American Indian Holocaust: The Native American Boarding School

I recently read chapter 1 of the book Next Steps: Research and practice to advance Indian education, edited by: Karen G. Swisher and John W. Tippeconnic III. This chapter is titled: The unnatural history of American Indian Education. The chapter was about the colonial education and stereotypical beliefs about the culture and capability of Native Americans. I noticed the words natural and true showed up quite often, natural to me means not human made and true meaning the truth with facts. It was stated that there are four tenets of colonial education (the reculturing and reeducation of American Indians by the secular and religious institutions of colonizing nations). 1. Native Americans were savages and had to be civilized. 2. Civilization

Theodore Fontaine is one of the thousands of young aboriginal peoples who were subjected through the early Canadian system of the Indian residential schools, was physically tortured. Originally speaking Ojibwe, Theodore relates the encounters of a young man deprived of his culture and parents, who were taken away from him at the age of seven, during which he would no longer be free to choose what to say, how to say it, with whom to live and even what culture to embrace. Theodore would then spend the next twelve years undoing what had been done to him since birth, and the rest of his life attempting a reversal of his elementary education culture shock, traumatization, and indoctrination of ethnicity and Canadian supremacy. Out of these experiences, he wrote the “Broken Circle: The Dark Legacy of Indian Residential Schools-A Memoir” and in this review, I considered the Heritage House Publishing Company Ltd publication.

Throughout the history of the Native Americans, no one has suffered more because of the white man’s atrocity than the children of the Indians. Most of them, if not all, were taken away from their reservation to live in a boarding school. Whether they liked it or not, they were to follow and obey the school’s rules and regulations even though they deemed it unforgiving. In her poem, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways,” Louise Erdrich meticulously depicted the sufferings of the Indian children at a boarding school created just for them to better assimilate with the white man’s culture. The speaker of the poem and the imagery used to describe this wonderful heart-warming literature made it possible to convey the real existence of the pain

People know about the conflict between the Indian's cultures and the settler's cultures during the westward expansion. Many people know the fierce battles and melees between the Indians and the settlers that were born from this cultural conflict. In spite of this, many people may not know about the systematic and deliberate means employed by the U.S. government to permanently rid their new land of the Indians who had lived their own lives peacefully for many years. There are many strong and chilling reasons and causes as to why the settlers started all of this perplexity in the first place. There was also a very strong and threatening impact on the Native Americans

The term genocide brings awful things to mind. For most, it probably directs their attention towards the Holocaust; this was definitely a gruesome and obvious example of genocide, but there are many others with great similarities that are not very well known. One of these is the decimation of the Native American population by the European settlers and the atrocious things that were done to them such as the trail of tears following the Indian Removal Act of 1830 during the settling of North America. The Holocaust might be the most well known but there have been many other incidents in history just as abhorrent. The Holocaust and Native American Genocide are different in weapons used and the motives for killing but similar in intent,

Europeans had different ideologies than indigenous peoples when it came to land in terms of who could own the land. As a result of European entitlement, they assumed that the land was available to be taken. The process of removing indigenous people from their land began, and the settlers were justifying it by suggesting that is was not necessarily “stealing” land, but rather it was “saving” the land from being misused by the savages that lived there previously (Sahlins 19). Mindsets such as these finalized the traumatic process of Native American invisibility as they were forced out of their land and their homes.

By 1940, Native Americans had experienced many changes and counter-changes in their legal status in the United States. Over the course of the nineteenth century, most tribes lost part or all of their ancestral lands and were forced to live on reservations. Following the American Civil War, the federal government abrogated most of the tribes’ remaining sovereignty and required communal lands to be allotted to individuals. The twentieth century also saw great changes for Native Americans, such as the Citizenship Act and the Indian New Deal. Alison R. Bernstein examines how the Second World War affected the status and lives of Native Americans in American Indians and World War II: Toward a New Era in Indian Affairs. Bernstein argues

