The Indian Schools

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.

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 Child favors unpublished sources such as letters to give an uncensored inside look into boarding school experiences.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

Education has been a topic of controversy for many years now, and will continue to be for years to come. The modern American society is best defined by its education. A good part of the average person’s life is spent at school, going to school, and paying for school. However, even though education is so obviously very important, there are many groups in America that are getting shorted. The Native Americans are a key group that has struggled the most. The largest obstacle they face is lack of proper education. The standard educational practices being used for the instruction of Native American peoples are not effective. There are many pieces to this road-block, and many solutions. This can be rectified by having more culturally

“There’s a distinction between an education and school. Education is what Native people have been doing for their children since the beginning of time. School has been what has been imposed on people from outside” (Garland). This thought from Garland’s article “In remote Alaskan villages, teachers struggle to make school meaningful,” eloquently lays out how many Alaska natives regard the operation of collecting knowledge. Remarkably, Garland’s notion also offers great insight as to why the U.S. education system seems to fail Alaska natives altogether. It is this “distinction” (Garland), between education and school that seems to actively disconnect the ancestral cultural values of Alaska natives from the mainstream education system in this country. An impression of this broken connection appears in Kleinfeld’s The Teacher who Came to Rivertown. Here, Bob Perthall and his family move to Rivertown, Alaska, a remote village of 75 people. Accepting the position of teacher/principal, Perthall’s good intentions collide with subsistence, alcoholism, hardship, long-held customs and personal crisis. At schools end, the people of Rivertown finds no surprise in Perthall’s ending defeat. However, what really concerns us about the “teaching case,” is Perthall’s lack of preparedness for the students and culture of Rivertown, ultimately continuing the cycle of an ineffective school.

In the late 1800s, Captain Richard Henry Pratt set out to “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.”(A Plea to “Citizenize” Indians). The goal to erase Indian cultures and replace it with white American culture was sought to be achieved through boarding schools. Pratt was the creator of the first Indian boarding school: Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. These government-funded boarding schools would take children from their homes on reservation, often for them to not see their family again until they are grown(lecture). Pratt’s goal was to eliminate the Indian culture and incorporate the Indian people into the more “civilized”(Marr) American culture. This meant forcing the Indian students to speak only English and to give up all cultural traditions, religions, names and take up Christianity and American sounding names. Students were put into these boarding schools with little or no contact with their families for “eight to nine months of the year” (Marr). These schools operated with minimal funds, so the education was very insufficient. It was clear from the beginning; the actual goal was not to give quality education for the Native American children but to get rid of the Indian culture.

2. The brief conclusions all serve to indicate cold, harsh, and impactful conclusions to his yearly cycle which further emphasize the schism between school years. Some of the conclusions serve different functions, though. For example, when he ends his third grade segment with “I’m still waiting.” it is short and impactful; but, when he ends the fifth grade segment with a rhetorical question “Oh, do you remember those sweet, almost innocent choices that the Indian boys were forced to make?” the segment seems to linger on for a moment longer, portraying that the event had a stronger impression than the previous, shorter conclusion.

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.

Sherman Alexie, in “Indian Education” tells his experiences in school on the reservation. Some of his teachers did not treat him very good and did not try to understand him. In his ninth grade year he collapsed. A teacher assumed that he had been drinking just because he was Native American. The teacher said, “What’s that boy been drinking? I know all about these Indian kids. They start drinking real young.” Sherman Alexie didn’t listen to the negatives in school. He persevered and became valedictorian of his school.

Education —an institution for success, opportunity, and progress — is itself steeped in racism. In Sherman Alexie’s short story “Indian Education” from his book The Longer Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven is set in two places, the Spokane Indian Reservation and a farm town nearby the reservation. The story is written in a list of formative events chronologize Victor’s youth by depicting the most potent moment from each year he is in school. Alexie addresses the issue of racism in education by examining examples of injustice and discrimination over twelve years in a boy’s life. Victor faces his initial injustice in first grade when he is bullied by bigger kids, but his understanding of injustice becomes much more complex in grades two through twelve as he experiences discrimination against his American Indian identity. Familial experiences of a Native woman, Alexie’s style and humor, and Victor’s awareness of discrimination from grade one to twelve all reveal the grim reality of growing up and being schooled on an American Indian reservation.

