The Unexpected Impact of Boarding Schools on Native American Identity

So the idea of the Indian was completely foreign to them until boarding schools And all of a sudden in boarding schools all the kids all the young people are taken required to go to these schools All of these different groups they're all living together They're all forced to surrender much of their own individual cultures those dozens of different cultures that they were you know they'd come from And suddenly it begins to dawn on them They're now all speaking the same language right They're all you know we've got much more in common than we have differences among us So there's a way in which you know the supposed purpose of a boarding school was to destroy Indianness The famous phrase coming from Colonel Pratt who was the one who founded Carlisle was kill the Indian to save the man Destroy Indian identity in order to allow these people to survive in the modern world But what the boarding schools did was in fact create the Indian They didn't kill the Indian The Indian didn't exist before