U.S. once set up over 400 boarding schools to extinguish Indigenous culture: media

Members of the 23 Native Pueblos of the U.S. state of New Mexico, plus several tribes from the state of Arizona, celebrate the Inaugural Indigenous Peoples Day at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, the United States, Oct. 14, 2019. (Photo by Richard Lakin/Xinhua)

Children were forcibly removed from their homes. By 1893, the Bureau of Indian Affairs received congressional authorization to withhold food rations and supplies from American Indian families who refused to enroll or keep their children in boarding schools.

NEW YORK, Nov. 17 (Xinhua) -- Beginning in the early 1800s, the U.S. government set up and supported more than 400 boarding schools designed to extinguish Indigenous culture and assimilate young Native Americans into white society, reported NBC News on Wednesday.

"The goal, in the words of one of the first school's founders, was to 'kill the Indian in him and save the man'," said the report.

The schools often required the children to take on English names and give up their style of clothing and hair, as well as their traditional languages, religions and cultural practices, the report noted.

"Children were forcibly removed from their homes. By 1893, the Bureau of Indian Affairs received congressional authorization to withhold food rations and supplies from American Indian families who refused to enroll or keep their children in boarding schools," it said.

The boarding school system was used as a "weapon" not only to break the children's bonds with their families and culture but to take Indigenous peoples' land, a U.S. Senate report released in 1969 was quoted as saying.

At least 100,000 Native American children are estimated to have attended the boarding schools, which operated across 37 states with the last ones closing in the late 1960s, according to the report.