Final answer:
Missionaries taught Native Americans European languages, Christianity, domestic skills, farming, and industrial labor. While they provided education and bridges between societies, they also enforced cultural assimilation, damaging Native culture and traditions. Despite some benefits such as health care provision, the focus was on conversion and often had harmful effects.
Step-by-step explanation:
Missionaries have played a significant role in the history of interactions between European settlers and Native Americans. Tasked with the spread of Christianity and European culture, they established churches and schools where they taught the Native Americans the language of the conquering nation, European-style agriculture, industrial labor, and domestic skills. At boarding schools like the Carlisle Indian School, Native American children were stripped of their culture and forced to adopt Euro-American social and cultural practices.
Skills taught to Native American men often involved manual labor, such as farming and other forms of industrial work, while women learned domestic skills, both of which led to low-paying jobs. Notably, Catholic missionaries like Dominican friar Bartolome de las Casas sought to understand and defend Native Americans while providing education and attempting to bridge the gap between European and Native American societies.
Missionaries also had a hand in assimilating Native Americans through various means, including outright demands for cultural change and leveraging legal systems to coerce children into boarding schools. These procedures had long-lasting detrimental effects on Native cultures and exacerbated the losses of traditional languages, religions, and social customs.
Especially with boarding schools, Native children faced a complete overhaul of their identities, including name changes, new clothing, and the abandonment of their tribes' languages and social norms.
While some missionary activities, such as building hospitals, may have had beneficial impacts, the overall effect of missionary work on native populations was often harmful. Practices foreign to European sensibilities, such as polygamy or ancestor veneration, were met with shock and rejection, leading to divisive and damaging consequences in Native societies.
Thus, while missionaries arguably provided some elements of education and health care, their efforts mainly focused on cultural and religious conversion and assimilation.