The title comes from Richard Henry Pratt, the U.S. Army officer who founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879 and summed up his mission as killing the Indian to save the man. The film traces that assimilation policy from the boarding school system, which forced Native children to cut their hair, abandon their languages, and take English names, through to the reservations and legal structures the U.S. government built around Indigenous nations. It uses archival photographs and government documents to lay out policies historians and legal scholars in the film argue meet the definition of genocide: forced removal, cultural erasure, and population loss tracked across generations. The film connects that history to present-day conditions on reservations, including poverty rates and health outcomes activists cite as direct consequences of these policies rather than separate, unrelated problems. It is a blunt argument film rather than a balanced survey, built to make a legal and historical case for why this history counts as genocide and why its effects have not ended.