Reservation boarding schools represented an important component in the U.S. government's campaign in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to "civilize" American Indians according to Anglo-American standards. The history of the Rainy Mountain School in southwestern Oklahoma reveals much about the form and function of the Indian policy and its consequences for the Kiowa children who attended the school.

In To Change Them Forever, Clyde Ellis surveys changes in government policy and tells how the Kiowa people resisted and accommodated the efforts of school personnel to transform them. Ellis combines archival research with personal memoirs, conversations with former students, and the school's official records to portray a school often at odds with official policy and frequently neglected by the Indian Service's bureaucracy.