Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 by David Wallace Adams
Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 argues that the final phase of the so-called “Indian Wars” was waged not on battlefields but in the dormitories and classrooms of federal boarding schools. Policymakers believed that by removing Native children from their families for extended periods, Indigenous cultures could be erased and replaced with white American norms—an ideology chillingly summarized in the dictum, “Kill the Indian and save the man.”
Moving beyond a conventional study of federal Indian policy, David Wallace Adams offers a vivid and deeply researched account of daily life within these boarding schools as “total institutions” designed to reconstruct Native children psychologically, culturally, and socially. The assault on Indigenous identity took many forms: the cutting of hair, the imposition of English names, military-style discipline, corporal punishment, suppression of Native languages and religions, enforced patriotism, Victorian gender norms, athletic programs, and vocational training aimed at economic subordination.
While some students adapted or partially embraced the values imposed upon them, others resisted through escape attempts, arson, and subtle acts of defiance. Adams also traces the post-school experiences of Native graduates, examining how they struggled to reconcile their boarding school education with life on the reservation and selectively drew upon their schooling to navigate personal survival and tribal continuity.
Through meticulous scholarship and compelling narrative, Education for Extinction reveals boarding schools as central instruments of cultural destruction and Indigenous resilience, offering a powerful reinterpretation of American Indian history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.