Native American Cultural Assimilation

ingrained the Statesn Cultural enculturation from the compound Period to the reformist October 2, 2011 Introduction Although the first European settlers in America could not meet survived with egress their assistance, it was not long before the primeval Americans were viewed as a problem population. They were an obstacle to the working out juts of the colonial presidential term and the equal to the bleakly formed linked States. The aboriginal Americans were dealt with in various slipway.During amplification some were out honorable exterminated with war while differents forcibly made to relocate to lands deemed less than ideal. The idea was to get hold of them vanish out of sight, out of mind. though their numbers in terms of population and tribal groups dwindled, they persisted and continued to be a problem in the eyes of the federal official g eitherwherenment. In the latter part of the nineteenth century the United States political sympathies instituted a curr ent way to wage war against the natural Americans. This knotted assimilating their children by and by means of government-run boarding and day indoctrinates.Federal policy- coercers were sure that by giving the Native American children an American-style socialization, they would eventually evolve into Americans and return to their qualifications, entirely forsaking their previous culture, traditions and way of thinking. The federal government assumed that as the aged begin apartd off and, with the children assimi posthumousd, within a few generations at most, at that place would be no need for reservations or Indian policy, thus accomplishing the headwaiter goal of fashioning them vanish.There is little doubt that concentration done instruction failed on just about all fronts, but through my interrogation I hope to uncover some positives for the Native American children, oddly those affected by late nineteenth century Indian policy which removed(p) them from t heir families and, in some cases, sent them into an unknown world hundreds of miles away. end-to-end the history of, especially, European imperialism, the relationships between indigenous peoples and colonizers usually proceed through a series of microscope stages. Generally speaking, the first phase involved the ecesis of colonies which meant the disruption of Native societies and usually the displacement of people. In most cases, in that location was some degree of force and if complete domination was not swift, treaties were bony up by resetting territorial boundaries in order to maintain a degree of order. Because resource and land acquisition was the main goal of the colonizers in the first place, treaties seldom lasted and violence continued. In most cases, the next phase in colonialism to lessen violence and restore order was to bear witness assimilation. Assimilation could mean turning the indigenous population into a work enduringness or perhaps a marginalized gro up of others who speak the colonizers language1 As colonial expansion unbroken growing in normality America, assimilation was attempted on several levels. Attempts were made at outright Native American removal from their lands and, when that did not work, religion was probably the most far-flung gun of the colonizers to blast the Natives. Priests, Catholic and Protestant, (usually backed by an armed force) were more than often than not unsuccessful in their attempts to force refinement on the Natives. 2 Assimilation by this means was further complicated because of competing religions. Natives who embraced Catholicism offered by French or Spanish colonizers further distanced themselves from British colonizers and vice versa. European wars of the 17th and 18th centuries between Catholic and Protestant powers carried over into the North American colonies and the Native Americans were situated in a no-win situation. As a result of victories in these wars, not only did 1. Holm, Tom . The cracking amazement in Indian Affairs. pp. 1-2. 2.Findling and Thackeray, eds. Events that Changed America in the Seventeenth Century. p. 72. the British envy Native Americans who fought against them in the wars, they crept deeper into Native American territory until their defeat in the American Revolution. 3 Now, what had been colonial expansion in America turned into matter expansion of the newly created United States. As the eighteenth-century came to a close and the major(ip) players in expansion had changed, policy toward Native Americans stayed essentially the same it had been infra the British.Early in the nineteenth-century and the Louisiana Purchase in hand, (Thomas) Jefferson, much as he struggled with the issue (Indian policy), could simply not envision a future tense for the United States that included a place for Indians as Indians. As president, Jefferson attempt to design an Indian policy that would humanely assimilate Native Americans into the new republ ic, but his vision of national expansion turned out not to have any room for Native Americans. 