African Americans And The Native Americans

Boarding School Seasons by Brenda J. Child offers a look into the boarding school experiences of many American Indian students. Child favors unpublished sources such as letters to give an uncensored inside look into boarding school experiences. However, she also includes other sources such as school newspapers, oral history collections, photographs, biographies, United States government publications, and annual reports. Government boarding schools were created to help the American government gain more control over Indians and to push the Natives to adopt the white ways of life such as language, skill, and education. While integration was the ultimate objective, Child sets out “to show that even with the challenges of cultural assimilation and a devastating land policy, American Indian people, even children, placed limits on assimilation and also defined and shaped the boarding school era.” (viii) The boarding schools designed to tear American Indian families apart did not succeed in isolating children from their tribes, but created bonds and

The Native American Indian Boarding School was an institution designed by missionaries to "assimilate" the Native American children to adopt American culture. Assimilation was intended to strip young children of everything they knew of their own culture and replace it with what the white man saw fit ultimately because they were threatened by the native people they had suppressed. As far as being successful, the schools did separate the children from their parents and tribe therefore weakening the tribes legacy for the future. The objective was to enfeeble the natives into submission. Concurrently, the public was told the children were being properly educated. Studies in English, business economics and etiquette was the publicized curriculum.

Indian boarding schools were established in the late 1800s as a way to assimilate Native Americans into the dominate society. The idea is that if an American Indian can farm, communicate with English, and rid themselves of their traditional ways then they can seek the America dream. A great deal of policies have been passed to gear Native Americans towards non-Native ways, but the practice that had a profound effect was the focus on Native American children. Indian boarding schools were develop by the federal government and religious organizations to assimilate the Native American children into the dominate culture (Brave Heart, Yellow Horse, & DeBruyn,

The Dawes Act not only impacted the current inhabitants of the indigenous lands, it also affected the future generation of Indians; since the culture was being readjusted to be acceptable for American standards. On the new lands granted to the Indians were private government-run boarding schools in order to successfully assimilate children of the native population into society. In Document F, the weekly lesson plan of the Day

For more than 300 years, since the days of Christopher Columbus and the Spanish Government, an attempt of genocide of the Native American Indian has existed. From mass brutal murders and destruction by Spanish and American armies, to self-annihilation through suicide, homicide, and alcohol induced deaths brought about because of failed internal colonialism and white racial framing. Early Explores used Indigenous inhabitants upon first arriving to the America’s to survive the New World and once they adapted, internal colonialism began with attempts to convert the Indians to Christianity, repressing their values and way of life, forcing them into slavery, and nearly exterminating an entire culture from existence.

A document commissioned by the Department of Interior which shed light on the terrible boarding school conditions was the Meriam Report from 1928. This was the first report commissioned to look Native American boarding school conditions since the 1850s (“Native American Issue,” 2006). The report found that there was an alarmingly large number of children that died at Native American boarding schools. The Meriam Report states that infectious diseases were widespread, there was a great deal a malnutrition, overcrowding was an issue, poor sanitary conditions, and students were overworked (“Native American Issue,” 2006). Boarding schools have not kept a good record of the number of students enrolled therefore making it easier for these boarding schools to have overcrowding (Yuan et al., 2014). The Meriam Report suggested that Native American children should not be educated in separate institutions and that boarding schools need to change their point of view that the Native American culture is evil (“Native American Issue,” 2006).

Boarding schools were an issue that plagued both Native Americans and Inupiats. As conveyed by the writings of Mary Crow Dog and other Native American figures, we see how the effects of such schools were devastating to the native population. Boarding schools wiped Natives of their language and culture, teaching young children to be ashamed of what makes them unique. Pupils would return from their long stays at boarding schools, unable to speak to their own family, resulting in an isolation between themselves and their community. Over the years, generations would eventually lose most of what makes them native and, for the most part, their culture slowly faded away. It seems that the Inupiat people faced a similar fate. Inupiat children were forced to learn by Western standards, eventually forgetting their crucial survival skills, language, religion and other unique aspects of their culture. However, we are exposed to a more positive outlook towards boarding schools in the book, Fifty Miles from Tomorrow, where William Hensley says he enjoyed his boarding school

