The Government's Attempt At Erasing The Identity Of Native Americans

Boarding schools were the government’s attempt at erasing the identity of Native Americans. They tried three different ways of schooling to assimilate the natives. The first two did not have the successes the government was looking for because the children still had their Indian Culture. The Native students did receive a few benefits from going to school, but the cost of the negative experiences was not worth the few benefits attained.
Schooling provided by the government or a denomination was intended to assimilate the Indians. The least successful schools were the boarding and day schools that were on the reservation because the children could go back to their families to take part in traditional ways of life. The children were taught
Hans informs, “Even those Native communities that had originally supported education for their children felt that residential schools were culturally oppressive and, most importantly, their children were subjected to physical, spiritual, and sexual abuse”. The children were not allowed to practice the spiritual beliefs of their tribes and they often received harsh punishments for breaking the rules. Even the Native children were close to home suffered abuse at school. Indian children were instead forced into Christianity by their teachers. Specifically talking about the missionaries’ day schools Hans commented, “Teachers hoped that they would carry what they had learned to their parents and communities.” The hopes of the denomination schools were that the children would take what they learned about Christianity and teach it to their parents and the other tribe members. Although the intention of spreading Christianity was there it was difficult to do so because the tribal ties were still strong if the school was on the reservation. The off-reservation schools had more success at assimilating the children but the students and parents met the schooling with resistance. According to Surface-Evans, “The most common and subtle forms of resistance utilized by students, such as refusing to eat or ingesting toxic substances, or continuing to speak native languages…Arson was also a way to strike back at the institution and materially corrode its power”. The Indian children were persistent and did not go done without a fight. In addition to maltreatment disease spread rampantly. Milwaukee explains, “Many of the Indian deaths during the great influenza pandemic of 1918…took place in boarding schools… In the early twentieth century trachoma, a contagious and painful eye disease, afflicted nearly half of the