A Sinister Priest Tries Concealing A Boarding School Massacre
Older Than America
By PHYL VAN AMMERS
Boryanabooks Film Critic
The Echo Park Film Center showed supernatural thriller Older than America, which should be seen for its portrayal of brutality purportedly suffered by Fond du Lac Indian children in Minnesota in the 1900s.
The plot rests on a plot by a sinister Catholic priest to conceal the deaths of children in a boarding school for Indians during in an earthquake in 1955. There is no record on Internet of an earthquake in the Cloquet area of any significant magnitude.
A rebellious child – Irene — sees a secret burial in the forest and insists on telling what she saw when she is a young mother. The evil priest wants to protect the Church from accusations of child abuse and rape, so he convinces the woman’s sister Apple to authorize electric shock therapy and heavy medication. Irene remains institutionalized for most of the rest of her life.
Irene’s daughter has disturbing visions of what happened to her mother Her aunt also institutionalizes the younger woman but her ghost uncle helps her escape and she returns to the older ways, “older than America.”
American Indian Movement co-founder Dennis Banks acts in the film as a tribal leader. He is the most convincing actor in the film, playing his role with simplicity, gentleness and humor.
Between 1880 and 1902, the United States government took from 20,000 to 30,000 Indian children from their homes to Christianize them forcibly. There was a similar system in Canada, the Canadian Residential System. The teachers in both systems did not allow the children to speak their native tongues. The objective was assimilation: “Kill the Indian and Save the Man.” Many of the schools closed by the 1940s. Some became colleges.
The film hints at what could happen if they returned to the old ways, and the Americans joined them. If only the filmmaker Georgina Lightning could have shown us how we might do this.
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Honey on the road to San Francisco with some of the Spanish explorers
NOTES FROM ABOVE GROUND
By Honey van Blossom
(Honey is a Belgian Marxist former strip-tease artiste)
"Cities of the Golden Gate," Raymond Dabb Yelland, 1893. Most illustrations can be enlarged by clicking on them.
Prologue to the story of the Spanish exploration and settlement of California
Seasonal migrations of animals now extinct in California probably created the roads the native people used before the Spanish land exploration of California. “The heyday of giant mammals in North America was the middle and late Pleistocene, an epoch that started 2.6 million years ago and ended 11,700 years ago, around the time the Earth was thawing out from the Ice Age. The gigantic beasts, which migrated from Asia across a now-vanished land bridge called Beringia, are known as Rancholabrean megafauna, after the famous La Brea tar pits in downtown Los Angeles — the graveyard of thousands of saber-toothed tigers, giant bison and other extinct animals.”[1]
The seasonal migrations of the large mammals may have created the substantial roads used by the indigenous people after their arrival.[2]
Paul S. Martin and Richard G. Klein argue that Paleoindian over-hunting led to the extinction of the megafauna.[3] Others argue that climate change was responsible for mammoth and mastodon extinctions. As the last major glaciation ended around 12,000 years ago, climate warmed too quickly for the megafauna to adapt.
