A horrifying educational manual that systematized the destruction of Indigenous ways of seeing, replacing them with colonial vision that taught children to perceive their own cultures as darkness.

The Colonial Curriculum

Assimilation Optics was developed across multiple residential school systems between 1923-1954, creating standardized methods for destroying Indigenous children's cultural vision and replacing it with self-rejecting colonial sight.

The Five-Stage Process

Stage 1: Sensory Disruption

  • Remove all familiar visual, auditory, tactile references
  • Replace Indigenous clothing, hairstyles, body adornment
  • Create complete environmental alienation
  • "The child must be made strange to themselves"

Stage 2: Language Blindness

  • Punish use of native languages
  • Force English-only comprehension
  • Destroy oral traditions and storytelling
  • "Words create worlds; control the words, control the world"

Stage 3: Cultural Darkness Training

  • Teach children to see their ceremonies as "primitive"
  • Replace traditional knowledge with "civilized" learning
  • Force Christian interpretation of natural world
  • "They must learn to see their own culture as darkness"

Stage 4: Mirror Work

  • Use photographs and mirrors to show "before/after"
  • Reward recognition of "improvement"
  • Punish nostalgia or cultural longing
  • "Success measured by self-rejection"

Stage 5: Missionary Vision

  • Train graduates to return as cultural destroyers
  • Create self-perpetuating system of cultural blindness
  • Reward those who teach others to not-see
  • "The greatest victory: when they do our work for us"

Optical Instruments

The manual detailed specific tools for vision replacement:

The Shame Mirror: Photographs showing "savage" vs. "civilized" appearance

Progress Charts: Visual documentation of cultural erasure

Bible Pictures: Replacement imagery for traditional sacred vision

Punishment Spectacles: Forced viewing of "barbaric" cultural practices

Success Portraits: Images of "properly assimilated" graduates

Assessment Metrics

Progress measured through:

  • Speed of cultural sight rejection
  • Enthusiasm for teaching others to not-see
  • Ability to perform civilized vision convincingly
  • Degree of shame when exposed to traditional practices
  • Willingness to destroy cultural artifacts

The Living Document

Assimilation Optics continues operating wherever education systems:

  • Teach children their cultures are "backward"
  • Replace indigenous knowledge with "universal" truth
  • Reward cultural self-rejection
  • Create shame around traditional ways of seeing
  • Train victims to perpetuate their own oppression

The True Blindness

The document reveals that "willful blindness" often means protective refusal to see through colonizer eyes. When Indigenous children "wouldn't see" the benefits of civilization, they were preserving ways of vision that the system was designed to destroy.

Their "blindness" was actually sight.

Emerged through Shadow examination to expose how education becomes weapon, how "illumination" destroys indigenous sight, how civilization creates the very blindness it claims to cure.