"Kill the Indian, Save the Man"

"Kill the Indian, Save the Man" was a phrase associated with a late 19th and early 20th-century U.S. policy aimed at assimilating Native Americans into European-American culture. It reflected efforts to suppress Indigenous identities, languages, and traditions through forced boarding school education, where Native children were prohibited from practicing their culture, often undergoing corporal punishment. The goal was to "civilize" Native Americans by replacing their cultural practices with Western norms, with the belief that this would "save" them from what policymakers saw as their supposed "savagery." Today, the phrase is recognized as a symbol of cultural oppression and the damaging impact of assimilation policies.