Native American Boarding Schools & Assimilation Policies | Crash Course Native American History

Biden's Apology and the "Indian Problem"

• 🇺🇸 In 2024, President Biden issued a formal apology for a 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 welcomed the acknowledgment, others felt "sorry is not enough" given the generational destruction caused.
• 🎯 The U.S. government historically referred to the existence and land control of Native Americans as the "Indian problem."

The Era of Assimilation

• 💡 By the late 19th century, after exhausting other tactics, the U.S. government and "Friends of the Indian" groups shifted focus to assimilation, aiming to absorb Native Americans into American culture.
• 🗣️ Richard Henry Pratt, a key figure, advocated for this with the phrase, "Kill the Indian, save the man," by erasing Native identity.
• 🏫 Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which became a model for dozens of federally supported boarding schools that forcibly removed thousands of children from their families.

Boarding School Experiences

• 🚫 Children were forced to abandon their cultures, languages, religions, and even names, often facing beatings, malnutrition, disease, and abuse for non-compliance.
• 💔 Hundreds of children died at these schools, and those who survived often felt disconnected from their home cultures upon return.
• ✊ Resistance to these policies existed, including the 1894 Hobo men incarcerated for refusing to send their children to boarding schools, and writers like Zitkala-Š who spoke out against the harms.

The General Allotment Act (Dawes Act)

• 🔑 Senator Henry Dawes believed land ownership was key to assimilation and co-drafted the General Allotment Act of 1887.
• 🗺️ This act authorized the division of reservations into 160-acre parcels called allotments, given to individual tribal members instead of communal tribal land.
• 💰 The goal was to break up tribes, open land to settlers, and encourage Native men to farm and women to keep house, with U.S. citizenship offered as an incentive to accept allotment and relinquish tribal citizenship.

Devastating Effects of Allotment

• 📉 The Dawes Act led to the loss of two-thirds of Native American land by 1934, as non-allotted land was declared surplus and sold to settlers.
• 📊 The act also created tribal rolls and introduced blood quantum, an unscientific measure of tribal membership, often leading to Native individuals being presumed incompetent if they had less European ancestry.
• 🏘️ Many reservations today are checkerboarded with mixed ownership, making it difficult for tribes to manage land for farming, ranching, or traditional activities.
• 💔 The legacy of both boarding schools and allotment continues to be felt, with policies described as cultural genocide, causing deep trauma and fractured land ownership that persists for generations.
• 🌱 Despite the historical trauma, tribes are actively working towards healing, reviving traditional languages, and reclaiming cultural identities.