Final answer:
The U.S. government created boarding schools for Indian children as a way to speed up their assimilation into white ways of life, which included adopting Euro-American social and cultural practices and abandoning their own cultures and languages.
Step-by-step explanation:
In which way did the U.S. government try to speed Indian assimilation into white ways of life? The answer is a. They created boarding schools for Indian children.
The U.S. government established boarding schools in the late 19th century with the purpose of assimilating Native American children into European-American culture. This attempted assimilation included efforts to erase their indigenous cultures, languages, and traditions. The most notorious of these schools was the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. In these institutions, children were forced to speak English, convert to Christianity, and adopt Euro-American cultural practices, often under harsh and abusive conditions.
Contrary to efforts such as protecting Indian culture or granting them large areas of land, the boarding schools were specifically designed to disrupt Native American family units and culture by physically removing children from their homes and communities and punishing the practice of their native traditions. This painful process of cultural transformation was considered a form of 'civilizing' the children according to Euro-American standards of the time.