The Wyoming-based team behind Home From School: The Children of Carlisle worked together to make a powerful documentary about a tribe coming together. It is the story of Northern Arapaho taking back the stories and remains of children who were wrested away from their families in the late 19th century. Among the many who died at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania were three Northern Arapaho boys. This film captures their descendants’ journey, from Wyoming to Pennsylvania, to help them finally come home—more than 130 years after their passing.
Director Geoff O’Gara has worked on numerous projects about the American West, and his book about the Wind River Reservation, What You See in Clear Water, won a Spur Award for best nonfiction. Producer Sophie Barksdale, originally from Australia but now calls Wyoming home, co-produced the Heartland Emmy-nominated film The State of Equality, about how Wyoming led the way in women’s suffrage. And co-producer Jordan Dresser is no stranger to Independent Lens projects. Dresser was a star and a producer of the film What Was Ours, as well as a journalist, authoring this piece on the stories we can learn when Native American artifacts are reclaimed. Sophie and Jordan are also working together on a new project, Who She Is, their first foray into animation.
Home From School’s filmmaking team all collaborated on this interview for Independent Lens.
What inspired you to make Home From School and tell this story?
Yufna Soldier Wolf of the Northern Arapaho Tribal Historic Preservation Office discussed the long-running effort by her tribe to retrieve remains from a cemetery at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School with Geoff O’Gara in 2017. O’Gara had known the Soldier Wolf family for many years and had worked on a documentary with them about their journey to the Salt Lake City Olympics in 2002. It looked like a long-term project, and perhaps more likely a magazine article than a documentary.
Then the U.S. Army suddenly reversed itself and agreed to disinter three Arapaho boys in the Carlisle cemetery, and return them to Wind River for traditional burial. After consultations with tribal elders and the Northern Arapaho Business Council, [our] team was invited to travel with the Northern Arapaho delegation to Carlisle to retrieve the remains, including access to the ceremonial tent. Research broadened the story to include the history of boarding schools nationwide, and the struggle to repatriate remains and artifacts by American Indian tribes from museums, cemeteries, private collections, and archeological sites.
How did you gain the trust of the people featured in your film?
Geoff O’Gara: When I moved to Wyoming in the 1980s to edit an environmental publication called High County News, I had no idea that the Wind River Reservation would shortly become a community of huge importance to me and my family. Initially, it was the lure of rich stories to a non-Native journalist. In the 1980s, I wrote a book for Knopf about the struggles between Natives and non-Natives over natural resources on Reservation lands.
Some of the people I met as a writer and then as a producer for Wyoming PBS became friends [of mine], among them the Soldier Wolf family—which is why Yufna Soldier Wolf came to me as her tribe pursued the return of Northern Arapaho children’s remains from the Carlisle Indian School cemetery, in faraway Pennsylvania. [Yufna is the great-granddaughter of Chief Sharp Nose; her great uncle is Little Chief, Sharp Nose’s son, who died at Carlisle in 1883.] Once again, here was an important story largely unknown to a non-Native audience and textured with history and cultural collision.
As we began filming, it became clear to me that the story needed to be told by the people who lived it, with no omniscient authorial narrator. With the help of Yufna and talented Arapaho producer Jordan Dresser, we found the voices we needed, and as our team gained their trust, they shared their stories.
There was anxiety among elders about sharing sensitive matters from within the tribe with the outside world. But as the late Crawford White, one of the Northern Arapaho elders who provided the tribe traditional guidance, said, “We need to open up about this. The story needs to be told, for our people. It’s time.”
What were some of the biggest challenges you faced in making this film?
Sophie Barksdale: Securing funding is something that plagues any filmmaker and was certainly a challenge for us. Due to the unexpected agreement of the Army to move forward with the disinterment and return of the remains of the three boys, we began filming before we had any production money in hand. We are proud to say that thanks to Vision Maker Media, our other funding partners, and countless hours of grant writing, Home From School was 100% grant funded, which is pretty amazing given the current independent film funding ecosystem.
Geoff O’Gara: The timing of the global pandemic hit during a pretty critical moment in our film’s post-production, causing all kinds of delays and unplanned costs in its completion. Luckily, we had an incredible team that worked through the many challenges of long-distance editing, technology issues, and media management to finish the film. In the end, we are grateful to have finished the film now, when U.S. Indian boarding schools are getting so much attention in the news, and we can show the film to in-person audiences.
And was it especially challenging to get access for filming in these sensitive locations?
Geoff O’Gara: In 2017, when we went to film the Northern Arapaho delegation retrieving the remains at Carlisle Cemetery, the Army was very against us having cameras and crew inside the ceremonial area. This was a surprise to us, as all of the elders and members of the delegation wanted us there. At one point, the Northern Arapaho delegation smuggled me and our film crew onto the tribal bus, and we hid in the back seat in order to get into the cordoned off area.
