M3 Blog Post - Indian Boarding Schools

I reviewed the video; Culture Clash for Indian Youth (01:38), from "The Geography of Hope: The West," a Film by Stephen Ives.  The video was about Indian youth that went to the Indian boarding schools.  These boarding schools were introduced to “help” the Native American children assimilate into American culture and were taught that their Native American culture was “barbaric”.  We have read about the Indian boarding schools and how the Native American children were not allowed to speak their native language, they could not wear the traditional Native American clothing or their traditional hair styles and had no contact with their family either.  The government made these camps seem as though they were necessary to try and help these Native American children become Americanized and live in the manor that everyone else was living in America.  When you read information on these boarding schools you can only imagine how terrible it must have been for the Indian children and how scared they must have been without their parents or family there, but when you watch the video of actual Native American people that experienced these schools this brought this to a new level for me.  After listening and watching the expressions on these Native American people tell their stories, I have a greater sense of how this experience made them feel and not just facts on the subject. 

After watching this video I believe the perspective that it was meant to convey was how devastating these boarding schools actually were on these Native American children.  There is a male speaker in the beginning of the video and he says along the lines of; even if one was successful at one of the schools, like Carlisle what place did that man have in a society that had not changed.  What kind of shoe do you wear, the Indian Moccasin or the white man shoe. He was basically saying that even though they went to this boarding school they still had no place in society after.  They now did not fit into tribal life as they were stripped of their Indian culture and they still did not fit into American society nor were they accepted.  As I stated above, before I saw a video of people talking about their actual experiences I did not have a concept on how devastating these schools actually were on these children and how it displaced them in society from both their tribe and American’s.  There is a woman that speaks in the video and recalls how she had one of the teachers at the school speak Indian and the teacher took the woman in the bathroom and washed her mouth out with soap.  The woman got blisters in her mouth from the soap and it was physical abuse those poor children received.  This made me realize just how cruel these American’s were to the Indian children and it is disgusting and disgusting how they stripped away the only culture that these children knew and took them away from their parents and tribes.  These children were torn from their lives but they still remained survivors and it is nice to see them able to voice their stories and get the truth out in the open.