AMERICAN INDIAN BOARDING SCHOOLS: A Legacy of Discrimination, Forced Assimilation, and (near) Annihilation
On July 16, 2021, the tiny remains of nine children of the Rosebud Sioux returned to their homelands on the Great Plains in South Dakota to be buried at last with appropriate reverence near the graves of their ancestors.[1] How these children left their home lands 142 years ago for a far-off boarding school in Carlisle, Pennsylvania to find abuse, disease and death many miles away is a sad story of wrongful policies by the U.S. government and indifference by the people who carried them out in defiance of their own likely sense that these policies were wrong.
In the late 19th century these policies regarding American Indian populations addressed the issue of how to “deal with” the many tribal groups across the central U.S. By the early 1870s the U.S. government re-settled these populations on large parcels of land that are now the great American Indian Reservations established by Congress in, among others, the Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 and the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Life on the “Res,” as it has come to be called, was characterized by extreme poverty, disease, malnutrition, and struggle.[2]
The Res was also far away from schools and churches, which formed the backbone of U.S. society in the late 19thcentury. The lack of contact…
