Boarding+Schools

Native American History and Culture  Boarding Schools





The Boarding School experience was, according to one of its harshest and most vocal critics, Zitkala Sa, a"miserable state of cultural dislocation," that created problems long after the children returned home. The boarding school experience not only alienated the children from their families but also from their culture as many of the children were removed to early too remember all but traces of their traditional life styles. [|Boarding Schools] As she relates in "The School Days of an Indian Girl," the missionary school was designed to strip children of their tribal cultures and replace these cultures with knowledge of the dominant one. At first Indians such as her mother thought that the offer of education began "to pay a tardy justice" for the theft of Indian lands and was necessary if their children were to advance in the white world; from the white culture, however, Gertrude Simmons discovered no compensation for her loss of Sioux culture and habits. Left angry and isolated, she was alienated from her family and decided to create her own name: Zitkala-Sa. [|Native American Writers]