Carlisle Indian Industrial School Opens With "Kill the Indian, Save the Man" Mission of Cultural Genocide

Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt opens the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania under U.S. government authorization, establishing the blueprint for more than 400 federal Indian boarding schools nationwide designed to forcibly assimilate Native American children through cultural destruction. Pratt’s explicit motto captures the institution’s genocidal purpose: “Kill the Indian, save the man.” The school’s mission is to eradicate Indigenous identities, beliefs, languages, and traditional knowledge by removing children from their families and communities—often by force or coercion—and subjecting them to a regime designed to strip away every aspect of their cultural identity. Administrators force students to speak English exclusively, cut their hair (a deeply significant cultural violation for many tribes), wear Anglo-American clothing, adopt Christian religious practices, and abandon all Indigenous cultural expressions. Students receive English names replacing their Indigenous names, cannot practice traditional religions, and face severe punishment for speaking their native languages or maintaining any connection to their cultures. Carlisle becomes the model that the federal government replicates across the country, creating a vast institutional infrastructure for what scholars and Indigenous communities recognize as cultural genocide.

The conditions at Carlisle and other boarding schools constitute systematic abuse and result in hundreds of deaths. Outbreaks of tuberculosis, measles, trachoma, and other diseases are common and serve as significant threats to students confined in overcrowded, unsanitary facilities. At Carlisle alone, nearly 200 children are buried in the school’s cemetery, with many families never informed of their children’s deaths. Federal archives contain “ample evidence” that the government “coerced, induced, or compelled Indian children to enter the Federal Indian boarding school system,” according to later investigations. Treatment of students includes solitary confinement, flogging, withholding food, whipping, slapping, and cuffing for infractions like speaking native languages or resisting assimilation. Students are also subjected to forced labor, with children performing agricultural and industrial work that benefits the institutions while being framed as “education” and “training.” In one documented example, Samuel and Edward were sent from their Winnebago home to Carlisle in 1895; Samuel died just 47 days after arrival, and Edward followed four years later. Carlisle never informed their families or the Winnebago Nation of their deaths, and the boys were unceremoniously buried without notice—illustrating the dehumanization inherent in the boarding school system.

Carlisle almost completely fails to achieve its stated educational goals while succeeding at cultural destruction. The school fails to graduate most students, instead subjecting them to harsh conditions, labor exploitation, and abuse that traumatizes generations. General Pratt’s objective to assimilate Native children into Euro-American culture by eradicating their Indigenous identities produces lasting damage: the destruction of languages (many Indigenous languages go extinct or nearly extinct due to boarding school policies), the severing of cultural transmission from elders to youth, and the creation of intergenerational trauma affecting Native communities into the 21st century. The U.S. government eventually acknowledges the boarding school system’s devastating legacy in a historic 2022 report by Interior Secretary Deb Haaland detailing the horrors Native children experienced in more than 400 boarding schools the government ran or supported, identifying 53 marked and unmarked burial grounds on school sites. In December 2024, President Biden designates the Carlisle site as a national monument with co-stewardship by Indian tribes, acknowledging the cultural genocide while providing minimal redress for the systematic destruction of Indigenous cultures, languages, and communities. The boarding school system exemplifies institutional corruption operating through humanitarian rhetoric—“civilizing” and “educating” Indigenous children—while executing a policy of cultural annihilation that serves the broader project of Indigenous dispossession by destroying the cultural foundations that sustain tribal sovereignty and resistance to land theft.