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Rh Tribes also negotiated “more than 150” treaties with the United States that included “education-related provisions.” Dept. of Interior, B. Newland, Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report 33 (May 2022) (BIA Report). Many tribal leaders hoped these provisions would lead to the creation of “reservation Indian schools that would blend traditional Indian education with the needed non-Indian skills that would allow their members to adapt to the reservation way of life.” R. Cross, American Indian Education: The Terror of History and the Nation’s Debt to the Indian Peoples, 21 U. Ark. Little Rock L. Rev. 941, 950 (1999).

At first, Indian education typically came in the form of day schools, many of them “established through the … efforts of missionaries or the wives of Army officers stationed at military reservations in the Indian country.” Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of Interior, p. LXI (1886) (ARCIA 1886). At those day schools, “Indian children would learn English as a second language,” along with “math and science.” Fletcher & Singel 917–918. But the children lived at home with their families where they could continue to learn and practice “their languages, beliefs, and traditional knowledge.” Id., at 918. At least in those “early decades,” schooling was “generally … not compulsory” anyway. Id., at 914.

The federal government had darker designs. By the late 1870s, its goals turned toward destroying tribal identity and assimilating Indians into broader society. See L. Lacey, The White Man’s Law and the American Indian Family in the Assimilation Era, 40 Ark. L. Rev. 327, 356–357 (1986). Achieving those goals, officials reasoned, required the “complete isolation of the Indian child from his savage antecedents.” ARCIA 1886, at LXI. And because “the warm reciprocal affection existing between parents and children” was “among the strongest characteristics of