Native American Heritage month kicked off with a pre-release screening of the PBS documentary, “Home from School: The Children of Carlisle” last Thursday, Nov. 4.
The event included the screening in the auditorium of the College of Arts & Sciences and was followed by a Q&A panel with four members of production.
Panel members included co-producer Sophie Barksdale, associate producer Jordan Dresser of the Northern Arapaho tribe, as well as Yufna Soldier Wolf and Juwan Willow, both members of the Northern Arapaho tribe and featured in the film.
The 78-minute-long documentary focuses on the journey of several members of the Northern Arapaho tribe from the Wind River Reservation here in Wyoming to the site of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania.
All in order to return the remains of three Northern Arapaho children to the reservation.
“During this era at Carlisle, Native American children were stripped of their tribal identities and forced into an English-only military-style remedial education,” according to the official press release for the film.
The members of production recognized this was an uncomfortable one, but one they argued needs to be addressed.
Reinette Tendore is the Native American Education Research & Cultural Center Director & Native American Program Advisor and was instrumental in organizing the screening and panel.
“When I first saw Home from School at a private screening, it definitely hit home,” Tendore said. “It’s a very powerful movie, there are almost no words for the emotions.”
The film is indeed highly emotional, but this lends to its importance, according to the film’s co-producer Sophie Barkdale.
“We cried our way through a lot of the research,” Barkdale admitted during the live Q&A. “But this kind of education is the most important. If children don’t know about this history, then they won’t be educated adults.”
The repatriation efforts followed by the documentary were driven largely by Yufna Soldier Wolf, great-granddaughter of Sharp Nose, the last War Chief of the Northern Arapaho.
One of Sharp Nose’s sons, a great uncle to Yufna Soldierwolf, died at Carlisle in 1883.
“Repatriations are about bringing back our rights, as tribes and as people,” Soldier Wolf said during the panel. The importance of repatriation efforts was a core theme of the film and the Q&A.
Associate producer Jordan Dresser has had his hands in many repatriation projects in addition to Carlisle.
“The Chicago Field Museum houses thousands of items, including four skulls,” Dresser said, addressing the difficulty that comes with many repatriation efforts. “A lot of these institutions believe that these remains belong to them, and so the process is long and difficult.”
A similar difficulty is addressed within the film, as the US Army Office of Cemeteries presents many hoops to be leapt through in order to return the remains to the Wind River Reservation.
“It’s hard, you feel sadness in your heart, you feel sickness,” said Juwan Willow, one of the members of the youth delegation that accompanied Soldier Wolf to Carlisle in 2017.
“You want to break down and cry every day that you’re there, but you keep going not only for you, but for one day your kids, or your grandparents who are still here,” Willow recalled about his experience visiting Carlisle. “It’s inspired me to continue to pursue repatriation in its many forms. Not only human remains, but artifacts as well.
“It’s taking back our identity,” Willow said, to the value of repatriation efforts. “It’s reclaiming our story and being able to tell it the way we want to tell it.”
“Home From School” will premiere on PBS’s Independent Lens on Nov. 23 2021 at 7:00 p.m. MST.
