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4 the Indian nature,” officials set out to eliminate it by dissolving Indian families. Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of Interior 392 (1904).

Thus began Indian boarding schools. In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened its doors at the site of an old military base in central Pennsylvania. Carlisle’s head, then-Captain Richard Henry Pratt, summarized the school’s mission this way: “[A]ll the Indian there is in the race should be dead. Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” The Advantages of Mingling Indians With Whites, in Proceedings of the National Conference of Charities and Correction 46 (I. Barrows ed. 1892). From its inception, Carlisle depended on state support. The school “was deeply enmeshed with local governments and their services,” and it was “expanded thanks to the Pennsylvania Legislature.” Brief for American Historical Association et al. as Amici Curiae 11 (Historians Brief). Ultimately, Carlisle became the model for what would become a system of 408 similar federal institutions nationwide. BIA Report 82. “The essential feature” of each was, in the federal government’s own words, “the abolition of the old tribal relations.” Annual Report of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of Interior 28 (1910).

Unsurprisingly, “[m]any Indian families resisted” the federal government’s boarding school initiative and “refus[ed] to send their children.” S. Rep. No. 91–501, pt. 1, p. 12 (1969). But Congress would not be denied. It authorized the Secretary of the Interior to “prevent the issuing of rations or the furnishing of subsistence” to Indian families who would not surrender their children. Act of Mar. 3, 1893, 27 Stat. 628, 635; see also, e.g., Act of Feb. 14, 1920, 41 Stat. 410. When economic coercion failed, officials sometimes resorted to abduction. See BIA Report 36. As one official later recounted, officers would “visit the [Indian] camps unexpectedly with a detachment of [officers], and