Educational Media Reviews Online

This is a documentary of Native Americans still surviving in Michigan who went through what was called Indian School—schools set up across the country in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century to re-educate Native American children and "civilize" the American Indian. These schools used all kinds of physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual abuse to alienate Indian children from their tribes, families, religions, and languages. Various survivors of these schools, especially the Mount Pleasant Indian School in Michigan, tell their stories in this documentary, along with archival materials and footage. Survivors from the Lakota, Tlingit, Choctaw, and Chippewa nations describe their humiliating experiences growing up in these schools, and becoming outcasts both in their own tribes as well as in American society. It is a heart-wrenching tale of psychological abuse used to demean and subjugate a conquered culture through re-education of their children, and another human rights abuse story in the history of the United States of America.