A young Mohawk Indian by the name of Ah-nen-la-de-ni, shares his experiences of when he attended a government contract school in Pennsylvania between the years of (1892-1899). That is until he escapes the school jail after receiving a letter from the Nurses’ Training School in Manhattan. To which he desperately wanted to attend but was not allowed. Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s purpose for sharing his personal tale of perseverance and tortuous trials is to make his voice heard about how his people were forced to assimilate into the unknown culture of White America, and to stop the assimilation in his school. Americans wanted to expand as far west as they could which meant that they needed to transform the Native Americans culture into their own. In other words, the Native Americans were going to be forced to move onto reservations, go the boarding schools to learn English, and give up their culture and traditions. To make sure that the Americans can expand west into the Native American’s lands; they passed the Dawes Act of 1887 which divided up the Indians’ land into allotments for individual Indians allowing them to become American citizens. The main objectives of the Dawes Act were to abolish the tribal and communal rights of the Native Americans to…show more content… Who told the boys that an “investigation was coming.” When the Superintendent of Indian Schools made a surprise visit to the school, she found “things were not beautiful at all.” The Superintendent witnessed the horrendous conditions and circumstances that the children lived in for many years, and made the Institute go “out of existence.” Therefore, Ah-nen-la-de-ni’s purpose for sharing his circumstances with someone that he trusted led to his voice being heard and the closing of the government contract school that he