The Jewish Holocaust is remembered and learned about every year in school. During this holocaust, six million people were killed. However, the Native American Genocide resulted in over one hundred-twenty million deaths. This tragedy is only briefly summarized. When Christopher Columbus, “the discoverer of the Americas,” claimed the land in 1492 on his quest for gold and silver, the fact that millions of people already lived in the area was not considered. It is estimated that fifteen million people, which Columbus had rudely referred to as “Indians,” lived north of current day Mexico at the time of his arrival. Three hundred-fifty years later, this number was reduced to less than one million (Mercier). The Native

The act also funded boarding schools that designed to replace Native American culture with American culture within the school system. Family and cultural ties almost diminished because of the boarding schools. Children were even punished for speaking their native tongue or practicing anything dealing with Native American rituals

The American government's treatment of Native Americans in the 19th century should be considered genocide. Genocide is the deliberate killing of a large group of people, especially those of a particular ethnic group or nation. And what American governments were doing is literary killing innocent Native Americans which are one hundred percent genocide. They were killing a lot of Indians, but they didn’t want to kill all Indians because they needed some of them to work in the fields. There were a lot of diseases and bacteria speared around which was killing a lot of them. There were estimated about 12 million Indians and about 75-80% were killed by the strategic diseases. In 1890 the last major battle between Native American Indians and U.S. soldiers occurred. It was called the Battle of Wounded Knee and occurred near the Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. Approximately three hundred Sioux Indians were slaughtered. Native Americans found themselves overwhelmed by Anglo-Americans' financial and military resources. But their response to events was neither

b. causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;<br>c. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;<br>d. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;<br>e. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.<br>(Destexhe).<br><br>In this paper, I will argue that the act of genocide as here defined, has been committed by the United States of America, upon the tribes and cultures of Native Americans, through mass indoctrination of its youths. Primary support will be drawn from Jorge Noriega's work, "American Indian Education in the United States." The paper will then culminate with my personal views on the subject,

The Bureau of Indian Education (BIE) was formed in 2006. This government agency, previously known as the Office of Indian Education Programs, controls the direction and curriculum for all Indian schools as well as managing the funding. Three legislative acts developed the roles of the BIE. The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 and The Education Amendments Act of 1978. The only more recent legislation was The No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. It is the mission of the BIE to provide quality education to all Native Americans by focusing on the spiritual, mental, physical, and cultural aspects of the individual within his or her family and tribal or village context (U.S. Dept.

Children were taken away from their homes and told everything they knew was wrong. They were sent to boarding schools to change their culture. These boarding schools were run by the United States government. The government's goal was to civilize Native Americans. They sent children to these schools against their will. Native American children were educated like Americans and they had to change their native ways to be more like whites (Cayton 266). Teachers abused their students and beat their native ways out of them. They were not allowed to see their families so they would try to escape, but their attempts were unsuccessful. The United States government’s Boarding Schools of the mid-late 1800s irreparably changed Native American culture.

What if the only thing that brought generations of families together were stripped from children? Native Indians had this happen to them when they attended boarding schools in the late 1900s. The language you are born into is the glue that can keep a strong bond within your culture and family. Language barriers can cause families to be unable to bond and these children may feel as if they cannot have a relationship with their family members. The Indian boarding schools were a destructive form of dehumanization since the way it tore culture from students, changed their culture into the culture they thought was right, and caused many Native Indians family troubles as well as depression and confusion.

Historical trauma, as Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart expressed, is being carried on the genes of Native people without being notice, is something heavy that cause pain and unconformity that it is slowly killing them. As the article refer that historical trauma is “the cumulative emotional and psychological wounding, over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma experiences.” Meaning that the things that happen in the past are still hurting people now, and it needs a great attention and cultural focus. It is really important to show a true respect to Native American culture, so it will be able to accurately help Native Americans from the roots of the problem. A lot of people will argue that what happen to the Native American community happened long time ago, but according to this article, Healing the American Indian Soul Wound, actually is something that kept on happening not so long ago, for example, “it was only in 1994 that native peoples were allowed to practice some forms of religion without fear of reprisal by state and federal government policies” (p. 345). It is surprising that this was still happening in 1994, which is so recent, and it shows a lot of immaturity from the government on the topic of respecting others as human beings. I actually argue with people that cultural genocide over Native Americans is something that I will not doubt is still happening now. I have a strong belief that