Boarding schools aimed to extinguish native culture by manufacturing consumer desires

Evidence

Once safely away from tribal influence, the students were not allowed to practice their tribal customs or speak their native languages. They were forced to cut their hair, wear the clothing of white culture (the boys had to wear military uniforms of the very men who had slaughtered their people), taught English, Christian doctrine, and vocational skills. Similar to the African American youth who attended Tuskegee Institute, were also carefully taught individualism, industriousness, and consump - tion as a way of life. As Adams notes, according to one person involved, “We need to awaken in him wants. In his dull savagery he must be touched by the wings of the divine angel of discontent” (Adams, 1995, p. 23). The explicit purpose, as indicated by the title of Adams’ book, was “Education for Extinction,” that is, to extinguish native culture and completely assimilate them into white culture: “Kill the Indian, save the man.” — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1198

Categorization

• XREF: Home Boy’s characters navigating assimilation; but more directly the ‘awaken wants’ line connects to the book’s consumer-culture critique (ch2, ch15). Pairs with Tuskegee’s vocational-consumerist training. — connects to: Segregation’s core harm was discursive inferiorization, not separation itself — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1181; Settler schooling functioned deliberately as deculturalization of native peoples — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1197; Boarding schools severed whole generations from their ceremonial language and songs — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 125 (+5 more)
• BMF: The forced militarized clothing, stripped language, and manufactured ‘wants’ in a colonizer-run school recalls the disciplinary formation of D-503 in Zamyatin’s ‘We,’ where the state remakes persons into uniform, want-manufactured subjects.

Broader Connections

• Settler schooling functioned deliberately as deculturalization of native peoples #corroborates (0.92) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1197
• Boarding schools severed whole generations from their ceremonial language and songs #expands (0.88) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 125
• Boarding school coercion directly caused an entire language’s near extinction #expands (0.80) — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 181
• Colonial education aimed to starve desires, not merely discipline them #qualifies (0.75) — Ann Laura Stoler, Along the Archival Grain_ Epistemic…, 775
• Residential schools functioned as land theft by removing Indigenous children #expands (0.75) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 849
• Mass culture’s technical rationality masks class domination as consumer demand. #complicates (0.72) — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 94
• Colonial administrators used assimilated natives as agents to erode national culture #exemplifies (0.72) — Frantz Fanon, A Dying Colonialism, 244