Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн

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Education would not only include as it aims Christianization and citizenship training, but also would incorporate the rudiments of academics such as the ability to read, write, and speak English, as well as facilitate individualization by developing a work ethic that promoted the ideal of self-reliance as well as respect for private property.⁹ Education would produce assimilation, and this would result in a new American who no longer would speak his or her tribal language, avoid “pagan” thoughts and rituals, and would leave behind any notions of community and communal values. And it should be an educational process that would not be thwarted by angry parents and traditional forces on the reservation.

One solution was to distance the school children from their family and tribe. Not only did the federal officials believe that the children should be separated from their “tribal” and “savage” ways so as to become “civilized,” but by separating them from their families they could be used as hostages to insure proper behavior by their parents back at the reservation. This type of education would be a different kind of relocation policy, a sort of education that would assimilate and integrate the Indian into American society. It would be a form of cultural genocide, or as one writer called it, “education for extinction.”¹⁰ And the model for organizing an off-reservation school like Carlisle would be a military one, and Richard Henry Pratt would become its first officer and teacher.