People of the West

Boarding Schools

When a young Paiute boy cuts his hair in anger, his grandmother relives her own trauma as a survivor of the Sherman Indian Boarding School. In flashback, teenage Kaiba and her cousin Wahiti are torn from their families and forced into a system built to erase their culture. Hair is shorn, names are changed, and language forbidden as Richard Pratt’s doctrine—“Kill the Indian, save the man”—takes hold across California. Through Kaiba’s defiance and remembrance, a legacy of survival endures, revealing how assimilation tried—and failed—to silence Native identity.