Hello friends, welcome to episode 2 of our series, Taken, Native boarding schools in America.

In our last episode we discussed one of the motto of the founder of the Carlisle Indian

School Richard Henry Pratt.

Kill the Indian and save the man.

And the statement speaks right to the heart of the matter.

The dominant view was that an Indian was not a man, and that he could only become a man

by writting himself of his natural identity.

So how did we get here?

How did we get to the first federally funded boarding school?

Let's dive in.

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

The children who arrived by train to Carlisle Indian School were photographed in a series of

before and after images, images that were widely disseminated and seen by the American public.

They showed children in the clothing of their communities and ancestors, and then after

having their hair cut and their traditional dress taken from them, they showed the child

remade in the image of the military-minded Europeans who ran the school.

One Mohawk boy, Maurice Caini, later wrote a poem about his grandfather's experience

that read in part, who is this boy?

Hair cut, tongue cut, whose youthful warrior braids lay heaped on the barber's floor,

spine straightened by General Pratt's rules of order, who is this teenage lad with eyes

cold in utter fear, mouth viced and shut of prayer and song, whose thin legs tremble

within army trousers, arms quiver in dread of the unexpected.

...