The issue of education for the Native Americans living in the West was such an important issue back in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that many white reformers pushed for a compulsory education for them. The schools where the Native Americans were forced into taught them everything they needed to know to become Americans culturally. Things such as rights, freedoms and the institutions that made America the country it was, were taught in class, but these schools also had another goal in mind, total erasure of their culture and complete assimilation of the tribes into American culture. This essay will tackle the motives of such reformers to push for the assimilation of the Native Americans by using their direct texts written …show more content…
They saw the Native Americans as problematic because of their culture, not because of their skin. While subtle, this key difference makes all of the difference. They saw the Native Americans as redeemable individuals that could be “cured” of their barbarism by adopting American customs as their own. It was seen as America’s mission to ensure that all of its citizens participate in institutions much like the white reformers did, as well as being guaranteed all the same rights and responsibilities that every other citizen of the United States was given. If it were really out of racist self-interest, these white reformers, who wrote about the education policies they wanted to implement, wouldn’t have written the way they did. They wrote to a white audience of reformers that agreed with these changes. They would have written about keeping the natives down as a people, just like the southern states did towards the African-Americans, but they did not. They instead preach that these people need to be assimilated for their own good. Thomas J. Morgan, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs in 1889, said it best, “The Indians are destined to become absorbed into the national life, not as Indians, but as Americans”. With this kind of statement, it is clear that he is pushing for more inclusion of these tribes into the United States and not bring them down. The reformers wanted the tribes as cultural groups to be disbanded and for the natives among those tribes to consider themselves Americans first and
In chapter 5 of Lomawaima & McCarty (2006), the Hopification is used to describe the success of the Hopi people in co-opting cultural norms into their society while maintaining their unique identity as a tribal and ethnic group and they were not the only ethnic Native American group to use parts of American national norms to help continue the existence of their ethnic identities (Processes of Hopification, Para 1). In chapter 1 of Lomawaima & McCarty (2006), the issues of local public school control was an American idea that was not extended to all Americans, the government along with the support of the colonizers decided to raise up the race of the Native Americans so they could one day join the ranks of civilized society, however; it is unclear the timeline in which the Native Americans would be deemed civilized because their cultural norms had been so different than those of the European colonizers that they were seen as savages who needed saving even though they had managed their tribes long before the colonizers came to the Americas (Schools as “Civilizing” and Homogenizing Institutions,
It wasn 't fair to the Indians that they were always getting the short end of the stick and never being accepted for who they were. The Native
I cannot only begin to make many similarities to the previous wrongdoings we have discussed in the course towards the Native American people and traditions. But also link so much of this treatment to who we were as a country during this time period. This persona of America at the time and the persona that many outsiders associate with the United States today can be mutually had. As a
The Native Americans were taught the white people's culture and language. The goal of the white man's school was to teach the Native Americans their ways so that they would forget their own culture. They were taught to be responsible for yourself and not to help the group. They were taught that if you work in solidarity then you get to the top at the expense of others. 4.
Nicholas Flood Davin was a remarkable and brilliant man, who’s legacy will live on. He was distinguished by his erratic behavior through his newspaper, Regina Leader, and his years as a member of the House of Commons.1 After the years of Confederation, he was drawn to the brilliant and merciless life in the Western prairies, where he changed the way of life forever.2 Nicholas Flood Davin’s work to create the Regina Leader, and his research about Residential schools helped to change the future of education, and lives of the citizens of Regina. Born in Ireland in 1839, Davin moved to Toronto when he was 33 years old on an assignment from the Pall Mall Gazette of London, but ended up becoming a freelance writer for the Globe in Toronto.3 In 1882,
In the article by Anthony F. C. Wallace, “The Hunger for Indian Land in Andrew Jackson’s America,” the reasons for America's need for Indian land is discussed. The purpose of this article is to explain the Indian removal that occurred under Andrew Jackson’s presidency. The thesis of this essay states that Americans kicked the Natives off of their land to fulfill a selfish desire to expand the cotton industry. The first point Wallace uses to support his thesis is how Jackson’s financial interest in the land affected the removal of Natives.
