Native children. The stated purpose of the policy was to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” The U.S. Boarding School Era emerged from the federal government’s desire to deal with the “Indian problem” by using education as a weapon. At the same time (the end of the 19th century), the U.S. hunted bison to near extinction to eliminate a major source of sustenance for Native people. One U.S. Army leader is said to have ordered his troops to “kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” While this effort sought to eliminate Indian nations by starving Indigenous economies, boarding schools were even more insidious. The intent was to eliminate Indians by removing all races of Tribal cultures—language, spiritual traditions, family ties, etc. and replacing them with European Christian ideals of civilization, religion, and culture.
 
We still do not know how many total children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and Christian churches. However, preliminary statistics tell us that within the first twenty years of the boarding school policy, 20,000 children had already been taken from their families and placed in schools far from their homes. Only twenty-five years later, that number more than tripled, and 60,889 children were in boarding schools by 1925.