!!!♥♥♥ ~~~ESSAY IN PROGRESS~~~ ♥♥♥!!!

[amy]

Okay this is going to be coming in chunks. If you review any of it (Constructive Criticism - like, "You're not proving your thesis - I suggest you move x here and add some bs about x here" - no like "this sucks") I'll love you forever. any suggestions treasured, or if you notice something that's just not done in papers, etc etc. PM for free tea even if I already sent you some, I have additional flavors. I ship outside of the US. if you want money, sure but I'm not converting to your currency. if you can write my last paragraph on the indian new deal and how they actually ended (it's pretty fucking messy) i'll give you like something really good but don't cause it's CHEATING. THANK YOU.

My paper's about the end of Indian government boarding schools in the United States. The theme is "Taking a Stand."

INTRO PARAGRAPH

(I'm trying to start large narrow down. :\ not working much??)

Native American history in the United States, post-1492, is marked above all else by injustice and genocide, both of peoples and of cultures. Christopher Columbus, one of the first Anglo-Americans to set foot in the Americas, began this tradition by shipping many of the indigenous people he encountered across the Atlantic into European slavery. He was followed by a string of brutal oppressors, from the infamous Cortez to many US generals, up to William Tecumseh Sherman of the Civil War. In some regions, anti-native sentiment continues today. However, after the US’ goal of “Manifest Destiny” was accomplished, the American Indian policy of genocide fell out of favor and was replaced by the ideal of complete assimilation, a humanitarian idea compared to Sherman's policy of "extermination" but one that still entailed a nationwide cultural genocide. One crucial factor in this genocide were the government-run, off-reservation American Indian boarding schools, which took children as young as five and six years old away from their families and tried to fully indoctrinate them with white culture, "killing the Indian and saving the man (1)" -- however, almost never did native children leave these schools fully prepared to succeed in "civilized" society. One of the most significant stands taken in US Native American history was the push to end the many problems and injustices caused by off-reservation boarding schools. This was accomplished in two parts: first, by the publication of the Meriam Report, or “The Problem of Indian Administration”, in 1928 which exposed these problems, and secondly by the activists who pushed for the application of its suggestions.

(thesis underlined)

Issues:

- I don't know whether to do the background in the intro or 1st body paragraph. In the intro I feel like I'm just ranting with no sources (I HAVE SOURCES) but I don't want to state my thesis without it.

[amy]

more stuff just to have it on the computer

The history of US Native American education policy is inexorably tied to the history of US policy towards Native Americans as a whole. It is impossible to understand the importance of the Meriam Report and the termination of United States government boarding schools without understanding the history of boarding schools, and the reason for their creation. The first boarding schools were created after the Trail of Tears for the purpose of Native Americans and seamlessly assimilating them into white society. As Richard C. Pratt, a founder of the Carlisle Indian School said, the goal was to “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man (1).” Or, as the 1898 Report of the Superintendent of Indian Schools said, “In our efforts to humanize, christianize, and educate the Indian we should endeavor to divorce him from his primitive habits and customs. . .We want the power of the Latin expressed. . .as well as the intellectuality of the Saxon. . .we must recreate him, make him a new personality (2).” This was a rather liberal idea at the time, compared to those of his contemporaries such as William “Tecumseh” Sherman

Biblography

Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59. Reprinted in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian” 1880–1900 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–271.

[amy]

k I just got an extension on my paper (due Monday) so if you don't reply i won't hate you forever xD

[Gundampilotspaz]

Amy, I jut woke up from my nap. I'll read it later, ok? ^^;;

[Mithrandir]

Hmm... that's a very well written paper you have there. Your writting is well focused, gramatically correct, and doesn't ramble.

Where you place the background really depends on the kind of essay you're writting. Are you organizing the essay chronologically (discussing what happened in one time period, then in the next) or like by concepts?

I don't know how your school teaches these things, but the last sentence of your intro isn't technically part of your thesis.

[darkon]

Mith: My teachers have all given me mixed places where to put my thesis. Most have said last sentence of first paragraph. Others have said first sentence. Others have said anywhere, just underline it.

