The Intersection of Karuk Storytelling and Education

Chapter 3: Assimilatory American Education
To understand American education in regards to Indians, one has to first
understand one simple fact: the United States cannot be a country without the
dispossession of indigenous peoples. There are two poles to the spectrum of colonial
practice. The first is an “extractive colony,” in which the foreign, politically dominant
group is smaller than the indigenous group, from whom they extract and exploit labor, or
else extract and exploit the resources of the indigenous group’s land. (Jacobs 2-3 There is
never any thought of the colonial group residing in the place permanently – once they’ve
finished exploiting the land and its people, the colonists will move on. The second is a
“settler colony,” in which the foreign, politically dominant group seeks to establish
permanent colonies. In order to do that, they must extinguish other groups’ permanent
claims to that land. The United States tends almost exclusively towards the latter in terms
of its relations to North America and North America’s indigenous peoples. In order to
firmly establish its claim to North America, the United States must extinguish the
competing indigenous claims. This extinguishing is brutal: in this thesis we will focus
solely on practices of child removal and forced assimilation, but the tactics run the gamut
of acts that the United Nations calls “genocide.” (Norton 36-48) While some masons of
America’s bloody foundations seem to have thrown themselves to their work with an
almost sociopathic disregard for human suffering, most had to tell themselves stories to
make their belligerent Americanism conscionable. One of the primary rationalizing
narratives was that of social Darwinism.
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