This poem takes an authentic text, in this case an excerpt of “U.S.” Captain Richard H. Pratt’s 1892 speech “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” and blacks out content in order to highlight specific words. These words form the poem. In his speech, Captain Pratt argued that off-reservation boarding schools for indigenous children was a more humane way to, as he put it, “kill the Indian.” Between 1860 and 1978, Indigenous children in the “U.S.” were forced to attend these assimilationist schools, taken from the reservation, separated from family, and deprived of their language and culture.