Film series: 19th-century boarding schools used to assimilate Native Americans

The Native Film Series, which took place Sunday at the Buskirk-Chumley Theater, highlighted incidents occurring in Native American boarding schools from the late 1800s to the 1960s.

“We showed a series of films and had a guest speaker, director Randy Vasquez,” said Rebecca Riall, co-organizer of the event. Vasquez’s upcoming movie, “Something’s Moving,” illustrates the boarding school controversy and will be released sometime next year.

“The film talks about why these boarding schools are now just coming to light ... and what it means for the Indian population as a whole,” Riall said.

A question-and-answer session following the film addressed how Native Americans’ cultural identity stood intact despite pressures to assimilate.

“I think Indian people knew about this for a long time ... but people didn’t really talk about what was going on in these boarding schools,” Riall said.

Boarding schools were used by the government to Christianize Native Americans, said Del Criscenzo, a co-organizer of the event and a member of the American Indian Student Association and the Native American Community Center of Bloomington.

“They would not have contact with their parents, forbidden to speak their language, to practice their cultural and spiritual beliefs,” Criscenzo said. “They were taught to speak English, their hair was cut and they were given European style clothing to wear.”

But experiences in contemporary boarding schools are different from those of decades ago.

Sophomore John Savariar attended the Indiana Academy for Science Mathematics and Humanities in Muncie for the last two years of his high school career.

“It was one of those high schools for the gifted and talented,” Savariar said.

About 150 juniors and 150 seniors were admitted to the school, but only 110 students made it through graduation.

“The tradeoff is between the better education that you receive versus the standard high school experiences,” Savariar said. He explained his mother pushed him to go and take advantage of the progressive educational opportunities.

“Girls were on floors two and three and boys were on one and four,” Savariar said. “It was very much a community atmosphere.”

He believes his pre-college boarding school experiences both helped and hurt him before he came to IU.

“I was so used to the boarding school environment, it was somewhat awkward to transition into main-stream experiences and large place like Indiana University,” Savariar said.