If you were paying close attention even in the most progressive of U.S. public schools, odds are you were never made aware of the full extent to which Native Americans have been maligned by their Euro-Christian counterparts. Sure, you know it’s a bad history, a dark history, but that was centuries ago, right? A sobering wake-up call could be found in Steven R. Heape and Chip Richie’s Our Spirits Don’t Speak English: Indian Boarding Schools.

The film is a straightforward educational documentary complete with interviews, photos, re-enactments and the readings of historical texts. It tells the tale of government and church financed boarding schools whose goal was to reform Native Americans, to make them more like their white neighbors. The facts are harrowing. In short, children were taken from their homes into the schools where their hair was cut, they were forced to speak english, and slowly the destruction of a culture set in for generations to come. If this is a topic that interests you you should absolutely check out the film. There isn’t the space here to get too deep into the facts. Read on…