Amy: What you've written so far is very good. It bears similarity to a lot of my papers (I always get great grades on my papers), especially in the flow of the writing. You don't say "He was President. A President runs the United States. The United States is a country." sort of things. You use other methods to increase the length of your paper (always good methods to know in writing research papers). As for placing the background, I always support short, concise first paragraphs that get across the purpose. And then a background to your purpose. But both really do work equally well, but some teachers are anti-first paragraphs longer than 4 lines, so in some cases it is good to at least know how to make a short first paragraph.

And hopefully I'll get back to you on Sunday with more help, I'll be down and out Friday and Saturday.

[amy]

well i've only written the introduction paragraph >>;

Hopefully I'll wake up in a few hours and write more.

:\ I dunno, I feel like I'm generalizing WAY too much when I'm like "FROM CORTEZ TO SHERMAN!" because a) I lack sourcezorz and b) of course everyone didn't go genociding for fun. BUT on the other hand there was no significant stand taken by non-natives to protect their rights, so :\;;.

Mith, in my classes generally thesis is at the end of intro paragraph, and intro flows into thesis. I think I was trying to get too much flow and background at the same time which led to the awkwardness in introduction.

xD Sorry if these problems are unfixable, it's just really helpful for me to write this, I'll probably think of a solution in a dream or something. Thanks guys!! ^^ I'll make sure not to get up at 5 AM again like last time i tried sleep revolution.

[amy]

Okay here's some more

(omfg i am bad at papers, especially the part where you DO THEM)

As always, critiques welcome :3

The history of US Native American education policy is inexorably tied to the history of US policy towards Native Americans as a whole. It is impossible to understand the importance of the Meriam Report and the termination of United States government boarding schools without understanding the history of boarding schools, and the reason for their creation. The first boarding schools were created for the purpose of Native Americans and seamlessly assimilating them into white society. The first was the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, founded 1879. As Richard C. Pratt, one of its founders testified, the goal was to “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man (1).” Or, as the 1898 Report of the Superintendent of Indian Schools said, “In our efforts to humanize, christianize, and educate the Indian we should endeavor to divorce him from his primitive habits and customs. . .We want the power of the Latin expressed. . .as well as the intellectuality of the Saxon. . .we must recreate him, make him a new personality (Pratt).” However, the idea that Native Americans could become functioning members of society was relatively liberal, compared to those of many contemporaries who still believed the best policy was, as Sherman said, “extermination (DiLorenzo).” These quotations clearly express two ideas fundamental to pre-1928 Native American education: a) that Native American peoples and cultures are fundamentally inferior to their Anglo-American counterparts, and b) that despite this inferiority, with harsh practices designed for “recreation” and total separation from their native culture, Native Americans could assimilate completely into white society. When applied to a real-world scenario, these ideas created the harsh system of government boarding schools, which held many injustices and ineffective practices endemic. When Secretary of Interior Hubert Work commissioned a report on the state of Native American affairs in the mid-1920s, these injustices were exposed and detailed in the requested “Meriam Report” for the first time to the general government and public. The publication of the Meriam Report was a great step towards towards increasing effective education and cultural tolerance for Native Americans.

(AGAIN THE VERBOSITY. GAH *IMPALES*)

[amy]

Okay, I redid the first body paragraph and sort of wrote another one although it's like morphing into other ones etc etc. And then one paragraph was three pages long so I made it two :\

Again, I <3 critiques/criticism, even if you only read part :D

The history of US Native American education policy is inexorably tied to the history of US policy towards Native Americans as a whole. It is impossible to understand the importance of the Meriam Report and the termination of United States government boarding schools without understanding the history of boarding schools, and the reason for their creation. The first boarding schools were created for the purpose of Native Americans and seamlessly assimilating them into white society. The first was the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, founded 1879. As Richard C. Pratt, one of its founders testified, the goal was to “Kill the Indian, and Save the Man (1).” Or, as he wrote in 1898 after becoming the Superintendent of Indian Schools, “In our efforts to humanize, christianize, and educate the Indian we should endeavor to divorce him from his primitive habits and customs. . .We want the power of the Latin expressed. . .as well as the intellectuality of the Saxon. . .we must recreate him, make him a new personality (Pratt).” However, the idea that Native Americans could become functioning members of society was relatively liberal, compared to those of many contemporaries who still believed the best policy was, as Sherman said, “extermination (DiLorenzo).” These quotations clearly express two ideas fundamental to pre-1928 Native American education: a) that Native American peoples and cultures are fundamentally inferior to their Anglo-American counterparts, and b) that despite this inferiority, with harsh practices designed for “recreation” and total separation from their native culture, Native Americans could assimilate completely into white society. Schools were the ideal institutions from whence to attack these cultures: “Vulnerable to change, and least able to resist it. . .children represented the logical targets of a policy designed to erase one culture and replace it with another (Ellis, 3).”

