By the late 1800s, Native American culture was under attack from a variety of sectors. As westward expansion continued, the U.S. government adopted a policy to the eradicate culture, language and spirituality of America’s indigenous people by taking children from their families, isolating them, and forcing them to deny their heritage. The policy of assimilation transported the children to boarding schools for cultural transformation. Everything Native was to be stripped away. The goal was integration into Anglo society. Their language, as their culture, was to be “unspoken.”