4 Those who refused or resisted assimilation would be forcibly pushed westward to lands deemed unfit for anything by most Americans. 5 As expansion increased further West, the Native Americans compositors cased another subtle weapon in addition to religion from the government in its attempt to subdue them American-style facts of life. Years of violence, agonistic removal to Indian filth and forced religious indoctrination had failed to solve what the federal government referred to as the Indian problem. 6 the Native Americans colourthorn not have flourished in their new land, but they survived and would not go away. As a result, American policy shifted from assay to vanquish the Indians to trying to make them vanish. Starting as an experiment in the azoic nineteenth-century and go on until it became 3. Hightower-Langston, Donna. Native American World. p. 365. 4. Conn, Steven. Hist orys Shadow. p. 3. 5. Garrison, Tim Alan. The Legal Ideology of Removal. p. 7. 6. Ninkovich, Frank. spheric Dawn. p. 185. olicy in the last quarter of the century, new Indian policy would be to extinguish Native American cultures through an American-style education of the issue. The thinking was, take the Native American children to American culture to assimilate them and, for the metre macrocosm, fill out with the adults on reservations. The idea behind this was, after a few generations, the adults would die off and the new generations of American educate, assimilated citizens would survive, but not their old cultures and shipway of life.The balance of this paper will focus on the assimilation through education policy. In 1794 the nation made its first Indian agreement specifically mentioning education, and many more treaties would contain similar offers and even demands for exacting schooling of tribal children. In 1819 Congress brookd a specific civilization fund of $1 0,000 for the uplift of Indians, and the assimilationist campaign continued to employ legislation, treaty making (until 1871), and other expedients to achieve its goals.Initially the United States government through its status/ Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), depended upon Christian missional societies, but by the later nineteenth century the government dominated the educational effort, having constituted a loose system of hundreds of day schools, on-reservation boarding schools, and off-reservation boarding schools, BIA and missionary schools together to Christianize, civilize, and Americanize Indian children the rigidly ethnocentric com defineer program aimed to strip them of tribal cultures, languages, and spiritual concepts and turn them into cultural brokers who would carry the new order back to their own peoples. 7 7. Coleman, Michael C.American Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling. pp. 1-2. The idea of targeting Native American children for civilization cooking actually began in the seventeenth-century in new-fashi unrivalledd England where Native children were separated from their families and situated in praying towns. A Christian education was aimed at the children because they (the colonists) believed (Native American) adults were too set in their ways to become Christianized. 8 From this early attempt at assimilation through education, Native American education developed into fairly formal on-reservation schools run by churches and missionary societies, with contain funding by Congress.These schools were made possible after such actions as the Indian Removal Act which concentrated Native Americans in Indian territories and under approximately more control of the federal government. These mostly denominational schools offered the only American-style, limited as it was, education until after the American civic War. after the conflict (Civil War) the nation developed the Peace Policy, an approach that gave schools a renewed promine nce. The carnage of the war encouraged re originators to find new ways to deal with Native nations other than warfare. 9 Under this peace, the federal government was to provide the necessary funding for schools, administrators, and teachers. 10 There was some funding for the policy by Congress, but not nearly enough.With limited funding, day schools were established on reservations. One-room schools were the norm where government officials encouraged a curriculum of academic and vocational subjects, and sometimes the Office of Indian Affairs paid a reservation carpenter, farmer, or blacksmith to offer courses. 11 8. Keller, Ruether, eds. Encyclopedia of Women and piety in North America. pp. 97-8. 9. Trafzer, Keller and Sisquoc, eds. boarding School Blues. p. 11. 10. ibid. p. 11. 