The Indian Boarding School Experience The United States government, from 1879 until the 1960s, sent school-aged Native American children to boarding schools at great distances from their homes and families. This effort was meant to replace the Indian culture with western traditions. By law, the U.S. government legally took children from the reservation and sent them to institutions called boarding schools. The schools were run like an American military academy, with uniform and military drills. Life in a boarding school was such an appalling experience. All the children endured cultural hardship beyond their imagining: abandoning their language, religion, and traditions. The government’s goal was to force Indian children to adapt a typical American lifestyle. The children of Native Americans could feel the pain and affliction of being separated from their parents and all their traditions. Henry Pancoast suggests that “the goal of these reformers was to use education as a tool to ‘assimilate’ Indian tribes into the mainstream of the “American way of life” (19). There are many ways that boarding schools abused the children. The abuse caused great psychological damage that stayed with them for the rest of their lives. They were stripped of their Indian identities and forced to …show more content…
This sexual abuse created a huge shock and frustration for Native American children at boarding school. The government rules made the children feel uncomfortable and insecure. The government had introduced panic and horror on the inside of children's lives. It was unbearable for these children; to handle the situation, the children complied with the government even though it created emotional chaos for them. Sometimes the federal government had even compelled the Native American children to perform oral sex in private with the government