Che Jim: In 2024, then-President Joe Biden delivered an apology unlike any given by a U.S. president before. 

"But the federal government has never formally apologised... until today. I formally apologise, as president of the United States of America."

He apologized for a federal policy that had forcibly separated Native American children from their families and into boarding schools for more than 150 years. 

The reception was mixed. While some Native people have expressed belief that this history is being formally acknowledged, others had pushed for more. 

Rosalie Whirlwind Soldier of the Rosebud Sioux tribe, told the Associated Press, "Sorry is not enough. A whole generation of people and our future was destroyed for us." 

I'm Che Jim, and welcome to Crash Course: Native American History. 

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It's 1883. After generations of broken treaties, war, and forced removal, things are as bad as they've ever been for Native Americans. And white progressives calling themselves "Friends of the Indian" are meeting to talk about how to make things right. 

At first, the friends talk about things like honoring treaties and restoring stolen land. But within a few years, they’ve pivoted. 

What if Native Americans just lived like settlers?

As bad as things already were, they were about to get a whole lot worse. 

See, for about a hundred years, the U.S. government had used a whole bag of tricks to deal with the fact that Native people a) existed, and b) controlled lands that settlers wanted. 

This was a so-called "Indian problem", which isn't a joke. That’s literally what they called it. 

But by the late 19th century, the government had exhausted most of its playbook:

Sign treaties with Native nations as equals, check. 

Break those treaties, check. 

Wage war, check. 

Remove tribes onto reservations, check. 

In short, they had tried everything to solve the Indian problem. 

Well, almost everything. There's still one more play, a real hail Mary. What if they turn Native Americans into white Americans?

You know the saying. If you can’t beat them, make them join you. 

So, that's when Friends of the Indian began talking about assimilation, assimilation, absorbing Natives into American culture. 

Conveniently, it suited the US government's goals. 

If Native people lived and thought just like settlers, there would be no problem with using land for all it was worth. 

And as the idea caught on, some people saw it as a way to help Natives by "civilising them".

Richard Henry Pratt put it this way: "Kill the Indian, save the man."

Pratt was a US Army officer who first started erasing Native identity by forcing Native prisoners of war to cut their hair, wear uniforms, and give up everything from their culture. 

When he later founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879, he used the same methods on Native children. 

Carlisle was the first federal-run off-reservation boarding school for Natives. And between the late 19th and early 20th centuries, it became the model for dozens of other boarding schools supported by the U.S. government. 

Thousands of Native children were taken from their families, brought to schools hundreds of miles from home, and forced to give up everything from their cultures: their clothing, their languages, their religion, even their names. 

Those who defied the rules were beaten. Many suffered malnutrition, disease, and abuse. 

Luther Standing Bear, in Oglala Lakota, who attended Carlisle, remembers, "We went to school to copy, to imitate; not to exchange languages and ideas, and not to develop the best traits that had come out of uncountable experiences of hundreds and thousands of years living upon this continent."

Hundreds of Native children died at these schools, and the ones who made it out would return to the homes and cultures they no longer felt connected to. 

A few Native parents willingly enrolled their kids, hoping for the best. But many were forced. Some schools even required that parents give up custody entirely. 

There was resistance, of course, like the 19 Hopi men who were incarcerated at Fort Alcatraz in 1894 for refusing to send their kids to boarding schools. 

Plenty of others spoke out against the harms of boarding school, like the Yankton Sioux writer Zitkala-Ša, who shared her experiences working as a music teacher at Carlisle. In The Atlantic, she wrote, "Gazing upon the Indian girls and boys bending over their books, the white visitors walked out of the schoolhouse well satisfied: they were educating the children of the 'Red Man'!

"But few have paused to question whether real life or long-lasting death lies beneath this semblance of civilisation."

Pratt dismissed her writing as trash and fired her for speaking out. 

Despite all this effort, boarding school still had a problem. They only assimilated kids. What about the adults?

Senator Henry Dawes, a member of the Friends of the Indian, had an answer. He believed that the key to assimilation lay in land ownership. If the government could control which Natives owned what land and how that land was used, then assimilation would finally be locked in. 

So in 1887, Dawes and another Friend of the Indian, anthropologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher, co-drafted the General Allotment Act, aka the Dawes Act. It authorised the president to chop up reservations into parcels up to 160 acres, called allotments, that were given to individual tribal members. 