Indian Boarding Schools, which began in the late 1870’s, were started to transition Native Americans from their traditional cultures and transform them into American citizens. By the 1900’s, there were 147 day schools on and off reservations in the Great Plains. Day schools were first built before the government decided that the children needed to be removed from their Indian lifestyle in order for total assimilation to occur. The first off-reservation boarding schools appeared around 1884 in the Great Plains. By 1890, 25 federal off-reservation and 43 on-reservation boarding schools were operating nationally. Many Indian families chose to send their children to boarding schools because there were no other schools available. After $45 million had been spent and 20,000 Indian children had been put into schools, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs William Jones put emphasis on the importance of utilizing existing boarding and day schools more effectively. Jones declared that the Indian children had shown little evidence of assimilation and introduced the idea for a hierarchy of schools in order to “provide the greatest opportunity for assimilating the best students with the greatest potential for surviving in the white world” (Encyclopedia of the Great Plains, par.8).

The Native American children were educated at Carlisle in order to make a “better” transition into society for post-bellum America. Carlisle was located in Pennsylvania and was a reform school for Native American children. “Carlisle fills young Indians with the spirit of loyalty to the stars and stripes, and moves them out into your communities to show by their conduct and ability that the Indian is no different from the white or colored, that he has the inalienable right to liberty and opportunity that the white and the negro have (Paul Prucha 68).” The Native Americans didn’t have the liberty to live on their land as they were before the whites arrived; “By 1979, my people were no longer free, but were confined on reservations under the rule of agents (Standing Bear 69-71).” The Native American children such as Luther Standing Bear were taken from their families, land, and tradition to be reformed into a civilized American. Luther Standing Bear recalls his time at Carlisle; “The task before us was not only that of accepting new ideas and adopting new manners, but physical changes and discomfort had to be borne un complainingly until the body adjusted itself to new tastes and habits (Standing Bear 69-71).” The Native American children’s names, attire, religion, and diet were changed to that of the white Americans. “…the change in clothing, housing, food, and confinement combined with lonesomeness was too much, and in three years nearly one half of the children from the Plains were dead… (Standing Bear

During Westward Expansion, white settlers saw the Indians as a hindrance to civilization. Therefore the mindset of settlers were to convert Native Americans into white culture. To begin assimilating, the government should, “cease to recognize the Indians as political bodies,” adult male Indians should become a citizen to the government, Indian children shall be taken away and “be trained in industrial schools,” and Indians should be, “placed in the same position before the law.” Assimilating Indians wasn’t a simple teaching of a new culture instead, it was brutal. The boarding schools were merciless towards the Indians, mainly because they wanted to force Indians to drop their culture. Native Americans were obligated to change and lost their

Throughout the history of the Native Americans, no one has suffered more because of the white man’s atrocity than the children of the Indians. Most of them, if not all, were taken away from their reservation to live in a boarding school. Whether they liked it or not, they were to follow and obey the school’s rules and regulations even though they deemed it unforgiving. In her poem, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways,” Louise Erdrich meticulously depicted the sufferings of the Indian children at a boarding school created just for them to better assimilate with the white man’s culture. The speaker of the poem and the imagery used to describe this wonderful heart-warming literature made it possible to convey the real existence of the pain

In 1820, the United States made plans for a large scale system of boarding and day schools Noriega, 377). These schools were given the mission to, "instruct its students in 'letters, labor and mechanical arts, and morals and Christianity;' 'training many Indian leaders'" Noriega, 378). In the case of boarding schools, Native American children would be forcibly stripped from their homes as early as five years old. They would then live sequestered from their families and cultures until the age of seventeen or eighteen (Noriega, 381). <br><br>In 1886, it was decided, by the United States federal government that Native American tribal groups would no longer be treated as 'indigenous national governments.' The decision was made, not by the conjoint efforts of the Native American tribes and Congress; but, by the "powers that be" the United States Legal System. This self-ordained power allowed Congress to pass a variety of other laws, directed towards, assimilating, Native Americans, so that they would become a part of "mainstream white America" (Robbins, 90)<br><br>By this time the United States Government, had been funding over a dozen distinct agencies, to provide mandatory 'education' to all native children aged six through sixteen. Enrollment was enforced through leverage given by the 1887 General Allotment Act, which made Natives dependent on the Government for

The main goal of boarding schools was to civilize Native Americans. The federal government wanted to solve “The Indian Problem” by assimilating Native Americans into white culture and felt that education