American Indian Culture and Research Journal

When we think of schools run by the federal government or by Christian missionaries for American Indians, we are reminded that Indian education was designed—to borrow the words of Richard Henry Pratt, the government’s notorious Carlisle Indian Industrial School founder—to “kill the Indian to save the man.” Historically, American Indian education in the United States was inextricably linked to Euro-American colonialism. By the late nineteenth century, many Euro-Americans thought Native Americans were a “vanishing race,” and schools for Indians incorporated this belief into their design. In the United States, the large number and variety of schools for Indians that sprang up from the late nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries were intended as a means to assimilate Native communities into the American mainstream, turn “primitive” peoples into “civilized” individuals, and create Christian citizens who would adopt values of private property, hard work, and industry considered important by many Euro-Americans. Prompted in part by the Meriam Report findings of 1928, profound changes to federal Indian education began with the Indian New Deal in 1934 and occurred again in the 1970s when Congress passed legislation specifically designed to increase Native American access to and control of formal education. It was during these landmark periods that Indian education shifted to become more community-centered and more tolerant of the expression of Native cultural values and identities. Only a generation ago in most Native communities, everyone seemed to know someone who had attended one of these institutions of assimilation. Consider what Wilma Mankiller, the former principal chief of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, wrote about her family’s experiences at the government’s Sequoyah School, near Tahlequah, Oklahoma: The whole idea behind those boarding schools, whether they were government operated like Sequoyah or a religious operation, was to acculturate native people into the mainstream white society and, at the same time, destroy their sense of self. . . . [T]he fact remains that the primary mission of Sequoyah and the other boarding schools was for the children to leave everything behind that related to their native culture, heritage, history, and language. In short, there was a full-scale attempt at deracination—the uprooting or destruction of a race and its culture.