As "1923" shows, many Indigenous children in the 19th and 20th centuries were forcibly taken from their families and sent to Catholic boarding schools, where they were forced to sublimate their Indigenous languages and beliefs in order to assimilate into white American society. In addition to being starved and beaten, they were refused the right to speak their native language. If they so much as uttered a word of it, they could be punished anew. Because of this, these school were home to countless cases of abuse and torture.
As a new investigation by the Department of the Interior seeks to prove the tragedy goes even further than what people realize. For example, a smaller investigation in 2010 shows that 227 Indigenous children died in just one Catholic boarding school between 1893 and 1934. Meanwhile, in summer 2021, investigators found mass graves for over 1,500 children from seven boarding schools in Canada. Thus, the impact of these boarding school policies on Indigenous populations has become impossible to calculate. After all, there were more than 350 boarding schools of this kind in the United States.
While "1923" has exposed this dark reality to the viewing public, there's still much to learn about the extent of its horrific elements. Meanwhile, viewers can only grip their seats and wait to see what happens with Teonna and the boarding school she rightfully exacted revenge upon.
