Civilization Fund Act Authorizes Federal Funding for Indigenous Assimilation Schools, Laying Groundwork for Boarding School System

Congress passes and President James Monroe signs the Civilization Fund Act (also known as the Indian Civilization Act), authorizing federal funding for organizations to run schools on Native American reservations with the explicit goal of assimilating Indigenous peoples into white society. The Act creates a federal fund to administer education, healthcare, and rations promised to tribal nations under treaties, but structures these services to serve the “civilization process” rather than tribal sovereignty or cultural preservation. President Monroe articulates the Act’s underlying logic: that providing education to Native Americans would “prepare them for successful assimilation into white society”—revealing that federal educational policy aims not to serve Indigenous communities’ self-defined needs but to destroy Indigenous cultures and replace them with Euro-American values, religion, and economic practices. The legislation initially supports schools in native villages and areas established by religious missions operated by both Protestant and Catholic organizations, creating a government-funded infrastructure for cultural transformation that would evolve into the devastating boarding school system.

The Civilization Fund Act establishes the precedent and legal authority for increasingly coercive assimilation policies culminating in the forced removal of Indigenous children to boarding schools. In 1891 and through the early 20th century, the government uses the Act as statutory authority to establish numerous Native American boarding schools, eventually creating a network of at least 367 known Indian boarding schools that forcibly remove or coerce over 100,000 American Indian and Alaska Native children from their families. These Bureau of Indian Affairs-operated and church-run institutions implement systematic cultural genocide: cutting children’s hair (a profound cultural violation), assigning them English names to replace Indigenous names, prohibiting contact with relatives, punishing children for speaking Indigenous languages, forcing Christian religious conversion, and subjecting students to physical and sexual abuse. The evolution from village schools to boarding schools represents an escalation in coercive assimilation tactics—from attempting to transform Indigenous communities in place to forcibly separating children from families and communities to destroy cultural transmission across generations.

The Civilization Fund Act’s legacy extends beyond the boarding school system to the creation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824 and the codification of assimilation as official federal policy. The Act establishes the template for using federal institutions and funding to pursue Indigenous cultural destruction while claiming humanitarian and educational purposes—framing genocide as benevolence and cultural annihilation as “civilization.” Monroe’s administration establishes a precedent for the systematic degradation of Native culture and provides legal frameworks that subsequent administrations use to justify forced removal from traditional tribal lands (Indian Removal Act of 1830), allotment policies destroying communal land ownership (Dawes Act of 1887), and the boarding school system’s peak operations in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Civilization Fund Act exemplifies institutional corruption operating through paternalistic rhetoric: Congress creates federal programs claiming to “help” and “educate” Indigenous peoples while structuring those programs to destroy the cultural foundations of tribal sovereignty, replace Indigenous governance and knowledge systems with Euro-American alternatives, and facilitate land theft by rendering Indigenous communities dependent on federal support rather than self-sufficient through their traditional economies and territories—all funded by taxpayer money extracted partly from the very Indigenous nations being targeted for cultural destruction.