You can't never become like us.

(I wrote this before the tutorial, and shared it at tutorial meeting.. but forgot to post it..sorry for late posting...)



The film begins with a graduate giving a speech at the graduation of Sherman school. She said “ be proud of who you are, and proud of yourself as native American.” However, I wanted to ask the student, “are you really native American?” I know it sounds mean, but it is important to question the students at Sherman school saying that they are Native American.
The purpose of Sherman school, when it was established, was to enable Indian to meet requirement of the modern progress and to appreciate and secure for himself. In addition, it was American’s duty given by god to take care of others. The way which Sherman chose to achieve these goals was educating the native Indian children in a military-discipline. Also, students were not allowed to practice their culture at Sherman. This clearly shows that Sherman, the educational place, became an educational regime which disciplinary was carried out as an efficient way to impose power on to the students. Student were gradually losing their identity was being transformed by the power imposed at Sherman.
Also, students weren’t allowed to go back to home for many years. This made students from alienating themselves from their culture, and live in a new way which was educated, specifically imposed. They no longer practiced their culture. They were losing their culture. Even though Sherman began to bring the cultural aspects of Indians, the culture was brought to students, when the Indian students were already living without their culture. The culture was imposed by the power.
Now student are learning their culture by learning their literature and dancing. They would learn some aspects of Indian culture, but I don’t think that is enough to say you are culturally American. Also, they were allowed to learn their cultural things when the school allowed them to do so. I think, here, the culture was imposed on students when they were getting assimilated into White American culture. It seemed to me that the white American wanted to remind the Indians of that “you can try to be like us, but remember, you are still Indian. We can’t never be same.”