Carlisle schooling targeted the land-language bond connecting Mohawks to place

Evidence

Mohawk language and culture didn’t disappear on their own. Forced assimilation, the government policy to deal with the so-called Indian problem, shipped Mohawk children to the barracks at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where the school’s avowed mission was “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.” Braids were cut off and Native languages forbidden. Girls were trained to cook and clean and wear white gloves on Sunday. The scent of sweetgrass was replaced by the soap smells of the barracks laundry. Boys learned sports and skills useful to a settled village life: carpentry, farming, and how to handle money in their pockets. The government’s goal of breaking the link between land, language, and Native people was nearly a success. But the Mohawk call themselves the Kanienkeha—People of the Flint—and flint does not melt easily into the great American melting pot. — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 934

Categorization

• XREF: Builds the settler-colonial disruption thread running through all four polyad courses; the aroma contrast sweetgrass vs barracks soap enacts the soundscape/observation theme. — connects to: Carlisle Indian School pioneered forced assimilation of 10,000 Indigenous children — , The Rod and the Child: A Global History…, 5146; Settler schooling functioned deliberately as deculturalization of native peoples — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education: Toward Diverse,…, 1197
• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the land/colonialism critique central to the eco-justice pedagogy course and the land-rights legal thread.

Broader Connections

• Settler schooling functioned deliberately as deculturalization of native peoples #corroborates (0.90) — Rebecca A. Martusewicz, Jeff Edmundson, and John Lupinacci, EcoJustice Education, 1197
• Carlisle Indian School pioneered forced assimilation of 10,000 Indigenous children #corroborates (0.85) — , The Rod and the Child, 5146