In 1819 the US Congress passed the Civilization Fund Act encouraging "activities of benevolent societies in providing education for Native Americans … to stimulate the civilization process". Mission schools flourished, but it would take another 60 years before the government officially took matters into its own hands, when the Carlisle school opened.

Having previously overseen the "civilizing" of a group of Native American prisoners of war in Fort Maison, Florida, Pratt shared the view of the commissioner of Indian affairs, Hiram Price, who said in 1885, "It is cheaper to give them (the American Indians) education than to fight them."

To wean indigenous children of their "Indianness", Pratt said, they must be removed from their tribal context. Thus the opening of boarding schools, many thousands of kilometers from students' homes on Indian reservations. (One bitter irony is that these reservations were formed on the basis of treaties that gave the US federal government huge expanses of land against a promise that it would provide, among other things, education to indigenous children.)

That, Torres believes, is genocide, if one considers the United Nations definition, which includes "forcibly transferring children of the group to another group".

In 1891, 12 years after Carlisle opened, the federal government made attending boarding school compulsory for all indigenous children. Those at these schools could be as old as 17 or 18－in some cases young married women with children were forcibly enrolled－or as young as 4 or 5 since they were considered the most malleable.