Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/22pdf/21-376_7l48.pdf
Page Number: 45.0

Cite as:  599 U. S. ____ (2023) 

3 

GORSUCH, J., concurring 

Tribes  also  negotiated  “more  than  150”  treaties  with  the
United States that included “education-related provisions.” 
Dept.  of  Interior,  B.  Newland,  Federal  Indian  Boarding 
School Initiative Investigative Report 33 (May 2022) (BIA
Report).  Many tribal leaders hoped these provisions would 
lead  to  the  creation  of  “reservation  Indian  schools  that 
would blend traditional Indian education with the needed 
non-Indian skills that would allow their members to adapt 
to the reservation way of life.”  R. Cross, American Indian 
Education:  The Terror of History and the Nation’s Debt to
the Indian Peoples, 21 U. Ark. Little Rock L. Rev. 941, 950 
(1999).

At  first,  Indian  education  typically  came  in  the  form  of
day schools, many of them “established through the . . . ef-
forts of missionaries or the wives of Army officers stationed 
at military reservations in the Indian country.”  Annual Re-
port of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary
of  Interior,  p. LXI  (1886)  (ARCIA  1886).    At  those  day
schools, “Indian children would learn English as a second 
language,”  along  with  “math  and  science.”  Fletcher  & 
Singel 917–918.  But the children lived at home with their 
families  where  they  could  continue  to  learn  and  practice 
“their languages, beliefs, and traditional knowledge.”  Id., 
at  918.  At  least  in  those  “early  decades,”  schooling  was 
“generally . . . not compulsory” anyway.  Id., at 914. 

The federal government had darker designs.  By the late
1870s,  its  goals  turned  toward  destroying  tribal  identity 
and  assimilating  Indians  into  broader  society.    See  L. 
Lacey,  The  White  Man’s  Law  and  the  American  Indian
Family in the Assimilation Era, 40 Ark. L. Rev. 327, 356–
357  (1986).  Achieving  those  goals,  officials  reasoned,  re-
quired the “complete isolation of the Indian child from his
savage  antecedents.”    ARCIA  1886,  at  LXI.    And  because 
“the  warm  reciprocal  affection  existing  between  parents
and children” was “among the strongest characteristics of