When applied to a real-world scenario, these ideas created the harsh system of government boarding schools, which separated students from their homes from as early as age 6, forbade them to speak their native languages, and were extremely strict about allowing visits home to see family. In one boarding school, one week-long Christmas vacation was allowed, although the school granted it reluctantly, one

administrator noting that parents “are very anxious to have a Christmas vacation. . .though in my judgment it is not advisable (Ellis, 121).” In some cases, the schools were so far away from the reservation that going home for the summer was financially impossible, as in the case of Anna Bender, a Chippewa girl who was sent to the Lincoln Institute in Philadelphia at age six. In her autobiography she writes: “I seldom heard from my parents and was so young when I came away that I did not even remember them . . . My father talked to me kindly and tried to help me recall my early childhood. . .At last he told me I had changed greatly from a loving child to a stranger (Hirschfelder and Singer, 78).” Although not all Native American children attended boarding school, a significant number did, and of the students who attended government schools, the vast majority were boarding. Writes W. Carson Ryan in the Meriam Report: “In 1926, of the 69,892 Indian children reported by the Indian Office as enrolled in some kind of schools in, 27,361, or slightly less than two-fifths, were in government and other boarding schools; and of the 26,659 enrolled in government schools, 22,099, or more than four-fifths, were in boarding schools, about evenly divided between non-reservation and reservation (Meriam).” When Secretary of Interior Hubert Work commissioned a report on the state of Native American affairs in the mid-1920s, the endemic problems of boarding schools, especially off-reservation, were exposed and detailed in the requested report for the first time to the government and the general public. The publication of the Meriam Report was a great step towards increasing effective education and cultural tolerance for Native Americans.

The report, ambitiously and accurately titled “The Problem of Indian Administration” was directed and complied by Lewis Meriam, who delegated each of the major sections – medicine, economic development, the judicial systems – to one of a team of experts in the field. The report’s section on Education was delegated to W. Carson Ryan, a nationally recognized expert on educational surveys and author of several studies of school systems including Saskatchewan, Canada, and the Virgin Islands. Ryan, along with an increasing amount of his contemporaries, had “developed a professional philosophy that committed him to the new concepts of Progressive Education (Szasz, 17.)” The two main tenets of this philosophy which traces its origins to the ideas of John Dewey were a) respect for individual diversity, and b) “the development of critical, socially engaged intelligence, which enables individuals to understand and participate effectively in the affairs of their community in a collaborative effort to achieve a common good (Wiles).” Consequently, in addition to showing dissatisfaction with conditions in undersupplied boarding schools, he expressed disagreement with the premise of boarding schools: that education was best achieved by separating children from their homes and expending the utmost effort to divorce them from their native cultures. In the section regarding non-reservation boarding schools he wrote: “. . .the philosophy underlying the establishment of Indian boarding schools, that the way to "civilize" the Indian is to take Indian children, even very young children, as completely as possible away from their home and family life, is at variance with modern views of education and social work, which regard home and family as essential social institutions from which it is generally undesirable to uproot children (Meriam).”

[Gundampilotspaz]

Amy, it's been like a month.

[amy]

WELL I DON'T SEE YOU CORRECTING IT EITHER

[amy]

I finished, thanks for all your help, losers.

[amy]

o__o Apparently it's 7 pages, wtf, I swear it was 8 when I emailed it to myself before, I guess I'll have to go size 13...

[Suga Babe]

Do you still need help on it...or is it done with? If you do, I can edit it for you.

[amy]

Thanks sug, I handed in the final draft this morning though :D (size 13 worked)

[Suga Babe]

Thanks sug, I handed in the final draft this morning though :D (size 13 worked)

Oh...my bad, guess I'm kinda late then eh. If you ever need an essay edited again, PM and ask me!

haha...size 13...that worked for me, as well, in the past!

[amy]

no problem, when I called you all losers I really meant everyone who was all "I'LL HELP YOU OLOLOL" 2 months ago xD