Personifying Power

I wish this film did not make me uncomfortable and instigate a acrid unease. I felt as though I was watching the scene from Anastasia when Rasputin (the vengeful sorcerer) waves his lantern and his minions charge and the characters’ eyes glaze over; the awareness of my haughty arrogance here, frustrates me. I do not want to see it differently than those interviewed in the film…I do not want to position myself as the Other, privileged and aware of the insidious forces that discipline and punish and make it look like fun and feel like family. But this is what I saw from the film—what Foucault identities as discursive sources of power so deeply penetrating and ingrained, that it is able to whitewash and render invisible oppression and rename it “free-will.”

It was very difficult for me to catch the nuances of the filmmaker’s voice within the documentary…was this film a critique of the Sherman Indian School, or a testament to a changed institution? Or was it a demonstration of what power looks like?

Ostensibly, the Sherman Indian School of today is not the same Sherman Indian School of yesterday. Before the students were forcibly rounded up, suffered homesickness, ran away, and then found ways of adjusting, a process after which they eventually were able to find a home at the Sherman school. Today, as the film showed, the students love the school: “Sherman has become a second home, a second family. That is why it’s so hard to leave and why so many come back to visit, to work and send their own children.” What are we seeing here?

As with the example of the Theodore Roosevelt School, here we can see the ways the school inhabits and adjusts to the changing spaces surrounding it. Power is an adept force. As the face of public opinion altered—the support for overt public displays of assimilatory/oppressive educational policies no longer explicitly condoned—the school adapted the way it presented itself in order to survive. The disciplining forces within the Sherman Indian School that attempted to subdue the Indian, still exist; however, they, like a virus, learn to adapt. Today, those forces manifest themselves by disciplining affection.

While this affection the students and community feel for the school is not problematic on its own, it creates the space for an underlying current of oppressive forces—the same forces which drove the forced entry and suppression of “Indianness” within the “old” Sherman Indian School—to impose a commodification and disciplining of their Indian identity, organizing it is such a way that it becomes convenient for those who wish to continue to conceal the relationship of power being reinforced. An Indian identity is safe when its presence is limited to high school mascots, traditional dances, talismans, herbal remedies, crafts—cultural artifacts chalked up when deemed appropriate by those who condition and “care” for the well being of the noble savage.

The cultural education program the contemporary Sherman School touts as integral to the cultivation of the “whole Indian,” sifts through history, selecting what to dignify, what to “remember,” what to teach. The cultural program does not recognize the years of institutionalized marginalization and exploitation the US government and assimilation programs (The Sherman Institute one of the many) used to breakdown and reorganize the Indian peoples so as to control the threat to their power they presented. Instead, students are given the opportunity to participate in musical programs, to present the traditional dances of their native tribes, to run for “Indian Prince and Princess.” Their affection for this disciplined silence, is indicative of the nature of the oppressive powers maintained in the Sherman Indian School.

The recognition of this masochistic affection, impresses and reinforces upon the consciousness of those outside the school, an idea that the Indians are nothing more that their cultural relics, that they are naive, simple, and cute—the documentary instigated an unease within me for it confronted me with my constructed perception of the Indian.