| Abstrakt: |
We analysed the social functions of the American Indian Boarding School movement. As well as teaching English, math and science, the boarding school mission was to eliminate all traces of Native cultures. A first step in cultural genocide was to replace the names of tribes with the single identifier "Indian". Individual students were renamed with American names and taught to replace the We of tribal life with the individualist I - that is to replace Native beliefs and practices with what Weber called "The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism". Anglo structures of patriarchy were to replace matriarchy or polygamy. Children were pawns in a total institution not just to teach them but to make the "old ways" extinct. While force was used to remove and educate children, schooling would accomplish what centuries of Indian Wars had not. Tribes, parents and children resisted this coercive project: parents hid their children, they ran away and, despite physical punishment, refused to learn the curriculum. Natives rejected the labels "backwards", "savage", "ignorant", "a vanishing race". Eventually schools were reformed and day schools built on the reservations. The tribes did not vanish, and the scholarship of Native History in the US helped re-write a misguided and violent project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
