Essay On Native American Education

Words: 709
Pages: 3

As most know, the United States of America is one of the most powerful countries in the world. We fought with everything we had to create the country we have now, and we didn’t allow anything to get in our way. Including the society that was here long before us, the Native Americans. We forced them to give up everything they knew, and become like us. The most effective way of doing this was forcing the Indian children to go to school and later send them to boarding school.

After almost completely killing off the most sacred animal of the Indian people, forcing the people onto reservations with little to no resources, and bringing deadly diseases to spread between the tribes, it still wasn't enough(notes). Among many other things, we also
…show more content…
But no matter how good the program was, children still struggled to fully understand the language. History was taught very biased, in favor of the white men of course. The other half of the day was spent on skills training. The girls were taught how to cook, clean, sew, care for poultry and they did laundry for the school. The boys learned different types of trades, such as blacksmithing, or learned physical labor, such as farming. And as the 1900’s came closer, the education began to focus more on skills training and making a living in their new society.(nrc)

As you can imagine, the boarding schools were very strict. Genders were strictly kept separate, and some girls were even locked in their dorms at night so they couldn’t sneak over to the boys dorms. Any rules broken came with severe consequences, such as confinement, deprivation of privileges, threat of corporal punishment or significantly smaller rations of food.(nrc)

Not only did we take away the Native Americans land, we took their culture. We killed most of the one thing they cherished most, we took their land, we took their children and we forced our beliefs onto them. We stripped the Native Americans of their pride, their culture, their everything, with no regret, and no matter how hard we try, we can never make up for what our selfishness