"Kill the Indian in him and save the man." This phrase condoned decades of systematic attempts to eradicate Indigenous culture in the United States through forced assimilation strategies, including boarding schools created to indoctrinate Native children by stripping them of their language, traditions, and family ties. While scholars have begun to investigate the histories of some boarding schools, like the Carlisle Industrial School, the eleven boarding schools that operated in Wisconsin from the 1870s through the 1950s have received little attention from the historical community in comparison to other regions. This research seeks to fill gaps in knowledge by answering the following questions: How did Wisconsin’s Native American boarding schools implement federal and state assimilation policies, and how did these policies impact the students’ experiences and educational outcomes? 

The National Archive in Chicago houses monthly reports on student enrollment and health, academic schedules and materials, letters between parents and administrators, and other materials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs that provide the regional specificity this study required. Student perspectives from this region are sparse as they are omitted by federal records, so comparisons to secondary scholarship and existing memoirs are the foundation of this paper. Wisconsin’s Native American boarding schools implemented federal and state assimilation policies through cultural suppression and a multi-faceted educational approach, fundamentally altering students’ identities and limiting their socioeconomic opportunities.