The Brutal History of Americanization of Native American Children

The Brutal History of Americanization of Native American Children

How Native children were separated from their families in the name of “cultural assimilation”

Four Native American children before and after assimilation. They were admitted to Carlisle Indian Industrial School

For centuries, the US has had a long and brutal history of wiping out the Native American population and systemic racism. Lands were snatched from the natives, they were confined to small patches, and strict laws were formulated against them. When the government realized that the indigenous population was increasing, they tried to “assimilate” Native Americans.

Cultural assimilation of Native Americans was a series of events organized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to forcefully assert American values and culture on the indigenous population. With the growing immigration of Europeans in America, the Caucasians desired to have a standard set of values and culture to be held by the majority of citizens.

Education was viewed as the primary method in the acculturation process for minorities.

Therefore, the federal government outlawed the religious customs and traditions of Indian culture and established Native American boarding schools that forcefully separated children from their parents.

This article focuses on the forced assimilation tactics targeting innocent children, the horrific conditions in the boarding schools, and the inception of the adoption program in the 1970s when the indigenous activists resisted the boarding schools.

How the Americanization of the Native Americans began?

Richard Henry Pratt was an American general who is best known as the founder of one of the first federally funded Indian boarding schools — Carlisle Indian Industrial School in 1879.

Pratt‘s motto was to “kill the Indian, save the man” and he is considered as the first person to use the word “racism”.

Pratt along with the famous soldier and his friend, Buffalo Bill, believed that acquiring modern skills were essential for the minority race and so masked this propaganda under the tagline of ‘cultural transformation’.

Once the model of boarding schools worked, more than 350 boarding schools were opened to…