Respond with a 125-150-word comment. Aim for something more meaningful than “I agree” or “I disagree.”
In the White Man’s Image
In the film ‘In the White Man’s Image‘, the film talks about boarding schools that many Native American children were forced to go to, to become what the Americans believed to be ‘civilized’. While they may have believed that these savages were gaining so called ‘freedoms’–which was, in actuality young people being stripped from their culture–the reality of the situation was that they quite possibly became just another form of slaves which was them losing any freedoms they had. At the end of the section we were supposed to watch and analyze, the film illustrates and goes into detail about how many students would live with white families, and with their boarding school education became household servants.
Regardless if the Native Americans were to become as civilized as their white counterparts, it most likely wouldn’t have worked to gain any respect nor dignity from people that demanded they change. This is proven again by the end of the section of the film where the Native American students were forced to do manual labor by the people who were supposedly trying to take care of them. It’s debatable to say that this could be an attempt at freedom since these children did attempt to be seen in the publics eyes, as citizens as as worthy of respect as anyone else. Unfortunately due to the superiority that a multitude of Americans felt over the ‘savages’ it’s safe to say that this probably never would have happened.
Unless the multitudes of American business owners, managers, and political leaders quickly changed their opinions about the oppressed peoples, the boarding schools hope for making the ‘savages’ contributing members of society were more or less fantasy for the time.
