Truth About Boarding Schools

Brainwashing and Boarding Schools: Undoing the Shameful Legacy

Boarding schools were an important part of the American Indian experience. They still are a critical factor in why some American Indian parents find it difficult to communicate with public school system administrators and teachers – and even more difficult to trust them.

Many non-Indians either aren’t aware of this shameful piece of American History or know very little about it. In order to undo the boarding school legacy, it is important for every teacher with American Indian students in the classroom to have an awareness of past events and their continuing impact.

Boarding School Brainwashing Techniques

American Indian boarding schools were a primary tool of the federal government and church to assimilate Native Americans. At times using neglect, abuse and isolation, this policy sought to sever ties between parent and child and child and culture. SOMETHING'S MOVING explores the realities, contradictions and intergenerational effects of the boarding schools through the voices and stories of former students, and follows their attempts at educating and healing themselves, their families and communities from this little known aspect of American history.Off-reservation boarding schools for American Indian children began on November 1, 1878 when Captain Richard H. Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian School at an abandoned military post in Pennsylvania.

Pratt was an Army Captain, not an educator. He had been put in charge of 72 Apache prisoners held at Ft. Marion near St. Augustine, Florida. The Army said that prisoners were suspected of having murdered white settlers, but never proved this claim.

Captain Pratt started a prison school for the men in his charge. When the Ft. Marion prisoners were allowed to return home in 1878, he convinced 22 of them to continue their schooling. The Hampton Institute, a school for freed slaves in Virginia, accepted several of them.

Carlisle’s opening allowed Pratt to resign his Army commission and to practice his ideas about educating Indians.

Pratt’s goal was to "kill the Indian, not the man." In order to assimilate American Indian children into European culture, Pratt subjected them to what we would call brainwashing tactics today. These are the same methods that cult leaders use to coerce recruits to commit completely to a new way of thinking.

At the time reformers believed that assimilation and off-reservation boarding schools were the lesser of two evils. They were a better policy than extermination, getting rid of American Indians by shooting them or starving them to death. Just because something is the lesser of two evils doesn’t make it right.

After Carlisle opened, boarding schools became a part of official U.S. Government Indian policy. Attendance was mandatory. Most of the schools were run by church organizations, but they all followed the same mind-control model set forth by Pratt.

• Many boarding schools were established far away from reservations so that students would have no contact with their families and friends. Parents were discouraged from visiting and, in most cases, students were not allowed to go home during the summer.

• Indian boarding school students wore military uniforms and were forced to march.

• They were given many rules and no choices. To disobey meant swift and harsh punishment.

• Students were forbidden to speak their language.

• They were forbidden to practice their religion and were forced to memorize Bible verses and the Lord’s Prayer.

• Their days were filled with so many tasks that they had little time to think.

• Indian students had no privacy.

• Boarding school students were expected to spy on one another and were pitted against each other by administrators and teachers.

• Students were taught that the Indian way of life was savage and inferior to the white way. They were taught that they were being civilized or "raised up" to a better way of life.

• Indian students were told that Indian people who retained their culture were stupid, dirty, and backwards. Those who most quickly assimilated were called "good Indians." Those who didn’t were called "bad" Indians.

• The main part of their education focused on learning manual skills such as cooking and cleaning for girls and milking cows and carpentry for boys.

• Students were shamed and humiliated for showing homesickness for their families.

• When they finally did go home, as to be expected, many boarding school students had a difficult time fitting in.

By the 1930s most off-reservation boarding schools were closed, but many American Indian children who lived on reservations still attended boarding schools located there. Missionaries ran some of these schools. The Bureau of Indian Affairs ran others. Although these schools dropped many of the Carlisle trappings, more than a few of them still retained an authoritarian structure and the goal of "civilizing" students.

In all more than 100,000 American Indian children attended 500 boarding schools that were established after the Carlisle model. It is a testimony to the strength, courage and persistance of Indian people that the people and their diverse cultures survived this prolonged attack.