Immigration and Education in a Culturally Pluralist Society
boarding schools Residential
institutions where students live and attend school.
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in their own cultural superiority. In the Mississippi Valley, French missionaries, especially the Jesuits, sought to convert Native Americans to Catholicism and to educate French colonists’ children in the language and culture of France. In the Spanish-controlled Southwest, Jesuit and Franciscan priests sought to alleviate exploitation of Native Americans by Spanish landlords by establishing missions to protect, control, and convert the tribes to Catholicism. Mission schools taught religion, reading, writing, and craft skills.57 The Moravians—religious followers of John Amos Comenius, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina—taught the Native American tribes and translated the Bible and religious tracts into Indian languages. Among the early Native American educators, Sequoyah (1770–183l), a Cherokee, devised an alphabet in his native language that developed into Cherokee as a written language. In the nineteenth century, the US government forcibly relocated the majority of Native Americans to reservations west of the Mississippi River in remote areas of the Great Plains and the Southwest. After 1870, the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), encouraged by well-intentioned but misguided reformers, again attempted to “civilize” Native Americans by assimilating them into white society. These so-called reformers sought to eradicate tribal cultures and instill what they saw as white values through agricultural and industrial training.58 From 1890 to the 1930s, the BIA used boarding schools to implement the assimilationist educational policy. Boarding schools emphasized a basic curriculum of reading, writing, arithmetic, and vocational training. Ruled by military discipline, Native American youngsters in these schools were forbidden to speak their own native languages and were forced to use English. Native American youngsters variously resisted, passively accepted, or accommodated to the boarding schools’ regimens. Active resisters repeatedly ran away from the boarding schools.59 Others passively accepted the boarding schools’ programs as a way to learn a trade useful for earning a living.60 Many students suffered a loss of cultural identity, feeling trapped in a never-never land between two different cultures. After the boarding-school policy was discontinued in the 1930s, Native American education experienced significant changes. Many Native Americans left reservations to live in large cities where their children generally attended public schools. Children on tribal reservations attended BIA schools, public schools, or nonpublic schools. Ending the assimilationist policies, the Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975 encouraged Native Americans “to control their own education activities.”61 Christopher Vecsey, On the Padres’ Trail (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). David W. Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995), pp. 12–24. Also, see Ruth Spack, America’s Second Tongue: American Indian Education and the Ownership of English, 1860–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2002), p. 75. 59 Spack, America’s Second Tongue, p. 131. 60 David W. Adams, “From Bullets to Boarding Schools: The Educational Assault on Native American Identity, 1878–1928,” in Philip Weeks, ed., The American Indian Experience (Arlington Heights, IL: Forum Press, 1988), pp. 218–239. For a history of a boarding school based on reflections of its students, see K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1994). 61 For Native-American self-determination and education, see Julie L. Davis, Survival Schools: The American Indian Movement and Community Education in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). 57
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1935 Publishes Black Reconstruction
1963 Death
1925 1940 1955 1970 1985
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