11. ibid. p. 12. About the same time these one-room schools were being established, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Edward P. Smith submitted his annual report favoring boarding schools over day schools.In his report Smith stated that the use of side and the elimination of Native languages was the key to assimilation and civilization. 12 In a plan for national system of Indian schools (October 18890 sent to the Secretary of the Interior, a alternate of Smiths, Thomas J. Morgan, offered the following When we speak of the education of the Indians, we mean that plenary system of training and instruction which will convert them into American citizens, put within their reach the blessings which the rest of us enjoy, and enable them to compete successfully with the white man on his own ground and with his own methods.precept is to be the medium through which the rising generation of Indians are to be brought into fraternal and harmonious relationship with their white fellow citizens, and with them enjoy the sweets of handsome homes, the delight of social intercourse, the emoluments of commerce and trade, the advantages of travel, together with the pleasures that come from literature, sc ience, and philosophy, and the solace and excitant afforded by a true religion. 13 Carlisle Indian Industrial School ten-spot years prior to Commissioner Morgans report, Richard Henry Pratt, a former United States Army officer who had commanded a unit of African American buffalo Soldiers and 12. Trafzer, Keller and Sisquoc, eds. embarkation School Blues. p. 12. 13.Prucha, Francis Paul. commercialismuments of United States Indian Policy. p. 177. Indian scouts in Indian Territory following the Civil War, began his own quest of assimilation through education. In 1879, he secured the permission of the Secretary of the Interior, Carl Shurz, and Secretary of the War division McCrary to use a deserted armed services base as the set of his school. 14 victimisation this site in Pennsylvania, he felt that he could take Native American children from the reservations and by distancing them from tribal influences, turn them into Americans. With the site secured and union support behind h im, the next step was to recruit students.He headed to the Dakota Territory where he was tasked to bring back Native American children to Carlisle. Aided by a teacher/interpreter, Pratt was able to bring back the first social class of 82 students. Unfortunately, when he got back to Pennsylvania, necessary basic living supplies antecedently promised to them by the Bureau of Indian Affairs were not to be found. The children slept on the floor in blankets. 15 In time, some funding was secured privately from former abolitionists and Quakers who were eager to be involved in his success and who often visited the school. Using his military background, the school (for both boys and girls) was modeled after a military academy.Instilling discipline and a sense of time was important to Pratt if he was to make progress with the children and, as one of his former teachers commented on the children, they have been systematically taught self-repression. 16 Although that first recruiting class co nsisted of only 82 students, by the time the school was at full operating capacity (the school survived 39 years), enrollment averaged 1000 students. 17 14. Landis, Barbara. Carlisle Indian Industrial School History. http//home. epix. net/ Landis/histry. hypertext markup language 15. ibid. 16. ibid. 17. ibid. Other Indian Schools Similar types of federal Indian boarding schools were located in the West. They may have been physically closer to reservations, but had the same ideals and philosophy of Carlisle.With military-type discipline, children were encouraged to leave their Native American culture behind and accept Americanization. One of the best cognize of these schools, the Haskell Indian Institute, was located in Lawrence , Kansas. 18 It differed from most Indian schools in the vitamin E in that, after a few years (and graduates) it, like other western Indian schools began to staff itself with former students in teacher and, in some cases, administrative roles. 19 Another N ative American school of line of business was the Flandreau Indian School, opened in 1893 in eastern South Dakota in the main for Ojibwe and Dakota students in its early years. 20 Like Haskell, its main function was industrial education for boys and domestic science for girls.No matter which school the children attended, Carlisle, Haskell, or Flandreau, in that location were common problems faced by the children initiation (into the white mans universe), discipline, and punishment, along with overall problems and achievements of pupil adjustment. 21 rough children absolutely resisted Americanization a favourite form of resistance was arson and those who, at least on the face of it, recognized the white mans ways were often subjected to rejection by their peers or elders or suspicion by non-Indians. 