Boarding School Research Paper

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Pages: 3

"The school is the only place for the Indian child to learn. He learns nothing of value at home," these are the words of H.B. Peairs. Peairs was the former superintendent of the Haskell Institute, an off-reservation boarding school located in Lawrence, Kansas. The school and others like it were established as part of the government assimilation movement, a longed for "solution" to the "Indian problem". By removing native children from their homes, it was hoped a whole generation would be stripped down of all savage ways and replaced with proper, civilized identities. As the non-Indian society tried with all their might to alter the cultural values and traditions of natives, they ended up causing the opposite effect, as Brenda J. Child, author of Boarding School Seasons, American Indian Families, 1990-1940 concluded. The assimilation attempt brought together otherwise separate cultures and groups to create a pan-Indian identity that ultimately saved …show more content…
Flandreau, located in Flandreau, South Dakota was originally meant for Dakota and Ojibwe students but as operation continued, diversity increased. The school went from housing students of two tribes to having at least one student from nearly 20 different tribes by 1938. Haskell earned the reputation of being one of the most intertribal boarding schools, bringing in students from the Midwest, Southwest as well as Oklahoma. With these schools reaching such diversity and filling up capacity, Indian cultures were bound to intertwine. Child's Ojibwe grandmother who attended Flandreau had memories of learning phrases from the Dakota language due to the high number of Dakota students at school. "This peculiarly pan-Indian quality of the boarding schools is not what assimilationists, who were committed to the repression of tribal languages and culture, had in mind when they founded," stated