It was systematic, institutionalized, and sustained over decades.

The boarding school system that operated across the United States from the 1870s through the mid-twentieth century had language elimination as one of its explicit goals.

The most famous articulation of this goal came from Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, who declared that the purpose of the schools was to “kill the Indian, save the man” — to eradicate Native identity, including Native language, as the precondition for Native people’s participation in American life.

At these schools, children were forbidden to speak their languages.

The prohibition was enforced through punishments that ranged from the merely humiliating to the genuinely cruel.

Children who spoke their Native languages were physically punished, made to perform extra labor, isolated, or subjected to other forms of discipline.