18. Warren, Kim Cary. The Quest for Citizenship. p. 15. 19. ibid. p. 15. 20. Child, Brenda J. embarkment School Seasons. p. 7. 21. Coleman, Michael C. American Indians, the Irish , and Government Schooling. p. 8. ConclusionThroughout my research there was a common theme in the sources I used one group trying to impose its will on another. I check that most of this paper has seemed like an indictment against, first, the European colonizers, then the European-American expansionists and, finally, the Americans in their treatment of Native American peoples, despite what may have seemed, at least some of the time, noble intentions. Sobeit. Actions by Native Americans against non-Native Americans have almost always been reactionary. Throughout history this was evident. In early colonial America, flake between the French and English (initially in Europe and other split of the world) spilled over into North America to the contested margins of their empires. Native Americans in conference with the French initiated what became King Williams War when they helped massacre British settlers of Schenectady, newborn York, on February 9, 1690. 22 The Native American mo tive for participating probably was not to see further expansion of French territory into Native American land, but more likely a response to years of violence committed by the British toward them. Moving ahead a lucifer of centuries, it seemed like the united States government still held to the mindset that the only easily Indian is a dead Indian, not necessarily dead in a physical sense, but dead in a cultural sense. Continued expansion westward was problematic for the federal government because every time there was another push, there always seemed to be Native Americans in its way.Violence in many forms against the Native Americans to try to vanquish them had little success, so new policy, though experimental at first, was implemented in the nineteenth-century and gained support of so-called reformers. The new 22. Bobrick, Benson. Angel in the Whirlwind. pp. 18-19 policy was designed, not to vanquish the Native Americans, but make them vanish. To make them vanish, again not so much physically, but culturally, the federal government adopted policies demanding assimilation. This assimilation would be accomplished by educating the Native American young in a way that would Americanize them. After their Americanization the young would take their training either back to the reservation or mainstream America, go forth their Indian culture behind, thus making the Indian culture gradually vanish.To this end, the federal government began its boarding school program for Native Americans during the late nineteenth-century as part of a crusade by a alinement of reformers who aimed to assimilate Native Americans into dominant Anglo-Protestant society through education. With a frenzy that was partly evangelical and partly militaristic, the creators of the boarding school system hoped that through education, they could bring about a mass cultural conversion by waging war upon Native American identities and cultural memories. 23 The negatives of the new Native America n assimilation/education program far outweighed the positives. The Native American children were confuse into what was essentially a whole new world very alien to them. One seemingly small example of this change was the wearing of shoes.Some children had never worn shoes in their lives, but were suddenly forced to wear them. The children were disciplined harshly for speaking anything but English in the schools harassed by peers, reservation elders and, sometimes, suspicious non-American Indians depending on the degree they accepted assimilation taught trades and skills that were becoming obsolete and, probably worst of all, so psychologically confused, many were later unable to function on the reservation or in the white mans world. 23. Bloom, joke. To Show What an Indian dejection Do. p. xii On the positive side of boarding schools, many children were removed from situations of abject poverty and given room and board.The food and living arrangements were exclusively foreign to them, but it was bankrupt than they had previously known. Moving the children from the reservations also kept them quarantined from the disease prevalent there. One of the benefits of completing their boarding school experience was that many graduates later began to staff the schools, especially in the West, somewhat lessening white influence and the schools ability (and will) to make cultures and ways completely disappear, a positive for the Native Americans, but a prime example of the failure of the schools to carry out federal policy. Though most of the education the children was rudimentary, at best, but in some cases students embraced knowledge and took their education to the next level.They went on to more formal schools and