Carlisle Indian Industrial School, open 1879 to 1918, is an example of a U.S. boarding school.
Carlisle’s founder was Richard Henry Pratt. Commissioner of Indian Affairs Ezra Hayt ordered him to concentrate on Lakota children. Who allegedly had a “hostile attitude toward the government.”
Hayt wanted to use the boarding school to pressure the Lakotas, and other western Indigenous nations, to give back millions of acres of treaty-protected territory. So it could be used for white people’s settlement.
“The children would be hostages for the good behavior of their people,” wrote Pratt, as he began to round up indigenous children in Dakota Territory.
“It was the same situation in the U.S. in terms of the boarding school experiment, era, harms, and impacts, and the unmarked graves,” claims Christine McCleave, head of NABS. and an enrolled citizen of Turtle Mountain Ojibwe Nation.
McCleave’s grandfather and great-grandfather attended boarding schools. Her great-grandfather was taken to Carlisle.
