This week, a lecture about Native American boarding schools from the mid-17th to the early 20th centuries.

Known more recently as American Indian residential schools, their primary objective was to civilize, or assimilate, Native American children and youth into Euro-American culture.

The moment you step foot in Carlisle, they basically, they stripped everything that was Native

American of you.

Right.

Every aspect of your heritage.

From your hair to your clothes, to your language, to your religion, these 10,000 kids,

most of them who didn't speak English on any level, were baptized as Christians

without ever being told what that meant.

More with Black Hill State University professor Thomas Wyatt after this.

Our topic today is we're going to start with our discussion of Native Americans.

This is one of two different discussions we're having.

I want to make clear that we're not talking about the Indian Wars in this kind of lecture.

That's going to be in a couple weeks.

And we're going to use that as a way to link

kind of wars throughout the 19th century all the way up to it, including the Spanish-American

war. So our focus is kind of around that. We're thinking more kind of legal policy and issues

and such. So the goal is to think in that broad 19th century way. So our start point is a couple

key things we need to kind of deal with. The second half of our semester, one of the big

questions we're picking up on is what does it mean to be an

American who can claim to be an American that's one of the big questions

that's gonna kind of take us through the end of our semester into as we deal

...