Native American Boarding Schools Summary

The cartoon works to portray the effects of the government boarding school for Native Americans in a positive way to show that the schools are effective in “civilizing” Native Americans. Additionally, the cartoon attempts to show that the Native Americans want to go to boarding schools and are happy to assimilate into white culture, clothes, gender roles, etc. The creation of board schools was a result of the ideology that white society was superior to the Native American way of life. Although white people agreed that the Native Americans had been treated unfairly in the past, they believed they were doing Native Americans a great service by forcing them into boarding schools, taking away their culture and traditions, and forcing them to assimilate.

The students in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls” nor the Native Americans had a choice to be forced out of their homes and assigned a new home, which resulted in learning a new language and to learn how to change their attitudes towards other people, how

Religious stability within the development of individuals was warped during the forced assimilation due to the cult-like idea of Christianity being the superior religion throughout the assimilation era. Michael C. Coleman, author of Indian Children at School, speculates that the propaganda of the Christian religion to force and assimilate the natives into the white man’s religion was the first program to civilize Indian schoolchildren. (American Indian Children at School) As a matter of fact, before being forced into American schools, the first phase of assimilation was the act of immersing the Indians into Christianity. In addition to this, Michael C. Coleman also proposes the idea that Christianity could be labeled as a cult during 1790-1920

These students attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School with the hope of suppressing their culture in order to adopt a more refined way of life. Pratt envisioned the students as ambassadors for his school, and anticipated that they would spread their newly acquired knowledge to others when they returned home. As Ruggles narrative illustrates, a conflicting set of cultural norms does not mean that Native American characteristics are erroneous. The legitimatization of this thought process served to convert the Native Americans into the villain while it pronounced the administrators and community members as

A memorial day for me was one Friday night at a dance at Flandreau Indian Boarding School in South Dakota. I went to this Boarding School, not knowing what to expect. My father had gone to this same Boarding School many years before I had. He graduated from there and I was hoping to do the same. Me and my very good friend of mine, we had the crazy idea to go to the school together to escape the realities of our home town.

In the speech “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man”, Captain Richard Pratt claims that the savagery of the Indians poses a problem to the advancement of the American society. He argues that their surroundings including language, superstition, and lifestyle cause this problem. TO support his claim, he provides the example of an Indian and White infant. He states that raising them in opposite environments will result in the acquisition of their respective qualities. Pratt proposes the solution of sending Indians to boarding schools, so they can gradually become civilized.

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

“The First Days at Carlisle”: Critical Analysis “The First Days at Carlisle” by Luther Standing Bear takes place in the year of 1879 in Carlisle, Pennsylvania at the Carlisle school, a federal boarding school. The purpose of the school was to force the Native American children to assimilate to the white man's culture and to eradicate their culture and traditions. At the school Native Americans children were taught the ways of the white man, but they were not given beds, they were not well fed, they were treated like prisoners, and they were taken advantage of. Throughout the short story “The First Days at Carlisle,” Luther Standing Bear shows how the Native American children were not well taken care of at the Carlisle school.

Many Native Americans, as well as the pack in “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves”, were forced to receive an education. Figures of authority tried, and usually succeeded, to force Native American children to attend school. These figures of authority did not give the Native Americans a choice in this matter, nor did they care about these individuals or their culture. Not to mention, over 100 Native American youth were chosen to attend school in PA. This was a noticeable number of people that were forced to attend school, and this was not very considerate.

This greatly impacted Native Americans in the long run because the children creating the new generation were unable to pass down the culture as they lost it themselves. As the older generation started to disappear, the Native American culture was quickly vanishing. Although some children kept some culture and values from their Native American life, their way of life still was greatly impacted by their time in boarding school. Most children even were taught to be ashamed of their own culture, which led them less likely to go back to that way of life. Through removing children at a young age, giving them new Anglo names, cutting their hair, and teaching the ways of Christianity these children were forced to completely forget about the culture they once possessed.

In both instances in “St. Lucy’s” and the Native American Indians, they had no other option but to be repressed by the Early Americans. Such as the early American nation thought it was necessary for the assimilation of the American Indians. Likewise the assimilation of the American Indians the girls in “St. Lucy’s” were forced to blend in and forget their old way of life to learn to act like a human. For the purpose of assimilation, some American Indian children were kidnapped and taken to boarding schools to learn how to be more like the early Americans and forced to forget their old way of life. With this in mind; “St. Lucy’s” children weren’t really kidnapped, but more convinced that this is what there wolf parents wanted from them and

They are often labeled as uncivilized barbarians, which is a solely false accusation against them. This paper aims to address the similarities between Native American beliefs and the beliefs of other cultures based on The Iroquois Creation Story in order to defeat the stereotype that Natives are regularly defined by. Native Americans are commonly considered uncivilized, savage, and barbarian. Nevertheless, in reality the Natives are not characterized by any of those negative traits, but rather they inhabit positive characteristics such as being wise, polite, tolerant, civilized, harmonious with nature, etc. They have had a prodigious impact on the Puritans

The short story “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” and the forced assimilation

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

The nature of these boarding schools was to assimilate young Native Americans into American culture, doing away with any “savageness” that they’re supposedly predisposed to have. As Bonnin remembers the first night of her stay at the school, she says “I was tucked into bed with one of the tall girls, because she talked to me in my mother tongue and seemed to soothe me” (Bonnin 325). Even at the beginning of such a traumatic journey, the author is signaling to the audience the conditioning that she was already under. Bonnin instinctively sought out something familiar, a girl who merely spoke in the same “tongue” as her. There are already so few things that she has in her immediate surroundings that help her identify who and what she is, that she must cling to the simple familiarities to bring any semblance of comfort.