American Indians Higher Education Before 1974: From Colonization to Self-Determination

Extract

Although Europeans and Americans involved American Indians in their educational systems almost from first contact, it was only in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that the United States government made a full scale assault and took control of virtually all aspects of American Indian education, with the purpose of forcing or encouraging assimilation. This assault began with treaty-based support for education in government schools run by both federally hired schoolteachers and missionaries, paid for directly with money the tribes received for their lands. By the late nineteenth century the federal government, recognizing the failure of day schools in the assimilation process, turned to the use of boarding schools, on-reservation and off, through which Indians were trained in vocational and domestic skills and which were intended to sever children’s ties to their cultures. During this time few Indians were educated at a college level. The English and later Americans expected those who were educated to use their educations to help in the assimilation process. These educational systems, while disrupting (though not destroying) reservation life and culture, focussed almost exclusively on industrial and domestic, not intellectual, training. The quality of education provided was so low that even Indian students wishing to attend college were often academically ineligible for entrance.