Throughout the film, “Indian School: Stories of Survival,” they confronted and discussed
the policy that allowed Indian children to be taken from their village and home, where they
endured cruel abusive behavior. The Indian School survivors rekindle the emotions of being
taken away from their families to boarding schools because their parents were forced to send
their children off to Indian boarding school where they “kill the Indian, save the human,” which
caused traditional family values to be broken. Several generations attended Mt. Pleasant
Boarding School, they weren’t taught to be parents but to merely be domestics, bakers, farmers,
and servants, this caused a lasting impact on many generations due to them not living in a home
environment.
The film goes into detail about each boarding school which wasn’t all governmentally
operated, most were religious white operated ones, the school's mission was to make Indian
culture practices and beliefs “non-existent” and how these schools used brutality and abuse to do
so. The knowledge of what the Native Americans had to endure at such a young age dispenses an
understanding of how their cultural was largely impacted and their downfall changed, it informs
how these events formed into what it has now in present day Native American lifestyle. They
were trained for low level jobs and to not question authority, they worked all day, sharing a
dormitory, and beatings. The Native students were constantly criticized and one of the Indian
school survivors' recalls being slapped for questioning Columbus’ discovery of America.
The government forced Native Americans from their culture, ancestral lands, and
restricted them to reservations, most people today don’t know that the American government
attempted to unify the growing country by attempting to assimilate Native American adults
would be no benefit. This forced teaching of Native American children to speak English, to dress
and wear their hair like the ideal “American” and to think like one, this strike lack of self-
