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Kill The Indian And Save The Man By Richard Henry Pratt

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Richard Henry Pratt was an American army officer who pioneered the first off-reservation boarding school in Pennsylvania during the late 19th century, named Carlisle Indian Industrial School for Native American children. Furthermore, his goals in facilitating this new education system were to forcibly remove Native American children from the ‘savagery’ of their barbaric environments and citizenize them through assimilative tactics. Pratt delivered the speech "Kill the Indian and Save the Man," in 1892, consequently, this speech was significant in perpetuating the manifest destiny and upholding doctrines of white supremacy and eurocentrism. Despite his speech being extremely controversial, racist, and deeply flawed it had a profound impact on …show more content…

Through this expansion they perpetrated the physical and cultural genocide of Native Americans, consequently, leading to the deaths of millions (Burton, January 17th, 2023). Lewis Morgan defined three stages of culture: savagery, barbarism, and civilization (Burton, January 17th, 2023). Furthermore, this was the execution plan Pratt intended to oversee as he founded Carlisle and influenced schools nationwide. He is quoted in his speech stating, “We make our greatest mistake in feeding our civilization to the Indians instead of feeding the Indians to our civilization” (Pratt, 1892). This quotation encapsulates the violent extent assimilationists such as himself were willing to go to eradicate the ‘Indian’ in the man. Furthermore, by promoting forced assimilation and erasure of Native American culture, Pratt endorsed white supremacy and perpetuated the legacies of colonization that continue to marginalize Native American communities today. Boarding schools were heavily documented as “before and after '' photos greatly circulated to demonstrate the ‘success’ of cultural assimilation, particularly through the education system. Tom Torlino’s pictures were an infamous example that encapsulated the horrors of assimilation (Burton, January 17th, 2023). He was initially photographed with long …show more content…

This is a significant contradiction in Pratt’s speech because despite advocating for the assimilation of racialized groups and immigrants he manages to recognize how ‘feeding’ people to American civilization does not mean that they will gain the privileges of being a white American. He speaks about the prevalent success of the transatlantic slave trade by describing it as, “the greatest blessing that ever came to the Negro race” (Pratt, 1892). However, continues to simultaneously state how Black Americans at the time were still not recognized as citizens or men. Prior to that excerpt, he was quoting the Declaration of the Rights of man and the citizen, being fully aware that these rights only applied to white men at the time. I assert that through the extent by which American institutions and society are entrenched in white supremacy, the rights of man and the citizen do not pertain to racialized groups. If that were not the case we would not be witnessing significant disparities in poverty, illness, criminalization, and injustice of Native Americans in particular. These outcomes reveal the long-lasting insufferable consequences of assimilation policies that were enforced during the 18th and 19th centuries, furthermore, perpetuated in Richard Pratt’s

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