Native American Boarding School Essay

Throughout the film, survivors from several Native American tribes describe the actual experience in boarding schools and other assimilation-related governmental policies. The quote from this film which symbolizes the assimilative policy is “kill the Indian and save the man” as shown at the beginning of this film. Before I reflect this film, I am going to compare the boarding school in general and the boarding school for Native American since I had never heard of the boarding school. In Japan, just a few boarding schools exist, but as a matter of fact, those school are practically the same as general high schools. The only difference is those have dormitories and all the students live there. Therefore, in general, we do not specifically distinguish between them. Rather, we recognize them as typical high schools. Then, I need to know the principle of the boarding school in the American society. The education of the boarding school is supposed to make students aware of their personalities and sophisticate their uniqueness. However, according to the survivors, the schools had gotten rid of their original culture as Native American and assimilated the White culture as a part of civilization. For example, children taken there far away from their home had been forcibly disaffected by their families, native languages, religions. …show more content…
In particular, the survivors experienced intergenerational trauma as the results of their times at the boarding school. Moreover, a guy talked about the impact on his family as well as that on him. I cannot recall precisely, but I totally understood the negative effect that the boarding school had. Even though their parents roughly figured out what was going on at the boarding school, that was inevitable and they sent their children to the boarding school while they were thinking of the child going to be totally different from who they had used to