Coast Salish Synthesis

The Coast Salish people have been faced with racism and oppression for centuries. Children of the late twentieth century were facing the same issues that their grandparents in the nineteenth century had dealt with. Land claims, treaties, and fishing rights are just a few problems that were arising as American and Canadian people in the Pacific Northwest advanced. However, possibly the most important issue to come was education. America and Canda used education and public schooling as a method of colonialization. Public schools were built in order to integrate Coast Salish children so that their culture and beliefs would be pulled away from that of their fellow natives, and to also be pulled away from their lands. Children who showed any expression or thought of their native culture were punished in order to "modernize" them. Rather than pulling these children away from their culture, however, "the schools created shadowlands personalities in the students, neither fully Indian nor fully white."  These children were being abused and mistreated by both American and Canadian forces. Punishment was conducted if children spoke their native language within the schools. This impedement of the Coast Salish people's freedom was being overlooked. "Both the residential schools and the mainstream public schools constrained and distorted Coast Salish views of land and history. In the 1960s and 1970s, integrated schools could be worse than residential schools for racism and psychological trauma." The children should not have had to deal with this, and the fact that both sides were mistreating this group of people was outraging. In order to fight and resist assmimilation, elders of the tribes would mentor the Coast Salish children in the language and rituals that were otherwise forbidden in the schools. Dancing and other rituals were outlawed by the goverment and were done in secret, away from any kind of government surveilence in order to keep their traditions alive. Sadly and ironically, when the Coast Salish people had had enough of the torment from public and residential schooling, they turned to boarding schools in order to escape the oppressioin and racism and finally be among their own culture.

http://ehis.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=5fa22f2a-4040-4e03-a43c-01da14223a35%40sessionmgr111&vid=2&hid=101