Boarding Schools or Concentration Camps? The end of the Gold Rush era signaled a change in U.S. policy towards Native people. Instead of directly killing California indigenous people, reservations were created and indigenous people were re-located to them. The children were taken, often by force, away from their parents and to far-away re-education centers. Children as young as four attended these re-education centers. They were forced to cut their hair and give up their clothing upon arrival. The girls wore dresses and the boys wore military-style uniforms. They were often segregated. The people who ran the centers were Anglo "teachers," or priests and nuns determined to "save" the Indians' souls by purging their native heritage. The children were forced to learn and speak only English. Girls were forced to learn how to sew, clean house and cook. Boys were forced to learn tanning, brick-making, and other manual chores. Speaking in your native language resulted in severe punishment, such as whippings, isolation, and the withholding of food. Children could not have visitors, including their parents, while they stayed at the centers. Some children stayed for years at a time. Indian children were often farmed out as free labor to white settlers in boarding school communities, and sometimes sold outright at auctions held by boarding school teachers. Kids sometimes risked their lives and escaped from these centers, traveling hundreds of miles to try and get back to their families and home. Some made it, some didn't. The purpose for these re-education centers was to destroy Indian children and Indian cultures and create American children. By 1890, it was becoming too expensive for the United States Army to hunt down and kill indigenous people-it was easier and less costly to lie to Native people to get them to stop fighting for survival, then steal their children and take them thousands of miles away to re-educate them by force. This alternative to physical termination of a people has been copied by many regimes throughout history, among them Nazi Germany. In northern California, children were often taken to boarding schools located in Riverside, Ca., and to various places in Oregon. A re-education center in Hoopa Valley near Fort Gaston also housed many local indigenous children as recently as 1932. An unidentified Yurok elder gave an account of boarding school life in Sweet Tears and Bitter Pills. "You know how I was raised? In a boarding school, being slapped across the face, beaten for being an Indian, feeling ashamed of the color of my skin." (1) Within indigenous communities, great-grandparents, grandparents, great-uncles and great-aunts are the people who lived through the boarding school cultural holocaust. (1) "Sweet Tears and Bitter Pills," Mariana Kawall Leal Ferreira.

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