Indian Education

Colonial Education

From initial contact with European settlers, Native Americans were under pressure to conform to White ways of behavior, dress, and religion. Many treaties contained provisions for the education of Indian children, the first of which occurred in 1794. Initially, the U.S. government used funding to pay various church organizations to operate already established mission schools. Then, in 1879, the federal government began its own system of off-reservation boarding schools. Much of this system consisted of the forced removal of Native American children from their parents to boarding schools far from the reservation. Here, children were often severely punished for any use of their cultural practices or languages. The philosophy undergirding this system of education was for the children to be rapidly assimilated into the dominant culture by being separated from the influence of their own cultures at an early age. Such a system continued into the 1930s.

The boarding school system, however, was not successful in its attempts at forced assimilation because the vast majority, almost 95%, of Native American children placed in off-reservation boarding schools eventually returned to their reservations. But many of these former boarding school students became marginalized in both cultures, since they were no longer familiar with the practices, traditions, and languages of their own tribes and clans.

K. Tsianina Lomawaima refers to this phase of Native American education as colonial education, referring to the reculturing and reeducation of Native [Page 502]Americans by both secular and religious institutions of such colonizing nations as Spain, Great Britain, France, and the United States. Lomawaima maintains that such a philosophy was accepted as inherently right by past colonizers and continues to underlie contemporary stereotypes about Native Americans and educational practices. Yet there was nothing natural or true about the philosophy of colonial education. Such a philosophy held that (a) Native Americans were savages and had to be civilized, (b) civilization required conversion to Christianity, (c) civilization required subordination of Native American communities, which was frequently achieved through resettlement efforts, and (d) Native American people have mental, moral, physical, or cultural deficiencies that made certain pedagogical methods necessary for their education. These doctrines were not based on natural truths but were culturally constructed and served specific agendas of the colonizing nations.

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