Gregory Smoak

is a cornerstone of this policy.

The idea of the Dawes Act was to take communally owned reservation lands and to break them up into individual private land holdings.

The idea here was that this would work a transformation of native people, that they would become individual capitalist yeoman farmers

They would assimilate and melt into white society and tribes would simply go away.

This is the same intent of the boarding school system, right?

Started your first major boarding school, 1879, Richard Henry Pratt's Carlisle Boarding School.

That school and others like it were intended to take Native youth and

transform them culturally.

I mean, very famously, people have heard of the English-only rule that is imposed, that students are punished for speaking native languages.

The physical transformation of students, they're cutting their hair, right?

And young Native men wearing military uniforms, young Native women wearing Victorian dresses.

All of this was meant to transform Native people and make them disappear as tribes and as a group in American society.

And this culture war is a larger context for the ghost dances.

And first of all, I say that the program I just mentioned

Allotment, boarding schools, the transformation of Native sovereignty, these three prongs, they are pushed by people who see themselves as humanitarian.

They see this as the only path forward.

There is this idea of the vanishing American, that Native people are simply going to disappear.

This is in part impelled by their view of atrocities against Native people.

The Sand Creek Massacre causes a major investigation.

There are court cases.