| Summary: | In 2021, the horrors of the Anglo-American academies designed to educate the Native American children, plagued by a high degree of mortality and systemic bad treatment, were disclosed to a wide audience. Yet, the horrendous conditions of these schools, their inequities and violence had already been denounced much earlier. Despite their socio-cultural differences, every Native American child, and the people they came from, had to cope with colonization and the hegemony of the Anglo-American society, adamant about imposing its values and system. Disparaged as "savages", Native Americans had to deal with the deceptive alternative of "get civilized or vanish". The education of Native American children was part and parcel of this process. Some Native American kids, who managed to master the semiotic codes of the colonial society, recorded their experiences in autobiographical narratives. This article intends to shed light on these seminal accounts, mainly written from the middle of the 19th century to the beginning of the 20th century. It will show how they described the difficult and often harsh change from their indigenous society and traditional education to Anglo-American academies, which often led them to feel like "strangers" in their own land in spite of how hard they tried to get assimilated.
|
|---|