Sherman Indian School: 100 Years of Mostly Education and Native Pride

In the course of a little less than an hour, I watched a school transform, though I’m uncertain of how the Sherman Indian School did this. Children were forced from their homes and sent to the boarding school to learn how to become domestic servants or farm hands. Students studied vocational skills and labored rather than performing academics. Some individuals (or an individual ) from older generations stated that the most they got out of the program was how to cultivate the land and that they learned a little bit of reading and writing. The students were prohibited to speak their native languages, to dress traditionally, or to practice their own cultures and the school was run with militaristic discipline. Some students didn’t see their families for 12 or 13 years.
That sounds horrible. All of this information is included in this film, yet this picture is not at all what the school seems to be at the time that the film was made. They call it a second home, a family, there’s sports programs, music programs, talents blasts, pow wows and even pageants with girls giving cultural presentations. Students are allowed to do their own dancing. They seem proud of their cultures, and most of all, they’re begging their parents to send them there.
I’m really not sure how to react. This place seems like such a nice place, but my initial reaction is to recoil just because I feel like nuclear family units are important, or at least I feel like they should be important (which was obviously disregarded in the school’s early stages) And now, children want to be sent to the boarding school. Parents are not the ones passing along their cultural traditions. This seems a little scary to me, leaving all of this up to one institution where children of many Indian cultures are coming together-are they now all just one conglomerate of Indian culture? Or are they, by this time, old enough that their parents (who likely also went to this school) have taught them enough of their own specific culture that it is fully engrained in them? Or is this even important?
But the school does look like a family, and I’m happy for that. They talked about trust, about learning applicable history and starting up cultural programs. I think all of that is really awesome, and in that aspect, I couldn’t help but compare it to Soka or even to the islanders from the Pacific Atolls that I learned about this weekend. (They live in such small communities and have very strong cultural practices-dancing, fishing, etc, but their islands are being encroached upon by rising water levels). There just seems to be gaps missing from the process. Was it the students that changed the school? What kind of ulterior motives were involved. Also, I noticed that they mentioned sickness in the video twice-once when someone died and another time when a girl was just sick…what role did that play? Can this school really play the part of standing “for the redemption of a race” with the kind of beginning that it had? And doesn’t it just sound like settling when they tell the students that they can “take the best of both worlds?”