Pedagogies of Dissent on the Reservation: Older Than America and Rhymes for Young Ghouls as Corrections to Colonialist Education

• In Event: Decolonial Pedagogies: From the Reservation to the Street

Abstract

Native American directors continue to produce feature films that revise the received Western tropes that went uncountered for too long in Hollywood history. By engaging in what Michelle Rahejas has called “visual sovereignty” by creating Native-centered films that engage with American history from an indigenous vantage point, these filmmakers use film as a counter-pedagogy that re-centers Native lives in American culture and history.

Georgina Lightning’s 2008 film Older Than America and Jeff Barnaby’s 2013 film Rhymes for Young Ghouls both focus on the submerged history of compulsory residential schooling for Indigenous children in North America through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Both films aims to raise awareness of the residential schools via conventional filmic narratives deployed for distinctly Indigenous purposes. Lightning uses familiar Gothic conventions to educate Native and non-Native audiences about the schools while Barnaby couches his history lesson in terms of a violent revenge narrative. Where the two directors differ, though, is in their respective approaches to healing from the intergenerational trauma of the boarding schools. Lightning focuses on a return to culture and community to facilitate healing while Barnaby is more interested in violent opposition to colonial imposition.

These films, then, rest at the intersection of a number of critical questions. Despite their differing approaches to healing, both films dissent from the education policy of forced residential schooling for Indigenous children but also serve as counter-education. Both films resist the colonialist narrative of assimilation and instead demonstrate how Indigenous people can learn about their own familial, communal, and cultural history. In Older Than America, Lightning shows how the older generation has been silenced by colonial oppression necessitating that Rain, the film’s protagonist, investigate her own family and communal history. What she finds is a suppressed history of violence and forced assimilation at the local residential school. She must learn to mistrust official accounts of history and find her own answers, which she then shares with her community via ceremony. Likewise, in Rhymes for Young Ghouls, Barnaby shows the older generation as either silenced, killed, or incarcerated while young Aila must make her own way through reservation politics and avoid the sadistic Indian Agent.

Author

• Laura Beadling, Youngstown State University