Eradicating Traditions
Students were taught to hate their cultural identity.
"Did I want to be an Indian? After looking at the pictures of the Indians on the warpath — fighting, scalping women and children, and Oh! Such ugly faces. No! Indians were mean people — I'm glad I'm not an Indian, I thought."
- Merta Bercier, an Ojubwe student
- Merta Bercier, an Ojubwe student
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Assimilation began the moment students arrived.
"[Long hair] was the pride of all Indians. The boys, one by one, would break down and cry when they saw their braids thrown on the floor. All of the buckskin clothes had to go and we had to put on the clothes of the White Man. If we thought the days were bad, the nights were much worse. This is when the loneliness set in, for it was when we knew that we were all alone. Many boys ran away from the school because the treatment was so bad, but most of them were caught and brought back by the police." - Lone Wolf of the Blackfoot tribe, a boarding school student |
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They lost their language and names.
“I explained why we seldom spoke Indian: it was beaten out of us. We were severely punished, and some of the boys and girls got worse punishment than I did.”
–Harriette Shelton Dover “Changing the names of Native American students to more European-sounding names was another attempt to 'civilize the savage' ”
(Daniels). “They said to us, 'All right, you speak English,' and we did. If you are around people who speak one language, you will sort of learn it. When we got to school, we were surrounded by over 100 girls who were all speaking English. Then you learn.”
–Harriette Shelton Dover |