The system’s architects would have argued, presumably, that Parker’s success was the exception that proved the rule — that his exceptional individual gifts allowed him to succeed in ways that ordinary Native people could not, and that the systematic erasure of Native culture was still necessary for the broader population.

This argument was self-serving and wrong.

The boarding school system produced not a generation of successfully assimilated Americans but a generation of people whose ties to their communities had been severed without their gaining full acceptance in the mainstream American society they had been educated for — a generation that had, in the most literal sense, been made to pay the price of the argument that Parker’s life disproved.

The Records That Remain