They shoved Zitkala-Sa on the train, the first step in her journey to White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute, a Native-American boarding school in Wabash, Indiana. According to her 19th century autobiography, “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” her mother complied with the government, allowing her daughter to be ripped from Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, because she wanted her to receive a Western education.

The children traveled for several days, passing across miles of sunflower-covered plains. Zitkala-Sa arrived at the school grounds in 1891. She remembered the overwhelming terror as the Quaker missionaries pushed her toward the large buildings in the distance. They chucked her into a small room, leaving her to sleep among strange faces. “I [heaved] deep, tired sobs,” said the Sioux woman. “My tears were left to dry themselves in streaks, because neither my aunt nor my mother was near to wipe them away.”

     In the decades following the Civil War, social reformers focused their attention on the education of Native-Americans. They believed in the intrinsic superiority of Western culture, which they considered indispensable to the intellectual development of productive citizens, so they designed boarding schools to assimilate the native Indians into American society.
     They stripped children from their families, ensuring the destruction of languages, religions, and cultures. The experience left a permanent scar on the NativeAmerican consciousness.
     Capt. Richard Henry Pratt established the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879. Located in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it served as a role model for the boarding school movement. They shipped the first wave of students in railroad cars. Civilians and reporters stared into the trains as they chugged into each station, struggling for a glimpse of the strange children.
     Pratt modeled the school on the military. He issued uniforms to men, clothed women in Victorian dresses, and forced them to trade their moccasins for American shoes. He had a motto: “Kill the Indian. Save the man.” He forbade their religion, washed their heads with kerosene, and required them to change their hairstyles. He banned their language. They spoke English, which T.J. Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs, considered the “language of the greatest, most powerful and enterprising nationalities beneath the sun.” Most Native-Americans considered this cultural genocide. “Imagine being torn from your family, thrown on a train, and forced into a boarding school,” said Donna Rosh, professor of anthropology at Minnesota State University Moorhead. “How would that make you feel?”
     Congress recognized Carlisle as a huge success. They appropriated more funds to Indian education, leading to the creation of twenty-five new boarding schools between 1880 and 1920. The government continued enforcing these policies until the middle of the 20th century. Schools sprouted up next to most Indian reservations, including those in Minnesota and North Dakota, such as White Earth, Standing Rock, Spirit Lake, and Turtle Mountain. The Lakota tribe was educated at Wahpeton Indian Boarding School. Louise Erdrich, a Lakota poet from Wahpeton, N. D., used it as an inspiration for “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways.”
     Many students escaped their imprisonment. They headed toward home, hitchhiking and catching rides on railroad cars. If captured by the authorities, they faced a terrible punishment, such as additional helpings of strenuous work or beatings with a belt.
    Erdrich describes this in detail:

The boarding schools burned a permanent scar in the Native-American psyche. Beginning with the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1897, the American government struggled to eliminate any traces of Indian culture. Entire languages vanished, as did religions and cultural traditions, bringing an entire civilization to the brink of extinction. “We had a perfectly good culture and good values,” said Gladys Ray, an Ojibwe elder from Fargo, North Dakota. “But people never bothered to hear about our beliefs. They failed to notice that we respected the whole creation: the rocks, the humans, the animals, the birds, and the creatures that live in the water. And there was nothing wrong with that.”