According to Document K it states,” Having wronged them for centuries we had better in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures form the face of the earth. ”This shows how angered society was after the creation of reservations for all Native Americans. After General George Armstrong Custer during the Battle of the Little Bighorn majorly lost when underestimating the Native Americans. After great deaths, many people wanted to the government to be much more stricter towards them. Adding on, it states,” An eastern contemporary, with a grain of wisdom in its wit, says that when the whites win a fight, it is a victory, and when the Indians win it, it is a massacre (Document K).
The constrained digestion of Native Americans was in this manner defended as being better for the Indians themselves. Numerous Native Americans, be that as it may, declined to acknowledge what the administration was giving them. They would not surrender their otherworldly convictions. They declined to figure out how to ranch, and they wanted to end up "socialized." To most individuals from white society, Native Americans were viewed as primitive, because the the fact that they didn 't meet society 's qualities and standards.
Merrell’s article proves the point that the lives of the Native Americans drastically changed just as the Europeans had. In order to survive, the Native Americans and Europeans had to work for the greater good. Throughout the article, these ideas are explained in more detail and uncover that the Indians were put into a new world just as the Europeans were, whether they wanted change or
In the book, The Cherokee Removal, Perdue and Green argue that the Cherokee Nation was treated unfairly by the U.S. Government in the 1800s. The majority of Americans were not fond of the Native Americans, and the Americans felt as if the Native Americans were on their rightfully owned property. Perdue and Green display how the states were trying to remove the Natives when they write, “A state could use its legal institutions to make life for Indians so miserable that they would gladly sell their lands and flee to the West” (Perdue and Green, 73).
1. Pratt opposed reservations because Jefferson’s treaty agreement meant the Great River would be the border between them and the whites. Indians would be isolated and not a part of the American life. 2. Schools would “kill the Indian and save the man” by introducing them to the life of an American.
This period was described as [one] whose Constitution is so perfect that no man suggests change and whose fundamental laws as they stand are satisfactory to all..” However, while both Native Americans and European immigrants theoretically experienced similar rights to those of citizens and were granted citizenship/naturalization in the early twentieth century, both groups lived in crude and unsatisfactory conditions in the 19th century; it would be inaccurate to describe their situation as “satisfactory” at all. During the 19th century, Native Americans lived unsatisfactory lives due to forced assimilation and the dissolution of their identities and sovereignty. At the beginning of the 19th century, Native Americans and Americans had gotten into a series of conflicts as a result of American migration to the west, the lands that the Native Americans
The main difference that we see between both racial ethnic groups is that white Americans believed that they could strip Native Americans from their culture and civilize them while “nurture could not improve the nature of blacks” (67). Although some Native Americans did try to live under the laws of white Americans, they were eventually betrayed and forced to leave the
The Native Americans and white people never got along ever since the time the first pilgrims arrived. After losing many wars to the white men Native Americans soon became controlled by these white men to the point where their children were forced into boarding schools. The government stated that the schools would civilize the native children and fix what they called the indian problem. They saw Native Americans as if they weren’t also part of the human race, as if they were less. That wasn’t the worse part either in the boarding schools where the native american children attended they were mistreated and malnourished.
Throughout the 19th century Native Americans were treated far less than respectful by the United States’ government. This was the time when the United States wanted to expand and grow rapidly as a land, and to achieve this goal, the Native Americans were “pushed” westward. It was a memorable and tricky time in the Natives’ history, and the US government made many treatments with the Native Americans, making big changes on the Indian nation. Native Americans wanted to live peacefully with the white men, but the result of treatments and agreements was not quite peaceful. This precedent of mistreatment of minorities began with Andrew Jackson’s indian removal policies to the tribes of Oklahoma (specifically the Cherokee indians) in 1829 because of the lack of respect given to the indians during the removal laws.