More than 150,000 Native children in Canada and hundreds of thousands in the U.S. were taken from their families, by law, as young as age four, to "Boarding Schools" in the U.S. and to "Residential Schools" in Canada, starting in 1879.  The purpose was to “kill the Indian in him.”  The last of these schools closed in the U.S. in 1970s and last residential school closed in Canada in 1996.