5:27
It began in the 1830s, when President Andrew Jackson blazed “The Trail of Tears” and deported “the Five Civilized Tribes” (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole) far out west to what eager white politicians called “Indian Territory.” The plan was simple: stick the whole bunch together out there on open land (it wasn’t) to prosper in their own native ways (pipe dream).
The President assumed the solution to the Indian problem Native people were always getting in the way was to jam them together in some woebegone corner where they could do whatever the heck it is that Indians do, for as long as rivers run and all of that empty treaty language.
The Messed Up History Of Native American Boarding Schools
By Marina Manoukian/Feb. 5, 2021 3:15 pm EDT/Updated: March 8, 2021 9:43 am EDT
Although boarding schools for Native American children in the United States still exist, they re a far cry from their original iteration. The first native boarding school was opened in 1879, and for almost 100 years, they became another arena of forced assimilation and genocide.
Parents were coerced and intimidated into allowing their children to attend boarding schools, and if parents continued to refuse, children were often kidnapped. Children were hostages taken to pacify the leadership of tribes that would dare stand against U.S. expansion and Manifest Destiny.