Once there, the tribal elders and leaders very much advocated for us to continue filming, which we did. To this day, we are grateful for them pushing so hard for us so we could share their story.
Do you each have a favorite or especially memorable scene or moment from Home From School?
Jordan Dresser: I love the medicine-gathering scene with the youth and tribal elders. The rain, scenery, and characters provide a rich context of tribal people and our ties to the land.
Geoff O’Gara: The final scene from the film, which we call “The Last Ride,” affects me, even now after seeing it hundreds of times. I think how the scene was shot and the music with it is very impactful. I like that there are few words and that there is an opportunity for the film’s story to settle before the close.
Sophie Barksdale: “The Last Ride” has a huge emotional impact on me, but one of my favorite scenes in the film is the medicine gathering sequence up at Togwotee Pass. I love seeing the Northern Arapaho community members of different ages sharing their traditions together. It feels special and intimate, especially in the backdrop of the beautiful environment of Wyoming. Sadly, three of our elders that we worked closely with are no longer with us, so it is wonderful and bittersweet seeing Crawford White, one of these tribal elders, in this scene, full of life and smiling with the group.
What was something meaningful for each of you, that you couldn’t get due to access issues, or had to leave out just in the interest of time?
Jordan Dresser: More access to the military. While we had some access, it was limited, and we didn’t get to expand and explore more of their thoughts and views on Carlisle and us bringing our children home.
Sophie Barksdale: I wish we could have included more about the retrieval of Little Plume in 2018. In the film we dedicate one small scene and in fact this was an incredibly moving moment especially since it closed the circle of bringing all three boys back.
Geoff O’Gara: I really wish we could have included more about the inner workings of how Native Americans are seeking repatriation of ancestors and artifacts, not just at Carlisle and boarding schools, but from archeological digs, collections sold by white traders, even construction sites. We actually had a lot of footage on this but felt it took away from our main story so didn’t include it.
What’s something you’ve been frequently asked about when it comes to Home From School?
Sophie Barksdale: We are constantly asked, “How did the three Arapaho boys die at Carlisle?”
Carlisle Indian Industrial School did keep good records on students, and there are extensive letters, ledgers, enrollment cards, and other primary sources to refer to. Sometimes however, the records are incomplete or unclear.
In the case of our three boys, Little Plume, Horse, and Little Chief, we know from their enrollment cards—and can confirm from letters and articles in the school newspapers—the exact dates of their arrival at the school and the dates of their death.
In a letter addressed to Rev. Roberts of Roberts Mission on the Shoshone Reservation—later renamed Wind River Reservation—in Wyoming, dated 1895, Richard Henry Pratt lists Little Chief (Dickens Nor) dying of pneumonia and Horse (Horace Washington) of a lung hemorrhage, likely brought about by scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. As mentioned in the film, tuberculosis and other European/White diseases were rampant during the time of these boy’s deaths.
Pratt’s letter also indicates that Little Plume (Hayes Vanderbilt Friday) died of “paralysis,” but no other information on this is included. While not always recorded in Carlisle School records, we know from family letters, stories, and other source documents from Carlisle, and of course other boarding schools, that students died from accidents, suicides, and abuses of all kinds. For Little Plume, “paralysis” as a cause of death could mean many things.
Who do you think would benefit the most from seeing your documentary?
Home From School has two main audiences:
- Non-Natives whose history lessons make no mention of the Native American boarding school era, a period after the Indian Wars when hundreds of boarding schools removed children from their families and tribes, to “assimilate” them into the culture and religions of the country their people had recently been at war with. This audience has an interest in acknowledging a more complete, textured, and honest history of the United States, and exploring the roles that both Indians and non-Indians can play in healing the historical wounds of our past.
- Native Americans who have some knowledge of the boarding school era, but who may also have been hindered from getting the full story by the protective silence on the subject of their elders. Their story, and their viewpoint, is often missing from the American story. Many Native Americans talk of “generational trauma” and the hope of healing historical wounds in order to find a better way forward—beginning with truth-telling about the past.
What are your three favorite/most influential documentaries or feature films?
Jordan Dresser: Knock Down the House, Life Is But a Dream, Sleeping Beauty.
Sophie Barksdale: It is so hard to choose! At the moment my favorites are Dying to Tell, The 13th, and For Sama.
Geoff O’Gara: I really love Errol Morris’ The Fog of War and Marcel Ophuls’ The Sorrow and the Pity.
What film/project(s) are you working on next?
Sophie Barksdale and Jordan Dresser: We are co-producing and co-directing an animated short film series on the stories of missing and murdered Indigenous women from the Wind River Reservation. The film series is slated to be completed in 2022.
Geoff O’Gara: I am working on a multimedia film, writing, and mapping project revisiting the Federal Writers Project & Guides, 100 years after they were written.
Any last thoughts?
Jordan Dresser: Bringing back our ancestors is important but difficult. It takes a lot out of the person who carries out this important work mentally, spiritually, and physically. So I commend individuals who do this work everyday.
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