used their training and education back on the reservations to become leaders with a better understanding of the Native American/American relationship, while others infiltrated local, territorial, state or federal Indian agencies once manned only by white bureaucrats, most who were ignorant when it came to dealing with Native American problems. Assimilation had failed as a governmental policy and, as more and more educated Native Americans left the reservations and adapted to the white world, while retaining fundamental culture and ways, and was replaced by acculturation. Acculturation was not a federal policy, it describes a necessary survival tool used by the Native American to carry on what little was left of their cultures and ways of life.Instead of their educations making them subservient to their master (the federal government), education allowed those Native Americans with the desire and wit to attain watch. Gaining this respect from both their own people, as well as the white American people took time, but with it came, little by little, more agency and the ability, right and courage to have a say in how their lives were to play out. As bad a reputation as they have had in the past and even to this day, the fact that res ervations still exist shows the unwillingness of some Native Americans to let their traditions die. The popularity of Indian art, jewelry and music serves to keep the cultures going.Just as the early settlers of the West found out, they are everywhere, though in change magnitude numbers, and will not go away. Works Cited 1. Bloom, John. To Show What an Indian jakes Do Sports at Native American Boarding Schools. Minneapolis, MN, regular army, University of Minnesota Press, 2000. http//site. ebrary. com/lib/genus Apus/ atomic number 101? id=10151303 2. Bobrick, Benson. Angel in the Whirlwind The Triumph of the American Revolution. New York, NY, regular army, Penguin Books, 1998. 3. Child, Brenda J. Boarding School Seasons American Indian Families, 1900-1940. Lincoln, NE, USA University of northeastward Press, 1998. http//site. ebrary. com/lib/apus/Doc? id=10015709 4. Coleman, Michael C. American Indians, the Irish, and Government Schooling A Comparative Study.Lincoln, NE, USA Univ ersity of Nebraska Press, 2007. http//www. netlibrary. com. ezproxy1. apus. edu/urlapi. asp viper? action= succinct&v=1&bookid=184858 5. Conn, Steven. Historys Shadow Native Americans and Historical Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago, Il, USA University of Chicago Press, 2004. http//www. netlibrary. com. ezproxy1. apus. edu/urlapi. asp? action= stocky&v=1&bookid=262649 6. Findling, John E. and Frank W. Thackeray, eds. Events that Changed America through the Seventeenth Century. Westport, CT, USA Greenwood Press, 2000. http//www. netlibrary. com. ezproxy1. apus. edu/urlapi. asp? action= succinct&v=1&bookid=77716 7. Garrison, Tim Alan.The Legal Ideology of Removal The Confederate Judiciary and the Sovereignty of Native American Nations. Athens, GA, USA The University of Georgia Press, 2002. http//www. netlibrary. com. ezproxy1. apus. edu/urlapi. asp? action=summary&v=1&bookid=103178 8. Hightower-Langston, Donna. Native American World. Hoboken, NJ, USA John Wiley & Sons, Inc. , 2003. http//netlibrary. com. ezproxy1. apus. edu/urlapi. asp? action=summary&v=1&bookid=79081 9. Holm, Tom. The Great Confusion in Indian Affairs Native Americans and Whites in the Progressive Era. Austin, TX, USA The University of Texas Press, 2005. http//site. ebrary. com/lib/apus/Doc? id=1010671 10.Keller, Rosemary Skinner, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Marie Cantlon, eds. Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America. Bloomington, IN, USA Indiana University Press, 2006. http//www. netlibrary. com. ezproxy1. apus. edu/urlapi. asp? action=summary&v=1&bookid=171513 11. Landis, Barbara. Carlisle Indian Industrial School History. http//home. epix. net/landis/histry. hypertext mark-up language 12. Ninkovich, Frank. Global dawn the Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865-1890. Harvard University Press, 2009. http//site. ebrary. com/lib/apus/Doc? id=10402533 13. Prucha, Francis Paul, ed. Documents of United States Indian Policy.Lincoln, NE, USA University o f Nebraska Press, 2000. http//www. netlibrary. com. ezproxy1. apus. edu/urlapi. asp? action=summary&v=1&bookid=53529 14. Trafzer, Clifford E. , Jean a. Keller and Lorene Sisquoc, eds. Boarding School Blues Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences. Lincoln, NE, USA University of Nebraska Press, 2006. http//www. netlibrary. com. ezproxy1. apus. edu/urlapi. asp? action=summary&v=1&bookid=162267 15. Warren, Kim Cary. The Quest For Citizenship African American and Native American Education in Kansas, 1880-1935. Chapel Hill, NC, The University of North Carolina Press, 2010. http//site. ebrary. com/lib/apus/Doc? id=10425421