Native American Education, History of

Missionary Schools

The Jesuits began establishing missions within Indian territories in the Northeast and Midwest beginning in 1611. Protestants sent missionaries to Indian territories in the early 1600s. Father Junípero Serra began establishing the twenty-one California missions in 1769. The purposes of the missionary work were Christianizing, civilizing, and assimilating Native Americans into the European way of life, religion, work patterns, and language.

In 1819, the U.S. government decided to assist the missionary efforts by establishing the Indian Civilization Act, which funded Christian missionary schools within Indian territory. Christian denominations involved in setting up missionary boarding schools included Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian, Baptist, and Catholic, among others. By 1884 they had created missionary schools in seventy-three different Indian territories.

The federal government was also involved in Native American education through writing education into many of the treaties set up with the various tribes. During the 1800s, the Senate approved nearly 400 treaties, of which 120 contained provisions for education. In exchange, the tribes gave almost a billion acres of land to the U.S. government. The government responded by passing the Dawes Act of 1887, which created a system of allotments for Native Americans. By dividing up the Indian territory into parcels, each Native American was able to receive land of his or her own, which encouraged an individual rather than tribal view of the land. The act turned out to be just another method of taking land from Native Americans, as it resulted in 60 million acres being opened up to non-Indians for settlement.

[Page 537]When students arrived at the missionary schools, they faced treatment designed to “de-Indianize” them. Their hair was cut, they were not allowed to speak their native languages, they were not allowed to practice their own religions, they could not use their known ways of practicing medicine, and they were most often not allowed to keep their own names. The belief on the part of the U.S. government and the educators at the schools was that if children were stripped of their sense of Indian identity and their memory of their religion, language, and sense of community, then their tribal customs would disappear, and the communities would become more like the White communities.

Off-Reservation Boarding Schools

In 1865, a congressional committee recommended the creation of boarding schools away from Indian communities for the education of young children. According to proponents, this would remove the Indian child further from the influences of the family and tribe. By 1873, the federal government had repealed funding for missionary schools, instead appropriating money to off-reservation boarding schools for Indian children that emphasized industrial labor training.

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