Reverend Lyman Abbott's A Proposal For Indian Education

Manifest destiny has been idealized in America since the budding of the nation, and in the late 1800s it went hand in hand with the American Dream. It was government funded and railroad approved, as both ruling powers promised immigrants and citizens a prosperous life in the West. Americans weren’t apt to allow anything to keep from recognizing their dream, and unfortunately Native American tribes in the West proved to be roadblocks for American settlers. Thus began the dissolution of tribes and the belief that colonization of the Native Americans would be anything but destructive. Though these actions may have been met with relief from American settlers, the implications of cultural immersion and forced education proved to be disadvantageous to Native Americans residing in the West.
With the passing of the Dawes Severalty Act in 1887, Native American lands were divided by the United States government and given in allotments back to the rightful owners. The Reverend Lyman Abbott, the author of A Proposal for Indian Education (1888) described it as “the solution of the land problem” with regards to the obstacles that the government created when concerning itself with Native American reformation. Abbott wrote that the nation planned to “consecrate the entire [Native American] continent to civilization, with no black spot upon it devoted to barbarism.” He firmly believed that if the United States government did

not take away the entirety of the Native American people’s reservations--if even the slightest amount of land was left purely for them--then they would find themselves amongst barbarians. The Reverend Abbott truly considers an uncivilized Native American to be “groups of tramps, beggars, thieves, and sometimes robbers and murderers” and shares that the only hope for them is government intervention. When he proposes this dramatic reform of education, he purposefully paints in the mind of his listeners a definite picture of a Native American before culturization, and one after. A picture of that form would convince like no other, and is akin to the plethora of racist and demeaning articles and pictures that have almost begun a piece of American history. The truth of the matter is that Abbott, and many others, had fallen victim to the belief that it is the Western man’s responsibility to colonize and identify other cultures that may be deemed brutish when compared to that of the white man’s.
Rudyard Kipling famously wrote a poem regarding this circumstance, and labelling it The White Man’s Burden.

In it, he claims that the “white man’s burden” is the responsibility to colonize and civilize less advanced countries. In this case, Kipling urges America to imperialize the Philippines, however the goal still stood true in American citizen’s minds with regards to all races, indigenous or otherwise. These ideals stood out to Americans in this time, and may have pushed many of them to further support reformation and colonization of the Native

Americans.
Reformers must have been happy, then, when the Carlisle school was founded in Pennsylvania, boasting as a school for Native American children.