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What Changed American Indian Culture

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What if the only thing that brought generations of families together were stripped of children? American Indians had this happen to them when they attended boarding schools in the late 1900s. The language a child is born into is the glue that can keep a strong bond within different cultures and families. Language barriers can cause families to be unable to bond and these children may feel as if they cannot have a relationship with their family members. The Indian boarding schools had been a destructive form of dehumanization because of the way it tore culture from students, changed American Indian culture into the culture they thought was right, and caused many American Indian’s family troubles as well as depression and confusion. To understand …show more content…

American Indian children would be housed with the missionary families while the boarding schools were built. A common assumption is that, “Indian children were forced into attending boarding schools or missionary schools, however,” Michael Coleman and others have shown that the American Indian children went for a variety of reasons, including the inability of parents to support them” (Burich 5). Many families could not afford to feed their children, which in turn, they opted to send them to the boarding …show more content…

Language can be defined as, “the learned system of arbitrary vocal symbols, by means of which human beings, as members of a society, interact and communicate in terms of their culture" (Leap 209). Language is not just the words a person chooses to speak. Language is much deeper. Language ties many different generations together and that is how people can share history. Unfortunately, “the profile of Indian language fluency among the adult members of a tribal community rarely predicts how familiar with the language the younger members of the tribe will be” (Vizenor 218). This is because the boarding schools would take away those languages and teach them to only speak English. “Indian children educated in those schools were forcibly removed from their reservations and systematically stripped of their language, their culture, and their heritage. They served lengthy internments during which they were subjected to harsh and humiliating discipline” (Burich 1). The language they spoke is what ties these children to their families. They were no longer able to speak to their family members from previous generations. American Indian culture focuses on storytelling and being able to tell stories from generation to generation. The boarding schools did not allow the children to continue their language and therefore they couldn’t share storytelling with their culture. These young,

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