Indian boarding schools

Institutions in the United States and Canada that separated Indigenous children from their communities, often coercively, to suppress Indigenous languages and cultures and impose settler ways of life.

Assimilation: The process by which people are pressured or compelled to adopt another society’s culture and practices. Boarding schools pursued assimilation by reshaping children’s language, religion, dress, and daily routines.
Intergenerational trauma: Psychological and social effects of trauma that persist across generations through families and communities. Survivors’ experiences and disrupted family ties shaped harms that continued beyond school attendance.
Dawes Act: An 1887 United States law that divided many tribal lands into individual allotments and opened surplus lands to non-Native settlement. Its allotment policy shared the era’s aim of breaking Indigenous communal life.
Mourning Dove: A Native American writer and member of the Colville Confederated Tribes who attended boarding school as a child. Her life and writing connect boarding-school experience with Indigenous literary expression.
Indigenous education: Educational practices and systems grounded in Indigenous knowledge, languages, communities, and traditions. It contrasts with schools designed to replace Indigenous cultural and community authority.
Compulsory education: A legal requirement that children receive education, usually through school attendance. Attendance laws and enforcement helped authorities take Indigenous children from their families.
Language revitalization: Efforts to restore and strengthen languages whose use has declined or been suppressed. Communities have worked to recover languages that school policies punished or displaced.
Richard Henry Pratt: A U.S. Army officer who founded Carlisle Indian Industrial School and promoted forced assimilation through education. Pratt’s program and slogan shaped the U.S. off-reservation school model.
Brenda Child: An Ojibwe historian whose scholarship examines Native families, migration, and boarding schools. Her research shows how families navigated school systems and maintained connections with children.
Tribal colleges and universities: Higher-education institutions in the United States chartered by Native nations or serving Indigenous communities. They center Indigenous self-determination rather than externally imposed cultural assimilation.

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