Ethnocide Through Education: Native American Boarding Schools
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Authors
Nicholas Malish
Issue Date
2026
Type
Language
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Abstract
The Off-Reservation Boarding School system was a program used by the United States government in the late 1800s to the mid 1900s to assimilate Native American children into the growing American society. This represented a significant shift from the previous policy surrounding Native peoples from military force to an attempt at a more peaceful solution. This research project looks at the issues at the heart of the creation of this system, the policies used to achieve the ultimate goal of assimilation, lingering after-effects, and ultimately try to answer if the schools were successful in achieving the goal of assimilation. The scholarly consensus is that they failed, in part due to the large amount of suffering that the students faced, along with the resilience of the students to hold onto pieces of the cultures that they had been separated from. This project uses a variety of primary and secondary sources in relation to this system to come to this conclusion, along with some supplemental information from similar systems that existed in Canada and Australia. In alignment with what previous research has found, despite the endorsement from both the federal government and reform movements at the time, these schools largely failed to achieve their primary objective. This paper argues that the push to separate children from their native cultures pushed them to cling to whatever aspects of their culture they could find in the practices of the school. Additionally, the separation from the tribal system allowed for the creation of a large Native American identity to be formed due to children of many tribes being forced into the same schools.