Not only did boarding schools like Carlisle exploit Native children for labor, they allegedly made tribes fund the abuse: the BIA used tribal nations’ trust monies, raised by selling Native land, to bankroll federal Indian boarding schools. In May, the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes of Oklahoma filed a class-action lawsuit in a district court in Pennsylvania against the Interior Department, among other defendants, demanding a full accounting of how trust monies “taken from the Nations themselves, and held in trust for the Nations’ collective benefit” were spent on boarding schools that systematically sought to destroy Native cultures.
Carlisle’s entire apparatus, from its location hundreds of miles from the nearest Indian reservation to its mixing of tribes and industrial curriculum, was designed to speed assimilation. Before Carlisle, most schools were located on reservations and primarily educated single tribes. As Secretary of the Interior Schurz complained in 1879, “It is the experience of the department that mere day-schools, however well conducted, do not withdraw the children sufficiently from the influences, habits, and traditions of their home-life, and produce for this reason but a comparatively limited effect.” Manifest Destiny demanded harsher measures. In the 1880s and 1890s, as the Dawes Act broke up Indian land into individual allotments, the government established military-style boarding schools, many of which were off reservation. As Ojibwe historian Brenda Child explains, “Indian people lost ninety million acres of land during the half century that assimilation policy dominated Indian education in the United States.”
Since retaking office, Trump has left no room for an honest appraisal of the government’s construction, and relentless expansion, on stolen land or of how its methods of expropriation continue to affect Indigenous peoples. His administration’s posture toward Native America is one of disrespect and ignorance. In July, presumably seeking to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, Trump demanded that the Washington Commanders football team change its name back to the Washington Redskins; that same month, the Department of Homeland Security’s X account posted the Manifest Destiny–era painting American Progress by John Gast, depicting Native Americans being driven off their land by settlers, which it captioned, “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”