Sherman Indian School

An interesting thing about this film is that it shows how the Indian school changed throughout the years, and how students from different generations perceived this change. At first they mention how the institute was founded for the “Glory of God.” In other words, it was a form of saying that those who go there were to be Christian. They also mentioned the same thing that we already learnt from the last papers that we read: students were prohibited from preaching anything related to their Indian culture, they could not even speak their own language. They were also emerged in a militaristic kind of discipline. Students were trained how to cultivate and do other kind of vocational trains, so there was very little about academics. This is how the school was in the early days. Graduates from the first classes said that at first they were forced to go to that school, and they couldn’t go back to their homes for many years.
However, the situation changed in the 40’s and 50’s. Students were not force to go to the school but they went on their own will. Many of the interviewees who went to school during those years said that they enjoyed going to school and having a new life there, new friends, etc. Most of them talk about the benefits of studying, and some of them even became staff of the school. Moreover, at that time the school started becoming more open to students for expressing different cultural aspects of their cultures, for instance, they would perform their native dances. Finally, nowadays their performances reflect both things from their native cultures and from American culture.
I think that this change was systematic. The school was not open to let Indians express themselves in their own culture because that would mean the risk to let the native Indians preserve their culture despite the fact they were in the boarding school. However, in the 40’s or 50’s there were already 4 or 5 decades of repression, and this is talking about many generations –let’s remember that many of the following students were children of past students. I think that by then, the American culture was already assimilated enough by the Indians, so they wouldn’t try to leave it but, on the contrary, try to be more part of it. Therefore, it doesn’t matter if they are allowed to perform their own native cultural practices or dances, because they would practice it as part of their history, of a form of identity that might be part of them, but not really them. They were in the process of believing that looking up to the white man was what they should do. And it seems that the method worked, because in the images of recent years we see how they perform things that belong to American culture.