The United States ' Legal Responsibility For Indian Education

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

This was a very important report because prior to it, Native American children were being sent to boarding schools were their heritage was frowned upon. “Recommendations included building day schools in Native American communities and the reform of boarding schools for Native American children.” (Parkay, F. 2001) This report was considered a landmark one because of the issues it highlighted of the educational issues plaguing the Native American community at the

Created to promote tribal authority, revitalize native languages and sustain native cultures, Tribal Colleges and Universities (TCUs) are a cornerstone in American higher education. With thirty-seven institutions that serve over 28,000 American Indian and Alaska Native students, TCUs seek to align their respective missions with community and tribal values (American Indian College Fund). Despite TCUs ambitions to sustain native culture and provide quality education for their populations, these institutions face innumerable challenges due to underfunding and a lack of intentional investment from U.S. governing bodies. Federal support for TCUs has been dreadfully insufficient in keeping up with the rapid expansion of these establishments, while poverty in Native communities greatly limits the amounts of tuition that can be collected; moreover, sustaining the will to endure in the face of structural inequalities is yet another barricade that TCU stakeholders face.

We will begin by discussing the first article that was written in 1981 by Steve Murray and Luther Tweeten named, "Culture, Education, and Economic Progress and Federal Reservations" and was published in the Growth & Change academic journal. This article takes a look at the economic issues in Indian reservations across the country and explains them in a mathematical form to explain why they are generally poor and struggling communities. Two negative things about this article is one, it is not specifically written for the topic of Native American education, and two, the article is almost thirty years old now. Although this does not make the article irrelevant because it does provide factual information about the current times in which it was written, and it does extensively discuss problems and

At the start, the schools were all on-reservation, designed to make education affordable and accessible to as many tribes as possible. This method held hopes of the children spreading American culture to parents; however, it allowed for Indian culture to seep into the children’s’ lives.

The history of the Native Americans and the white colonist that would become the United States of America have always been a disaster for the Native Americans. The land greed of the whites had driven the tribes of the East west, and destroyed the culture of the Midwestern Plains tribes. Near constant war with the Native American finally appeared to come to a peaceful solution. The Native Americans resisted the American way of life because they did not understand it, education was the key to civilizing the Native Americans. The government’s broken promises and the cruelty of the white settlers were symptoms of the greater Indian problem. The Indians refused to stop being Indians, despite the efforts of Washington and missionaries to teach

Many bills and laws have been passed to help set up education reform but with little or no effect. In the time that the Native Americans were placed on Reservations and 1871, over 400 treaties were signed with the government. Of those, 120 promised to move the Indian children to ’civilized’ children. Such treaties had the children put into boarding schools where they were to be taught the ’white man’s way’. Schools like this

An advocate for Indian education, Henry Roe Cloud wrote, “Is the Indian a ward of the government or a citizen? What are his rights and duties? . . . [He] must be trained to grapple with these economic, educational, political, religious and social problems” (59, 60). Cloud challenged the American educational system by rhetorically questioning the meaning of Indian citizenship and campaigning for more Indian societal responsibilities. In the Society of American Indians' (SAI) Quarterly Journal , progressivist Carlos Montezuma wrote, “Reservations are prisons where our people are kept to live and die, where equal possibilities, equal education and equal responsibilities are unknown” (93). In Indian schools, children were not even allowed to speak their native language for fear that they might return to their savage ways. Essentially, American Indians only wanted equal rights and equal citizenship; they wanted Euro-Americans to stop treating them like lower-level beings. But Euro-Americans continued their quest to mother the “savage” race by assimilating and converting Indians.

The Indian Schools claimed their purpose is to “civilize” Native Americans in a way that resembled white culture. However, these schools, in effect, acted as total institutions that didn’t promote individualism. Instead, they forced Native American students to oblige to various rules that stripped away their identity and labeled them as working class people. The after product of this process didn’t help students smoothly transition to “American” way of life; instead, they were left in a society that neither helped them to flourish in the dominant culture at the time nor to practice their own culture. Generally, I see this project as a big failure to the current values of the American culture and I hope these and other minority groups will be

Throughout history, single language policies were enforced within societies to control minorities. The U.S federal government often required its diverse ethnic groups to assimilate to U.S anglos culture. We have seen it occur countless times with various groups including the Germans, Chinese, and Japanese. One of the more severe cases of assimilation is of the Native Americans. During the 19th century, the U.S strived to eradicate the lifestyle of Native Americans by having it resemble American culture as closely as possible. One of the ways in which this was accomplished was by founding ‘Indian Boarding Schools’. Native American children were placed in these boarding schools where they were stripped of everything they had previously known. In order to have students conform to an American way of life, they were not allowed to practice their native religions, or speak their tribal languages.

The No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) was designed to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary

The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 (NCLB) signed into law by President George W. Bush on January 8, 2002, is a comprehensive overhaul of the federal governments requirements of state and local education systems (www.nclb.gov). It reauthorizes the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 and replaces the 1994 Improving Americas Schools Act.

The No Child Left Behind Act, otherwise known as NCLB, was passed in 2001. NCLB was intended to help schools improve their test scores in reading and math, from third to eighth grades. The law required every child to be proficient in those subjects by 2014 (Rich). There has been much debate over whether the NCLB Act is beneficial for schools and children, or whether it has the opposite effect.

Use of American Indian languages is on the decline in the US, and will continue to do so unless a greater pressure is put on language preservation. As an outsider, it is hard for me to watch so many cultures and languages die out, and even harder for those who love their cultures and heritage slowly having lesser importance within their Westernizing lives. While there are many aspects affecting cultural survival from outside the tribes themselves, there is also an internal struggle that outsiders don’t get a glimpse of. Many of the younger generations were explicitly not taught their native languages by their elder, facing backlash for leaving to receive an educated that they were originally encouraged to do, and changing age dynamics on

Arguably, no other group in United States history has been as oppressed as the American Indians. The United States Government has allowed unsettled tensions, poverty, conflicting cultures, disease, and the inaction of the Bureau of Indian Affairs to affect the educational opportunities of American Indians. There is no answer that will appease every group involved in this problem. However, the United States Government can do significantly more than they are doing to help remediate the problems of the educational system and fix some current issues on the American Indian reservations in the United States.