First Day of Carlisle Boarding School
(16" x 48", oil on canvas)

The girls'  eyes speak  silently to us still.

These boarding schools would "educate" the Indians, "civilize" them. The theory was to take the children far away from their land, their family and way of life, strip them of their language, their hair, their clothing and dress them in the garments of the white man's civilization. Then they would become like the White man, of the image the White man liked to hold of himself.

"Kill the Indian, save the man", was the policy of the Boarding Schools, originated by General Pratt. He stands in Wildcat's painting The Strategy. It was an enlightened policy for its day, considering the alternative policy was to kill all the Indians. Yet it resulted in what is referred to by modern anthropologists as a cultural genocide.

 

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