Native Americans, Cultural Degradation

Forced Isolation and Acculturation

Between 1850 and 1880, the U.S. government embarked on a policy of containment, establishing most of the nation's reservations and forcing Native Americans to live on them. Segregated and isolated, the once self-reliant tribes became wards of the government, with bureaucrats responsible for their welfare, issuing them food rations and supervising virtually every aspect of their lives. Forbidden to engage in their own spiritual practices, they instead faced zealous Protestant missionaries who were anxious to convert the Native Americans and were encouraged to do so by the government, which gave them some reservation land on which to build churches and religious schools. Not until the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act restored their freedom of religion could Native Americans publicly return to their ancestors' ways.

White patriarchal assumptions about proper families disrupted families that were matriarchal or egalitarian. Families were not allowed to make decisions or to direct their own lives, as everything became subject to approval by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). Policies were designed to weaken or break up families.

Government programs and boarding schools thus attempted to dismantle kinship patterns by taking children from their families and placing them in boarding schools or with white families. These programs also coerced Western ways at reservation schools, forcing acculturation by forbidding historical tribal languages, dress, hairstyles, religion, and culture. Children of different tribes, even warring tribes, were boarded together. When school was not in session, children were often boarded with white families to prevent them from renewing tribal ways. Children were often abused, neglected, and mistreated. While some Indian schools did teach American Indian children some vocational skills such as pencil making, programs encouraged them to move away rather than promote employment opportunities on the reservations. This coercive acculturation led to loss of culture, tradition, and way of life.

...