For more than a hundred years, the United States government and Christian churches ran boarding schools designed to strip Native American children of their languages, their hair, their names, and their family ties. This film traces that system from its founding philosophy, summed up in the era's own slogan of "kill the Indian, save the man," through survivor testimony from people who were taken from their families as children and punished for speaking their own languages. Archival photographs show rows of children in military-style uniforms, hair cut short, standing where classrooms once tried to erase who they were. Interviews connect that history to consequences still visible today in Native communities, including the loss of languages and the intergenerational trauma survivors describe passing down to their own children and grandchildren. The film treats the schools as a deliberate, government-backed policy rather than a series of isolated abuses, following the story from the 19th century founding of institutions like Carlisle up through the decades it took for the system to finally close.