The United States government developed policies and legislations during the second half of the nineteenth century with the aim of expanding the American territory westwards to areas occupied by Native American tribes. One of the legislations used by the federal government to "kill the Indian and save the man" was through educating Native American youths (Americanization through education). The Americans had a general saying that an "An Indian is as good as dead." The government enrolled thousand of Native Americans in boarding schools across the United States. All Native American students were supposed to drop their Indian names, forbidden from speaking their native languages, and denied all cultural practices. Additionally, the Federal Government introduced Training and Industrial schools where Native Americans acquired basic industrial training and knowledge. The education legislative of Native Americans was one of the most brutal methods of civilization (Peterson, ).
Anthropologists argue that culture develops in a uniform and progressive manner. The study of social evolutions aims at tracking the development of culture over time. The anthropological concept social evolution has a lot of relevance to the nineteenth-century social evolutionists. The above education of Native Americans was a good example of social revolution where people were forced to leave their cultures and follow the culture of other communities.
Despite the efforts by the U.S. Federal government to teach Native Americans the American culture, the move did not achieve the expected outcomes. People respond slowly to ideas of theorizing. American policy-makers tried different tricks including taking Indian students to boarding schools and warning them against communicating using any other language apart from English, but the idea never worked. Indians could not use and apply the American citizenship taught in school (History Matters, 2016).
The legislative had a negative consequence in the Indian society. The Indian society ended up losing most of its cultural values. Many children born in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries grew without knowing their culture. The Indian society had to spend more time later to educate the young generation about their cultural values and practices.
References
History Matters. (2016). “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man”: Capt. Richard H. Pratt on the
Education of Native Americans. Retrieved February 25, 2016, from http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/4929/
Peterson, Lindsay, "Kill the Indian, Save the Man," Americanization through Education:
Richard Henry Pratt's Legacy" (2013). Honors Theses. Paper 696. Available at http://digitalcommons.colby.edu/honorstheses/696
