Native American Education In The 1800s

From the early 1800’s till the late 1900’s America began to change drastically. After the removal act of 1830 and the signing of agreements like the Treaty of Echota, which gave all lands east of the Mississippi river to the U.S. government. White American population began to blossom and so did the spread of Euro-centric culture. Although at the time Natives were not considered citizens, whites still wanted to rid Natives of their culture and replace it with their own. In order to begin the process of acculturation and assimilation of Natives the U.S. government decided to break Natives of their unity by passing The Daws Act of 1887. The Act forced Natives into owning individual land instead of the traditional tribal sharing. This caused animosity amongst tribesmen and undermined the authority of Chiefs. The U.S. government then decided to turn their interest towards Native children. “Reformers hoped that an Education grounded in Western academics and buttressed by vocational training and stern discipline would …show more content…
Because the first set schools were built on reservations, where Native children could still maintain contact with their families, reformers efforts seemed to be ineffective. That was until, “Capitan Henry Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, housed in an outdated and unused military barracks”(townsen375), away from the reservations that reformers began to make progress in their mission. Pratt believed that, “all significant human differences . . . could be explained by environment alone”(Townsen 376). To “Remove the Indian child from his community and family surround him with the physical trappings of contemporary American society, instruct him in Christianity and academics, and the child would be transformed from an Indian into an American.”(Townsen