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DURING THE 19th CENTURY AND INTO THE 20TH CENTURY, AMERICAN INDIAN children were forcibly abducted from their homes to attend Christian and U.S. government-run boarding schools as a matter of state policy. This system had its beginnings in the 160Os, when John Eliot erected "praying towns" for American Indians, in which he separated them out from their communities to receive Christian "civilizing" instruction. However, colonists soon concluded that such practices should be targeted toward children because they believed adults were too set in their ways to become Christianized. Jesuit priests began to develop schools for Indian children along the St. Lawrence River in the 160Os.
However, the boarding school system became more formalized under President Ulysses S. Grant's Peace Policy of 1869 to 1870. The goal of the policy was to turn over the administration of Indian reservations to Christian denominations. Congress set aside funds to erect school facilities to be run by churches and missionary societies (Noriega, 1992: 380). These facilities were a combination of day and boarding schools erected on Indian reservations.
Then, in 1879, Richard Pratt founded the first off-reservation boarding school, Carlisle. He argued that as long as boarding schools were primarily situated on reservations, it was too easy for children to run away from school and efforts to assimilate Indian children into boarding schools would be reversed when children returned home to theirfamilies during the summer. He proposed a policy whereby children would be taken far from their homes at an early age, only to return when they were young adults. By 1909,25 off-reservation boarding schools, 157 on-reservation boarding schools, and 307 day schools were in operation (Adams, 1995: 57-58). The stated rationale of the policy was to "Kill the Indian and save the Man." Over 100,000 Native children were forced into attending these schools.
Interestingly, Richard Pratt was actually one of the "friends of the Indians." That is, U.S. colonists, in their attempt to end Native control over their land bases, generally came up with two policies to address the "Indian problem." Some sectors advocated outright physical extermination of Native peoples. Meanwhile, the "friends" of the Indians, such as Pratt, advocated cultural rather than physical genocide. Carl Schurz, at that time a former Commissioner of Indian Affairs, concluded that...