From 1879 the United States built a national system of off-reservation boarding schools on the model of Carlisle, founded by Richard Henry Pratt, whose stated aim was to 'kill the Indian, save the man'. Children were taken from their families, often under pressure or coercion, renamed, had their hair cut, were forbidden to speak their languages or practise their religions, and were set to manual labour that supported the institutions themselves. The Department of the Interior's Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report, released in May 2022, identified 408 federal schools operating between 1819 and 1969 and marked or unmarked burial sites at approximately 53 of them, with the number expected to rise; it was the first comprehensive federal inventory of the policy. The National Park Service records more than 7,800 children at Carlisle to 1918 and about 200 buried in its cemetery, whose remains the Army has since been returning to their communities.
The United States federal government and church partners removed Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian children from their families into distant boarding schools to eliminate their languages and cultures
The 1880 federal census counted 306,543 American Indians, and the 1890 census 248,253 — the recorded nadir of the Indigenous population of the United States. Both counts are undercounts, since census enumeration of people on reservations and in Indian Territory was incomplete, and Native Hawaiians were counted separately (about 40,000 in the 1890s).
No total exists for the nineteenth century. The firmest single figure is the National Park Service's estimate of about 200 children who died at Carlisle and were buried there between 1879 and 1918. The Interior Department's 2022 report identified burial sites at roughly 53 federal schools and stated that the number would grow as the investigation continued; because records were kept inconsistently and many children died after being sent home ill, any aggregate would be a guess.
The Department of the Interior's 2022 investigative report documents the removal of children from their families, the suppression of Indigenous names, languages and religious practice, the use of manual labour in place of academic instruction, and confinement in institutions from which children were not free to leave.
United States of America