Dispossession

845 Words2 Pages

Displacement and dispossession have been part of United States history since the birth of the nation. After the Native Americans were thought to have souls, they were no longer physically exterminated, but rather culturally exterminated (Smith 37). The land of the natives was taken and they were reduced to small and inadequate reservations. Native Americans were forced to attend boarding schools and were culturally dispossessed, women especially faced challenges because they faced discrimination based on their gender as well as their ethnicity, we continue to see similar dispossession in modern day society. Andrea Smith’s writing about the struggle of Native Americans in the boarding school system and Gloria Anzaldua’s mestiza consciousness demonstrate the dispossession of non-white people in the United States. Allies of the Native Americans advocated to “kill the Indian and save the man (Smith 36).” It was far more cost effective to commit “cultural rather than physical genocide (Smith 37).” Native Americans were denied the right to their culture, children were forced to attend boarding schools that would rid them of their cultural practices and “civilize them.” Native Americans were to be civilized in theses boarding schools and taught American culture, with the supposed goal to assimilate to mainstream society but “because of racism in the U.S., Native Peoples could never really assimilate into the dominant society (Smith 37).” Native Americans were dispossessed from their own culture, one door being closed without the other door ever being opened. Andrea Smith quotes Native American writer K. Tsianina Lomawaima saying “[an] ideological rationale more fully accounts for domesticity training: it was training in dispossession u... ... middle of paper ... ...tted. Native Americans were treated like soulless animals. Native children in schools had their face rubbed in their own excrements (Smith 39) the same way we rub a puppy’s face in his own urine when we are house breaking him. Once it was apparent that it was more cost effective to educate and butcher the Native’s culture instead of killing them, the boarding school system was swiftly implemented. People of color continue to deal with the butchering of their culture; Native Americans have social issues present in their communities that are the legacies of the dispossession they suffered long and not so long ago. Other people of color today in the U.S. also continue to suffer from racist and discriminatory practices, Spanish speaking immigrants are just one example of a similar dispossession caused by the state intervening in the passing down of language and culture.

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