Indian Children Given False Hope
The attempts to assimilate the Indian people into the great “melting pot” that is the United States through the education process has failed for many reasons.
First of all, in order to convince the young people that an education is beneficial, you must offer a guarantee for the future. When many Indian children discovered that there was no future for them, they reacted by dropping out of school. If getting an education meant being taken from family, friends and home and being isolated in a boarding school under the supervision of strict, often cruel, disciplinarians, then education was a thing to be feared.
Secondly, by isolating the Indian tribes on reservations, far away from the mainstream, the federal government ensured solidarity in peer identification.
By including the destruction of a culture into the educational process using a hit-and-run approach, the Indian child became a human guinea pig and, therefore, fair game for every well-intentioned do-gooder and despot willing to give it a try. In order for the white educator to create a new kind of Indian, in his own image, he first had to erase the Indian child’s culture, religion and identity in order to have a clean blackboard to write his own ideas on.
As each experiment failed, a new one would spring up in its place, and this process was repeated over and over for more than 100 years. Is it any wonder that the Indian people finally said, “Enough is enough!”
It is as American as apple pie for the average citizen to serve on the PTA or the school board. Do you realize that it wasn’t until the 1970s, after the passage of Public Law 93-638, the Indian Education and Self-Determination Act, that Indian parents were allowed the same participation in the education of their children?
One teacher, an Indian woman, became absolutely furious when she was told by a white school administrator that “I’m glad to see that Indian parents are, at last, taking an interest in the education of their children.” Her anger was understandable to most Indians. The parents of Indian children were totally excluded, in fact, and were discouraged from sharing in the educational processes of their own children. Every aspect of education was in the hands of the BIA or the religious order that ran the mission schools.
The school system was intended to eliminate all ties with the past, not reinforce them.
Entire families were moved to the urban ghettos of this country during the great “relocation” experiment of the 1950s and 1960s. Men and women were encouraged to attend vocational schools and “learn a trade.” You will find more unemployed “welders” and “iron workers” on Indian reservations than anywhere else in the United States. After all, what good does it do to teach a person a profession or trade if there are no jobs available in the field when he returns to the reservation?
In discussing the failures of many experiments in the education of Indian children, I am not referring to ancient history. I’m talking about my generation and the generation that followed mine into the reservation school system.
Not long ago I had a reunion with two classmates from an Indian mission school on the Pine Ridge Reservation, and, as usually happens when schoolmates get together, our conversation soon turned to other classmates.
We compared notes on the frequency of tragic incidents that were commonplace among our friends - incidents of death, imprisonment, suicide or alcoholism permeated our conversation. Were these former classmates of ours victims of a misguided experiment in education? To those of us who survived this onslaught on our senses, it was a chilling thought.
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