Research Essay Draft

Musa Sisoko

Literacy In American Society

Ewa Barnes

4/5/2022

The purpose of this essay is to understand and analyze how Native Americans have been affected by the institutionalization of literacy in the United States. I conducted my research by going to the BMCC database and researching an article in CQ researcher. How were Native Americans affected by the institutionalization of literacy in the United States? The Native Americans struggled a lot when it came to education in the United States. Native Americans didn’t have a fair shot in the school systems and they were racial discriminated against and were also belittled. Native Americans deserve to have equal rights and not be mistreated by others.

Native Americans have fought for equality for the past 19 centuries. White European settlers took the Native Americans land and forced them to move from their lands that they owned and move to the western territories that belonged to the Europeans. They were also forced to attend boarding schools and abandon their own languages to learn English and adapt to the European costumes by the U.S government in 1891. According to “Native American Rights” by Christiana L. Lyons, it states: “U.S. government begins to force Native American children to attend boarding schools to learn English language and European customs”. This was crucial for the Native Americans because they were not only forced to attend boarding schools, but also abandon their own language out of their own will to learn English. They also had been forced to adapt to costumes outside of their own culture and learn about the Europeans customs and their way of living.

Native Americans having to give up their language had a very bad effect on them. This policy was in the 1870’s and continued on a very large scale through the 1970s (Klug). Native children were treated very poorly and suffered  a lot in these institutions for using their own language. They would get punished severely, physically and psychologically for speaking to each other in their own language rather than speaking English. In an article “Native American Language Act: Twenty Years Later, Has It Made a Difference” by Kelsey Klug, it says: “This policy began in the 1870s and continued on a large scale through the 1970s; a few schools are still operating today. In these institutions, children were severely punished, both physically and psychologically, for using their own languages instead of English. These experiences convinced entire generations of Native people that their children would be better off learning to speak only English. Hoping to spare their children the pain they once went through, parents stopped passing their languages on to their children, and thereby stopped creating fluent speakers of those languages”. Native Americans who had suffered from these institutions were convinced that their children would be better off learning English instead of passing down their languages due to not wanting their children to go through the same pain and torture as they experienced. Because their language wasn’t passed down to the next generation of Native people, there were not many of them who could speak their languages fluently.