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Where The Spirit Lives Essay Questions

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Where The Spirit Lives Essay Questions
Residential Schools: “Where the Spirit Lives”
1. How did residential schools try to assimilate aboriginal children? Explain at least six practices which promoted assimilation.
• They changed the children’s look by cutting their hair which in some aboriginal culture has spiritual meaning, gave them different clothes to wear, and took away their identity by giving them new Christian names.
• Forced Christianity (When Ashtoh-Komi did the sweet grass ceremony during the beginning of the film one of the professors beat her up because she was performing this ritual which she wasn’t supposed to do because they were trying to make her ‘non-Indian’).
• They had to speak English (Even though Ashtoh-Komi didn’t know English she still had to speak it and …show more content…
The first incident is when Ashtoh-Komi and her brother got separated from their family. I felt really sad and empathic watching that because if someone did that to me and my brother I couldn’t even imagine what I would do without my family. The second incident is when the Indian agent (Mr.Taggart) quit his job after he realized that what he was doing was bad even though it meant losing his money. He came to this conclusion because he realized that the kids would rather risk getting hurt than actually staying at the residential school away from their family. This is shown when Rachel runs away from the school for three days straight to try to catch up with her tribe and later she is found dead. Even when they were saying their death prayers Reverend Buckley didn’t even use her real name even after her death, which is a big deal since that’s a part of her identity. This made Taggart feel disgusted and uncomfortable in what he was doing so, he quit. This scene was very shocking for me because throughout the movie I thought that Taggart was selfish and didn’t care about the children but, I later figured out that he was torn between doing what he believed was right and doing what the system told him to do. These were my two incidents from the film that had the biggest impact on me.
3. Analyze the attitudes of the following characters towards Aboriginal culture and the policy of
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