[1] Students from boarding schools were assigned to live with and work for European-American families, often during summers, ostensibly to learn more about English language, useful skills, and majority culture, but in reality, primarily as a source of unpaid labor.
By 1900, several other American Indian boarding schools in the west had begun federal outing programs modeled after that of Carlisle.
These included schools in Salem, Oregon; Lawrence, Kansas; Riverside, California; Carson City, Nevada; and Albuquerque, New Mexico.
[8] American Indian boarding schools that had no dormitories for female students assigned girls to live with local families.
[8] In 1878, the US government decided to return a group of Native Americans held as prisoners in Fort Marion (Castillo de San Marcos) in St. Augustine, Florida to their reservations.
[2] Supporters of outing programs hoped that the Native American children involved would be "civilized" and "uplifted" by immersion in white households.
[20] Pratt spent his retirement years criticizing work-oriented outing programs that were common in the western United States.
[5] Some people feared that those who would choose to host Native American children would not be motivated by altruism, but would exploit and abuse them.
[5] They were particularly concerned that families in the western and southwestern United States less morally upright and would not provide a safe home environment for children in the outing system.
[21] In 1928, the report concluded that the outing system had primarily become a scheme for hiring Native American children for odd jobs and domestic service, rather than providing them with any real training.
[21] Also, the report noted that Native American children often earned unfair wages in low-level positions with little oversight.
[22] Jacobs explains that Native American girls in outing programs often challenged their assigned roles as servants and host families' attempts to "uplift" them, actively asserting their own independence.