Instead of a big chunk of land shared by the whole tribe, each member would get a small slice that belongs to them.

It's giving grift. 

Allotment was supposed to be the government's golden ticket, a fast track to assimilation. 

It would split up tribes and open up more land to settlers. Native men would farm. Native women would keep the house. And the Indian problem would finally go away for good. 

And to sweeten the deal, U.S. citizenship for anyone who accepts an allotment and relinquishes tribal citizenship. 

No need to identify with a tribe when you're a citizen of the good old US of A.

Allotment wasn’t a new assimilation technique, though. In fact, it had already happened to the Omaha nation by the time the Dawes Act had been signed. 

Just a year before the Omaha reservation was broken up, the Omaha's principal chief Ongpatonga aka Big Elk wrote to his people, "I bring you news which it saddens my heart to think of. There is a coming flood which will soon reach us, and I advise you to prepare for it."

He had foreseen not just a collapse of the Omaha way of life, but a disaster that would wipe Native identity everywhere. 

As the government forced allotments onto tribes across the country, Big Elk's vision became a reality.

Some tribes resisted at first. The Yankton Sioux, for example, knew their land wasn't good for crops and wanted to keep it all for communal grazing. But federal officials used military force to persuade members of the tribe to take allotments. 

Many tribal leaders feared they'd just lose more of their land to settlers after the Dawes Act. And they were right. The government marked any non-alloted land as surplus to Indian needs and open it up for non-native settlers to purchase. 

Before the Dawes Act, Native nations controlled 138 million acres of land. By the time allotment ended in 1934, they'd lost two thirds of that acreage. 

The Dawes Act also led to the creation of Tribal Rolls, lists of every member of a tribe. 

The rolls came with their own problems, including the creation of blood quantum, a way of measuring tribal membership by fraction of tribal blood, which was basically just an unscientific vibe check based on whether someone looked Native. 

You can learn a lot more about that in episode 4 

Tribal members assumed to be mixed race were assigned lower blood quantum and given US citizenship and full control of their allotment right away. 

But those with higher blood quantum were presumed to be incompetent because they had no European blood. Basically, they weren't white enough. They were given a 25-year waiting period before they could take full control. 

And when they finally received the complete title to their allotment, many sell it because they couldn't afford to pay the property taxes. 

Yeah, big grift vibes from the Dawes Act. 

Thanks to the practice of allotment, many reservations today are a checkerboard of mixed ownership. Parcels owned by the tribe and tribal members are all jumbled together with parcels that aren't  

For example, the Nez Perce reservation stretches across 785,000 acres, but only 13% of it owned by the tribe or tribal members, which makes it hard to do anything that requires large connected chunks of land like farming and ranching, or for tribes to carry out traditional activities  

The effects of assimilation and allotment can't be understated, and they're still being felt generations later. 

Allotment left a legacy of land ownership that was at best fractured. After the death of those Natives who could pay the property taxes, ownership was split up among their kids, and their kids' kids, and their kids' kids' kids, and so on. 

So today, many allotments have hundreds of owners, and the legacy of boarding schools is still being reckoned with. 

Dr. Denise K. Lajimodiere, a poet and enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chipoa, called the policies of that era cultural genocide. Many of her relatives, including her parents, spent time in boarding schools. 

She wrote about their experiences, saying, "Speaking their tribal language was forbidden. My father talked about lye soap put in mouths which caused painful blisters, and pins put through tongues."

But there is healing to found. Survivors of boarding schools have told lies that language is medicine and culture is treatment. The more these practices are revived, the more healing can happen. 

And those efforts are underway across tribal nations. 

Like in recent decades, many Native have begun to teach their traditional languages within tribal-run school systems, a far cry from the boarding school era. 

We'll talk much more about these efforts in a later episode. 

By the late 19th century, Native nations had already seen bad deals, broken promises, and loss of land and life. And in the era of assimilation and allotment, greed came disguised as a helping hand. Be like us, dress like us, work like us, speak like us, worship like us, and then things will be better. 

Despite Native resistance, these policies brought catastrophic losses of culture and land, leaving scars that are still felt generations later. 

But today, tribes are fighting to reclaim their cultural identities, revive their languages, and heal generations of trauma. 

Next time, we'll talk about what happened in 1934 when the US government tried to put power back in hand. And I will see you then. 

Thanks for watching Crash Course: Native American History, which was filmed at our studio at Indianapolis, Indiana, and was made with the help of these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.