Native Americans and Boarding Schools

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Introduction The plight of families in America are often times unknown and misunderstood. Families are numerous issues that they deal with internal conflict, societal and economic factors and family structures in addition to countless others. The issues are even more so present in the families of United States minority communities like Native Americans. In addition to the above listed typical problems issues in families, Native Americans face reoccurring cultural oppression and historical assault on their identity. These include cultural residential restrictions, inaccurate and offense caricatures, cultural trauma and lingering effects from the boarding school era. Each issue fueling intense discussion and a paper at length in itself. I’ve chosen to critically analyze the boarding school era and its effects in comparisons to current Native American Families. This analyzes will take into consideration…. Boarding Schools In the nineteenth century, Native American Boarding Schools played an essential role in programs that were designed by the United States government to foster the forced assimilation of its native peoples into the mainstream of American society. David Wallace Adams described this solution to the ‘Indian Problem’ “as an instrument for fostering social cohesion and republicanism, no institution had been more important in the spread of the American system” (Coontz, 39). Reformers and politicians that favored this policy of reservation allotment also advanced the concept of placing Indian children in residential schools where they would speak English, learn a vocation, and practice farming. Advocates of boarding schools argued that industrial training, in combination with several years of isolation from family, would diminish the influence of tribalism on a new generation of Native Americans. For fifty years after the first federally administered

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