page_title: Sioux
section_title: Boarding schools
hierarchical_section_title: Sioux / History / 1890–1920s: Assimilation era / Boarding schools
context_page_description: The Sioux or Oceti Sakowin are groups of Native American tribes and First Nations peoples in North America. The modern Sioux consist of two major divisions based on language divisions: the Dakota and Lakota; collectively they are known as the Očhéthi Šakówiŋ. The term "Sioux" is an exonym created from a French transcription of the Ojibwe term "Nadouessioux", and can refer to any ethnic group within the Great Sioux Nation or to any of the nation's many language dialects.
  Before the 17th century, the Santee Dakota lived around Lake Superior with territories in present-day northern Minnesota and Wisconsin. They gathered wild rice, hunted woodland animals and used canoes to fish. Wars with the Ojibwe throughout the 1700s pushed the Dakota into southern Minnesota, where the Western Dakota and Teton were residing. In the 1800s, the Dakota signed treaties with the United States, ceding much of their land in Minnesota. Failure of the United States to make treaty payments on time, as well as low food supplies, led to the Dakota War of 1862, which resulted in the Dakota being exiled from Minnesota to numerous reservations in Nebraska, North and South Dakota and Canada.
context_section_description: Besides loss of land, the Dawes Act would also "outlawed Native American culture and established a code of Indian offenses regulating individual behavior according to Euro-American norms of conduct." Any violations of this code were to be "tried in a Court of Indian Offenses on each reservation." Included with the Dawes Act were "funds to instruct Native Americans in Euro-American patterns of thought and behavior through Indian Service schools" which forced many of the tribes into sending their children to boarding schools.
  Boarding schools were intended to "kill the Indian to save the man", which meant the destruction of Dakota and Lakota societies: children were taken away from their families, their traditional culture and kinship roles. They were dressed in Eurocentric clothing, given English names, had their hair cut and were forbidden to speak their languages. Their religions and ceremonies were also outlawed and forbidden. The goal was to teach academic studies in English, vocational skills suited to Euro-American society such as farming inorder to replace traditional lifeways. These schools were overcrowded and had poor sanitary conditions, which led to infectious diseases and students running away or dying while at the schools. The schools achieved mixed outcomes of traumatic experiences for many while others such as Charles Eastman, Ella Cara Deloria, Luther Standing Bear and Zitkala-Sa were able to use the education to their advantage to help their people.
caption: Solen Basketball team, Standing Rock Agency (1947)
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