Beginning in the early 1800s, the U.S. government set up and supported more than 400 boarding schools designed to extinguish Indigenous culture and assimilate young Native Americans into white society. The goal, in the words of one of the first school’s founders, was to “kill the Indian in him and save the man.”
The schools often required the children to take on English names and give up their style of clothing and hair, as well as their traditional languages, religions and cultural practices.