Haskell Cultural Center and Museum is on the campus of Haskell Indian Nations University, a college for Native Americans and a former boarding school, whose intent was to assimilate Native children to white society. Throughout the 1800s, the federal government and churches operated these boarding schools that removed children from their homes and took them to schools far away, where they were punished severely for speaking their native languages and banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices. By 1900, 20,000 children were removed from their families
and put into these schools, and by 1925, this number tripled.
