The Negative Impact Of American Boarding Schools

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American boarding schools had a profoundly negative impact on two of the most important aspects of American Indian cultures: language and spirituality. Boarding schools challenged the very composition of Indian cultures by forbidding tribal languages and the customs they reflected from being used by the Indian children from the moment they first arrived. This weakening was accomplished by forcibly separating those children from their families, and by severely punishing those children who deviated from the cultural norms imposed upon them. These schools then enforced a reliance on the Christian religious paradigm and displaced the spiritual beliefs that were centuries old that these children brought with them (Sanchez and Stuckey, 1999). When