Chapter 4: “Not an Educational Institution”: Native American Boarding Schools in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries

Just as it is said that history is written by the victors, it can also be said that the victors define a nation’s educational system and who is successful in it. The basic purposes of ‘education’ in white society in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were far different from the methods of teaching in Native societies. While both systems were invested in the idea that education was necessary to the well-being of their future generations, they approached the education of young people in very different ways. The dominance of white society allowed white values and methods to be the foundation for classrooms. Deprived of traditional connections and judged incapable of competence due to their race, Native children were at the crux of ideological conflict as the United States moved into the twentieth century. Lomowaima, head of American Indian Studies at the University of Arizona, notes that: “this exercise of power was mediated as well as cloaked by the language of morality, which also cloaked the basic dispossession of people from their tribal identities and lands” (Lomowaima, 1993, p. 236). Education was less about intellectual advancement than methods of persuasion used to accustom Native people to multiple methods of surrender.