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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