Why were Native Americans put in boarding schools?

The boarding school experience for Indian children began in 1860 when the Bureau of Indian Affairs established the first boarding school on the Yakima Indian Reservation in the state of Washington. read more

: 16"By 1885, 106 [Indian Schools] had been established, many of them on abandoned military installations" using military personnel and Indian prisoners Native American boarding schools in the United States were seen as the means for the government to achieve assimilation of Native Americans into mainstream American culture. read more

The goal was to make them as like “good white people” as much as possible. Given that Native Americans were viewed as “savages”, whether they went to the schools or not, seemed to be beside the point to the officials running the boarding schools. The only acceptable language was English. read more

Boarding schools were the ideal instrument for absorbing people and ideologies that stood in the way of manifest destiny. Schools would quickly be able to assimilate Indian youth. The first priority of the boarding schools would be to provide the rudiments of academic education: reading, writing and speaking of the English language. read more