[F]ederal schools were rarely built on reservations in the early 20th century. With the distribution of rations and other goods also sometimes dependent on Native children attending school, Native Americans were often effectively coerced into paying for their own assimilation ... the schools promised by the federal government were not built on every reservation. Meanwhile, the government gave Christian churches, including the Catholic Church, land for mission schools. Federal schools were also known to be particularly cruel to Native students, often forbidding contact between students and families. This led some parents to opt for religious boarding schools in the hope that their children would be treated marginally better ... For many parents, some of whom were barely literate, the approval to send their children to these religious boarding schools took the form of thumbprints. Pressed on government forms, signed and witnessed by church and government officials, these thumbprints authorized the mission schools to take portions of treaty and trust funds—owed to Native families by the federal government in
exchange for their land—to pay tuition.

The state and the church working together to screw over Native Americans reminds me of what Caitlin Johnstone wrote about the Democrats and Republicans: "In practice, Democratic inertia toward making large pro-human progressive leaps combined with the GOP’s enthusiasm for massive rollbacks in corporatist deregulation allows for the exact sort of two-steps-forward, one-step-back march toward corporate totalitarianism". It's a boxer's one-two punch!