The entire goal of the boarding school was to take a massive amount of an entire Native American generation, and change their overall outlook on life by educating them in the western way instead of allowing them to grow up in their Native households. In the end you will be left with a mass amount of civilized Native Americans, and not many of their generation will be able to keep the Native American way of life alive because they do not know much about it. This is a very effective tactic used by the settlers. It serves to kidnap an entire generation of Native Americans, and turn them into westernized peoples, who can be easily placed infiltrate a Native American community.

selves, basically not allowed to do anything that is not of the Westerner way of life and if they didn’t they would be severely punished. Knowing that native people connect a lot with nature and spirits. We could see that the boarding school social construction came between them so that they couldn’t continue to connect with those two important aspects of their culture. Especially talking with the spirits because of what? The spirits couldn’t understand English. We can see that the boarding school really took a toll on these innocent native people. But, yet, Pratt stated that the boarding school was built and organized to help the natives. But was it really build to help them? Or was it just built to create an unbalance between whites and natives?

Native Americans put up a good fight in defending their homelands against foreign invaders. Unfortunately, they suffered defeat and realized they would have to adapt to a new way of life. The battle for their lands was over, but the battle for their identities would just begin. However, it would not be the hardened warriors engaging in this conflict. Instead, the young Native American children would witness first-hand the American government’s solution to the Indian problem. Boarding schools were established to assimilate Native American children into white society. These boarding schools had both positive and negative impacts on the children.

government, thought Westward Expansion would positively impact Native Americans. President Andrew Jackson felt that Indian Removal would protect the Native Americans and give them more freedom. He also thought that, eventually, the influence of European Americans would guide them to become a more “interesting, civilized, and Christian community” (Doc 9). Additionally, government believed that boarding schools would be very beneficial for children, teaching them valuable skills, and helping them become more civilized “ladies and gentlemen” (Doc 8). However, these people were blinded to the impact it had on the lives of Native American by their own desire for land and power. The mass slaughter of buffalo robbed the Native Americans of their most valuable resource and the source of all their daily necessities. Forced assimilation killed Native American culture and identity, and uprooted their lifestyles. By taking away and selling Native Americans’ land, the U.S. government was constantly driving Native Americans of their homes, onto undeveloped, cramped land, making it nearly impossible for them to sustain themselves and their way of life. How is someone positively affected by having their means of survival, identity, and home taken

The boarding schools “educators suppressed tribal languages and cultural practices and sought to replace them with English, Christianity, athletic activities, and a ritual calendar intended to further patriotic citizenship” (Davis 20). Not only had the boarding schools taken away Native American culture, they were forcing the Native Americans into a different culture. The language was quite challenging to learn, especially to the older students. Learning a new language is much harder at an older age, and while being bilingual is vey helpful, these Native Americans were not allowed to speak their Native language. A Native American girl stated she, “remembers another little girl making a mistake in her use of English and being ridiculed for it. ... The English language was difficult to learn” (Vizenor 102). These Native Americans were learning a brand new language, being stripped from theirs, and they would be picked on if they did not have perfect English right away. Many chose to keep quite so they would not make mistakes.

As if life on the reservation was not hard enough, there came a time in a child’s life when he/she was taken away from their families and sent to a boarding school. The Annual report of the Department of Interior, 1901 wrote:

The United States government tried many attempts to assimilate Native American one of which is by creating boarding schools for those Indians. Children were taken away from their parents to be taught at these schools. They took the children because it was easy to erase their memory of anything their parents taught them, so it would be easy for educators to teach them about the American culture and they can easily adapt to it. Photographs were taken of students of how they looked upon entering the school and during their school session. Surely there was a change in the student’s appearance but there was also a change in their thinking and beliefs.

All they were doing was diminishing their mindset and confuse that small mind of theirs. The word “diminishing” implies that these Indians youth culture and way of life of knowing and learning weren’t valuable at all. Though, they were all young and “naive” the Westerners believe they could control and manipulate them. According to Pratt, he believed that the school is very important, where is will help to further the segregation and reservation process and that boarding school was the best hope of changing the Indian youths into members of the white society. Though I think this was a smart move to make there was still a lope hole in the boarding school system. The lope hole basically is the idea of trying to get rid the native culture of these young people so that they can become the “Americans” they train them to be. Pratt used a very good example of an Indian to become American and the purpose of why it is important to have the boarding school, “you immigrated to America as an individual to escape oppression in own country” (215). Basically saying that the man experience can help to influence the chance of the boarding school and that the Indians youth could see how easily it is to become a useful