Hello friends, welcome to Episode 5 of Taken, Native boarding schools in America.

I want to take a moment to issue a content warning for this episode, some parts of it may

not be suitable for younger audiences.

When Richard Pratt dictated his memoir to his daughter toward the end of his life, he

spent a lot of time talking about the Carlisle school and what he perceived to be its successes

and occasionally its failures.

He admitted that one of the school's largest programs got off to a rocky start he had arranged

for about two dozen students to be placed on local farms to work over the summer and almost

all of them ran away or were sent back by their host families.

But that was just the beginning and soon the program was practiced all over the country.

I'm Sharon McMahon and here's where it gets interesting.

What General Pratt was speaking about was called the outing program and its goal was to give

boarding school students real-world practice to cultivate the skills they learned throughout

the school year, which is a nice way to put it.

An execution students were signed to white families and they were sent to live and work

for them.

Pratt's vision was that students would be treated like a part of the family and the

experience would serve as a hands-on education about American Christian culture.

In 1895, he wrote to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs saying, this brings the Indian youth

directly in contact with good, wholesome, civilized life and they absorb it rapidly and

it absorbs them and they become a part of it.

But Pratt wasn't the first person to come up with the idea of boarding Native Americans

...