preview

Colonization Of Native American Education

Decent Essays
Colonization was detrimental to not only the physical bodies of the Native Americans, but to their minds as well. The shift in indigenous education was a destructive one; Western education completely overtook the indigenous education that had thrived for generations. Instead of allowing education to benefit both indigenous and European peoples, it was used as a tool to destroy indigenous culture. When the settlers from Europe and Spain first came to the Americas, “indigenous men and women articulated their petitions for more educational spaces” (Díaz 60). The attempt to share educational spaces was continuously rejected by the settlers in an attempt to spur assimilation instead of cooperation. Educational spaces were slowly transitioning to becoming…show more content…
Europeans had different ideologies than indigenous peoples when it came to land in terms of who could own the land. As a result of European entitlement, they assumed that the land was available to be taken. The process of removing indigenous people from their land began, and the settlers were justifying it by suggesting that is was not necessarily “stealing” land, but rather it was “saving” the land from being misused by the savages that lived there previously (Sahlins 19). Mindsets such as these finalized the traumatic process of Native American invisibility as they were forced out of their land and their homes. As a direct result of the stealing of indigenous land, racism began to influence other decisions that the colonizers were making. The settlers began to spread the idea that they were more intelligent and more capable of building a society than the Native Americans were. This mindset and many others were used to justify things such as stealing the land from ocean to ocean, as well as disrespecting many treaties and even slaughtering Native Americans to make them move off of their land (Finzsch
Get Access