'To Kill the Indian and Save the Man': A History of the Indian Boarding Schools in America, 1865–1939

Education was promised in many treaties made by the United States with the 500 Indigenous nations of North America. However, contrary to the tribes' expectations, the Indian Boarding Schools that arose were premised on the idea of cultural genocide.

Captain Richard Henry Pratt, superintendent of Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, made it his policy “to kill the Indian and save the man,” which became the aim for schools throughout North America.

For seventy-five years, these schools employed horrific methods to erase their students’ cultural heritage. These techniques caused the deaths of hundreds of students and did untold psychological damage to survivors (and to subsequent generations of their families).

The attempts of the schools to forcibly erase the children’s native language and identity, impose upon them a model of acquisitive individualism, and deny them contact with their loved ones hurt the students in unimaginable ways.

This presentation provides a broad overview of the history of the Indian boarding schools to explain the shared mission of the Indigenous Task Force of the Bahá’ís of Rio Rancho and Walking in Beauty, Inc., to build a monument to these lost children.

Joseph Weixelman, PhD is a historian of the American West, researching topics relating to national parks and Indigenous peoples, especially where the two intersect. He earned his doctorate from the University of New Mexico, and his dissertation, “Interpreting the ‘Anasazi Myth’: How the Pueblo Indians Disappeared from the Story,” was published as a chapter in Preserving Western History: Public History and Historic Preservation in the American West, edited by Andrew Gulliford.

He earned his master’s degree at Montana State University. His thesis, “Fear or Reverence?: Native Americans and the Geysers of Yellowstone,” later published in Yellowstone Science, led to an important revision of Yellowstone National Park’s history. While completing his undergraduate degree in anthropology at the University of Colorado, Joseph saw his honors paper, “The Traditional Navajo Religion and the Bahá’í Faith” published in World Order.

Joseph worked as a high-school history teacher in Colorado and Wyoming and a seasonal ranger at Yellowstone and Mesa Verde National Parks, as well as Petroglyph National Monument, for more than a decade. He spent more than sixteen years teaching American history at Wayne State College in Nebraska, including courses on the history of the American West, American Indian experience, and Civil Rights Movement, and supervised the training and evaluation of social science teachers throughout the state.

Following his retirement in 2023, Joseph relocated to Rio Rancho, New Mexico, where he continues his research and volunteers regularly at Petroglyph National Monument. He maintains memberships in the Western History Association, Phi Alpha Theta, Phi Gamma Mu, Yellowstone Forever, and the Archaeological Conservancy.

Joseph is a member of the Indigenous Task Force of the Bahá’ís of Rio Rancho and has delivered two previous talks (on Yellowstone and on the disappearance of Pueblo Indians from their stories), available to watch in the Task Force's video library. He was recently elected chair of Walking in Beauty, Inc., the nonprofit created by the Task Force to carry out its mission of placing a memorial for forgotten Indigenous children lost in the boarding schools in Rio Rancho's Waterwise Park.