, physical education drills, and the school band and football team. The football program later produced athletes of national renown, but the curriculum’s core purpose held: to prepare Native children for a laboring place in white society while severing their ties to their own.

Disease, Death and the Cemetery at Carlisle Barracks

Congregate barracks, poor ventilation and inadequate medical care left students vulnerable to deadly infection. Tuberculosis and influenza swept through Carlisle and the other schools, and children who died far from home were often buried on school grounds. During Carlisle’s operation between 1879 and 1918, nearly 200 children were buried in the school cemetery, according to The Washington Post. Those graves are the physical evidence of the system’s human cost — and the reason repatriation became an act of both grief and justice.

Bringing the Children Home: The Northern Arapaho

For the Northern Arapaho of Wyoming, this history never settled. On August 7, 2017, the U.S. Army began exhuming the graves of three Arapaho children — Little Chief, Horse and Little Plume — who had died at Carlisle in the 1880s. The effort was led by Yufna Soldier Wolf, working alongside tribal elders Mark Soldier Wolf and Crawford White Sr. On August 14, 2017, the Army returned the remains of Little Chief and Horse to relatives at the Wind River Reservation; the Northern Arapaho buried them on August 18, 2017. Little Plume was not returned. In what was supposed to be his coffin, archaeologists instead found the bones of two other people whose ages did not match his. Researchers do not know who those two individuals are, or where Little Plume’s remains lie. The Army reburied the two people found in his place, and Little Plume remains one of Carlisle’s missing children. The Rosebud Sioux of South Dakota and Alaska Native communities have likewise sought the return of children’s remains from Carlisle — a process now governed in part by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990.

Irony and Resilience: The Navajo Code Talkers

The schools failed at the thing they were built to do. Languages suppressed in classrooms for generations survived in families, ceremonies and, improbably, in military service. As the National Museum of the American Indian has observed, the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II found it “puzzling that the same government that had tried to take away their languages in schools later gave them a critical role speaking their languages in military service.” That irony is not a happy accident; it is proof that cultural knowledge carried outside the institution outlasted the institution itself. The same resilience now drives language revitalization across Indian Country, work that would be unthinkable without the deep history of Native American languages and the communities who refused to let them disappear.

Historical Context & Key Cultural Takeaways

• Policy shift: After the 1830 Indian Removal Act ran out of western land, the federal government turned to assimilation as a cheaper alternative to warfare.
• Institutional scale: Carlisle (1879–1918) became the model for about 150 government boarding schools; a 2022 federal investigation later identified 408 federal Indian boarding schools and at least 53 marked or unmarked burial sites.
• Cultural erasure as method: Names, hair, dress and language were targeted deliberately, because they carried identity, kinship and sovereignty.
• Mortal cost: Tuberculosis and influenza killed students in crowded dormitories; nearly 200 children were buried at Carlisle alone.
• Survival and repatriation: The Northern Arapaho exhumations of 2017, ongoing tribal claims, and language revitalization demonstrate that the system failed to eradicate the cultures it attacked.

Frequently Asked Questions

What did Richard Henry Pratt mean by “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man”?

Pratt delivered the phrase in an 1892 speech. It summarized his assimilation philosophy: that a Native person’s identity had to be destroyed before the individual could be “saved” within white society. Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, and the sentence became the shorthand for the entire boarding school system.

Which Northern Arapaho children were exhumed at Carlisle in 2017?

Three children who died at the school in the 1880s: Little Chief, Horse and Little Plume. The Army began disinterment on August 7, 2017, and returned Little Chief and Horse to the Wind River Reservation on August 14, 2017, with burial on August 18, 2017. Little Plume was not found.

Why weren’t Little Plume’s remains recovered?

The grave identified as his contained the bones of two other people whose ages did not match his. Researchers do not know who those individuals were, or where Little Plume is buried. The Army reburied the two sets of remains at Carlisle, and Little Plume remains among the school’s missing children.

How many children died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School?

During Carlisle’s operation from 1879 to 1918, nearly 200 children were buried in the school cemetery, according to The Washington Post. Deaths were driven largely by infectious disease, including tuberculosis and influenza, in crowded institutional conditions.

Did the boarding schools succeed in erasing Native cultures?

No. Languages, ceremonies and kinship systems persisted despite punishment and separation, and the Navajo Code Talkers of World War II are the clearest symbol of that survival. Today, tribal nations lead language revitalization and repatriation efforts — including the return of children’s remains from Carlisle.

Conclusion: Memory, Repatriation and Cultural Survival

The boarding school era was designed as a permanent solution: take the children, take the language, take the name, and the nation would follow. It did not. What remains is an unfinished ledger of graves, and a generation of tribal researchers, elders and families insisting that the children who were taken be named and brought home. That work — archaeological, legal and deeply personal — is now central to how Native nations preserve their heritage.