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Essay On Native American Boarding Schools

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The Native American boarding schools of 1800’s and early 1900’s left a huge crater in the Native American societies.Under the pretense of “helping”devastated Indian Nation the Euro-Americans,created boarding schools of assimilation .Forcing children to attend and sometimes resorting to what would now be kidnapping.Many of these children died from homesickness,working accidents ,uncontrolled disease and ill planned escape attempts.They have were abolished in the 1940’s,but the damage has been done.Languages,culture,and religion were gone when the children returned home.Boarding schools strict military enforcement not only caused Native American children to lose their culture but also make them sick.

American Indians have been educated in Euro-American style education for hundreds of years. Boarding schools were created in an effort to assimilate the American Indian into a the white man’s culture through education. Boarding schools for American Indians still exist today, though they are losing popularity as public and tribal school enrollment increases. Many American Indian students …show more content…

First of all, at many of the schools, they instructors and other adults running the schools were vastly outnumbered by the students. This instilled a fear based need to maintain control. One system that had been practiced before when American Indians were held prisoner was this military system . The transformation from prison to board school was easy in terms of disciplining. The military system was also used as a way to continue the assimilation from American Indian into Anglo-American culture.Enforcing a military regiment erased any tribal traditions from the daily routine, since the entire day was expected to be followed as if in the military. This further removed the American Indian student from their

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The perception was that Native American adults had a limited ability to learn new skills and concepts. Later in the report, it is expressed that children learn little at day school, causing their “tastes to be fashioned at home, and [their] inherited aversion to toil is in no way combated. ”11 Davin recommended that similar industrial boarding schools should be built in Canada, which would attempt to assimilate Native children into the European culture.12 Nicholas Flood Davin’s research and advances about the industrial schools in America, was important in the creation and developing of the Residential school system in

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These schools have been described as an instrument to wage intellectual, psychological, and cultural warfare to turn Native Americans into “Americans”. There are many reports of young Native Americans losing all cultural belonging. According to an interview with NPR, Bill Wright was sent to one of these schools. He lost his hair, his language, and then his Navajo name. When he was able to return home, he was unable to understand or speak to his grandmother.

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Throughout assimilation, there was a cultural barrier between the Indians and the teachers. At the core of this barrier was the idea that one culture was more civilized than the other. This idea can be seen in both Native American boarding schools and at St. Lucy’s. As stated in Sarah E. Stone’s dissertation, the teachers at Native American boarding schools were not “culturally familiar” (57) with the students and, as a result, treated them differently. Similarly, at St. Lucy’s the nuns saw the wolf girls as barbaric people and treated them accordingly.

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The white men had treated the natives poorly, continued in viewing them as savages and trying to civilize the Native Americans through uncomfortable ways. Native Americans were forced to assimilate into Western culture and have to withstand the racism and discrimination from the Whites during that time. One of the methods that the Whites used to try to have the Indians fit into the Western culture were Native American boarding schools. These schools were established during the late 19th century to educate the Native American children according to Euro-American standards. The boarding schools often established rules for the Native Americans to follow, but most of the Native Americans were not willing to abandon their culture and tribal traditions.

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1422 Words | 6 Pages

They were stripped away from their traditional and ordinary lives and introduced to the “oppressors’” way of life. If they stepped out of line and attempted to retain their previous lifestyle, they were physically abused through a system that wanted to spend as less money as possible to “kill the Indian, save the man.” It was this trauma that they went through as children that they reflect on their own children as they grew accustomed to it. It was this that many Navajo families of the reservation have a sense of fear to teach the younger generation the culture and language they were forced to grow apart from. The result and impact of the boarding school system can still be seen

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Those kids got the message that no matter what they learned at home in their tribal cultures, it was wrong. The worst part was, some of the people teaching and working at those schools abused them”(Pearson et al. 11). The adage is a adage. It was clear that the goal of these Native American Boarding Schools was to assimilate young generations of indigenous people and erase their cultures from American society. To add, the “educators” themselves were complicit in even violating the law.

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Indian Boarding Schools In the 1800’s, all Native Americans in America were forced onto reservations by the United States Government. The government controlled their food, supplies, and ways of life. However, the government wasn’t satisfied by this. They felt like the Indians were savages and needed to become more like the whites.

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759 Words | 4 Pages

Indian Boarding Schools In the 1800’s, all Native Americans in America were forced onto reservations by the United States Government. The government controlled their food, supplies, and ways of life. However, the government wasn’t satisfied by this. They felt like the Indians were savages and needed to become more like the whites.

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“The significance of Native American boarding school was that Americans were trying to assimilate their culture and their way of living.” Many Native Americans today have very different opinions to how their people were placed in Indian boarding school. “Many Native Americans think that it helped their people be more civilized and help them live in american ways. ”While other Native Americans think that boarding schools were a place where they were torchered and a place where they lost their freedom and their culture. “Most people agree that Indian Boarding schools were just trying to help indians be more civilized, but others can see the wrong in the schools.”

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During the mid 1800’s, America made a push for mandatory public education. By having more of America educated, it would provide a greater advancement in technology for our country. But this educational movement had something different planned for Native Americans. Instead of integrating Native American children into the American education system, they were placed separately into Native American boarding schools. These boarding schools were first chartered in 1860 in order ‘“to ‘assimilate’ these Indians tribes into the mainstream ‘American way of life”’(American Indian Relief Council).

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Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian School at Carlisle Barracks as a demonstration to convince the government that Indians could be reeducated in an American way. After the government agreed to reshape our culture, the numbers of boarding schools and students increased rapidly. They had an enrollment of 3,598 in 1877 and by the beginning of the nineteenth century, 20,000 Indian students were enrolled in 148 boarding schools and 225 day schools. Many of the schools that the children were forced to attend were built extremely poorly. When boys first arrive in the camps they had their hair cut short, many would have had longer hair, for having short hair was looked at poorly in the native American culture because it represented a state of mourning and was associated with death.

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government on the Native society was boarding schools that began in the late 19th century. Native children, as young as five years old, were taken from their families off the reservations thousands of miles away to boarding schools. One of those boarding schools was the Carlisle Industrial School, which opened in 1880, founded by Captain Richard Harry Pratt. The sole purpose of these schools was to assimilate the next generation of Native’s into the Anglo society. The boys were taught mechanical and agriculture skills, while the girls were taught domestic lessons such as sewing and cleaning.

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1278 Words | 6 Pages

Indian Boarding schools were created in the 1800s to “Kill the Indian, Save the Man.” They achieved this by transforming the natives looks, culture, language, and teaching them a certain way so they would be able to function in a “european society”. Indian boarding schools taught students both academic and “real world” skills, but they did so while ripping the indians from their culture. Most indian boarding schools were the same with their tactics in transforming the native man into a white one.

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1109 Words | 5 Pages

They did this by "cleaning" them up, cutting their hair, changing the traditional clothing worn, and taking away any other part of them that connected to back home. These institutions were places "…where traditional ways could be replaced by those allowed by the government" (Marr 1). Without the culture that had carried on within the Native Americans for generations, those who were forced to go to the cruel boarding schools were isolated whenever allowed back home. A different language, clothing style and living style was pushed upon the Native Americans by the government and the White Americans which showed the lack of respect coming from them. When people tried to prove that they should be treated as humans, which was the point of the schools, they tried to change everything about them.

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527 Words | 3 Pages

The government believed that if the children remained with their parents the problems would only increase, with the boarding schools it would make it easier to cut off their culture and religions. They decided it was best to christianize the children making almost every boarding schools either christian or catholic. The Native American kids were forced into going to church two to three times a day. It was against the

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