The Schools That Tried to Erase a People
By Marguerite Calloway
Length4h 14m
About this audiobook
In 1879, a crowd gathered at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania, to watch eighty-two Lakota children march in from the Dakota plains, their hair cut, their clothes replaced, their names exchanged for English ones. "Kill the Indian, save the man," Richard Henry Pratt liked to say. Behind that slogan stood a national policy: more than one hundred boarding schools, run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, that took Native children from their families and tried to strip away language, religion, and kinship. Some children died of tuberculosis in dormitories. Some ran home across a thousand miles of winter. Some learned to read, then used that reading to sue the government. Drawing on school ledgers, congressional testimony, the 1928 Meriam Report, and the testimony of survivors and their descendants, this book follows the policy from its founding through the Meriam reckoning, the 1934 reforms, the WWII years, termination, and the 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act, showing how Native families fought back at every step and how their resistance still shapes the law today.
Audiobook details
GenreHistory
Length4 hrs 14 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
Publish dateSep 19, 2026
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Chapter 1: The Train at Carlisle
2Chapter 2: The Policy on Paper
3Chapter 3: Haskell and the Business of Children
4Chapter 4: The Graveyard at the School
5Chapter 5: Run Home
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter 6: A Century of Learning, a Century of Loss
7Chapter 7: The Ledger and the Smoke Signal
8Chapter 8: The Meriam Report
9Chapter 9: Mr. Collier Goes to Washington
10Chapter 10: The War Years and the Quiet After
11Chapter 11: Termination
12Chapter 12: The Children Come Home
13About the Author
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