Randy Vasquez, at the camera, and associate capture images of Jane Ridgway, Walter Littlemoon, Hoody and Barkly on the Pine Ridge Reservation for “The Thick Dark Fog,” showing at Rapid City’s Elks Theatre, located at 512 6th St., on Sept. 24. Tickets are $5 at the door. PHOTO COURTESY/RANDY VASQUEZ
Boarding school film is healing journey
Pine Ridge man’s traumatic struggle chronicled
By Talli Nauman
Native Sun News
Health & Environment Editor RAPID CITY — The award-winning documentary feature film “The Thick Dark Fog” is not intended to be entertaining. “We hope this honest look at a rather dark episode of American history will help Native and non-Native people alike understand each other better and heal,” director Randy Vasquez said in his successful effort to raise $15,000 on the Internet for the film’s completion. The winner of the Best Documentary award at the 2011 American Indian Film Festival and the People’s Choice Award at the 2012 Black Hills Film Festival, the movie, which aired on PBS in June, is showing at the Elks Theatre in Rapid City at 7 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 24. Its protagonists, Wounded Knee residents Walter Littlemoon and his wife, Jane Ridgway, will lead a discussion about the American Indian boarding school experience following the screening. A “thick dark fog” is how Littlemoon described feelings he had for many years before Ridgway helped him cut through a morass of mixed-up emotions he now attributes to his boarding school days on the Pine Ridge Reservation. “I was 56 years old when we started this and now I’m almost 70 years old, and everything was blocked by fear because of boarding school,” Littlemoon told Native Sun News. The root of the trouble, he said, turned out to be the military philosophy that guided the administration of the federally-run Oglala Community High School in Pine Ridge, which he was forced to attend from ages five to 11. It was: “Kill the Indian; save the man.” His thoughts and feelings began to come unblocked when Harvard Medical School professor of clinical psychology Judith Herman, author of “Trauma and Recovery,” gave Littlemoon a name for the condition he suffered: complex post-traumatic stress disorder (CPTSD). The concept expands the diagnostic category of post-traumatic stress disorder from what the federal Veterans Administration describes as the symptoms of a short-lived trauma to include “the syndrome that follows upon prolonged, repeated trauma.” As Littlemoon understands it, “What happened in boarding school has made your everyday life so complicated you don’t even know where to start. “A lot goes back to before reservations were established, to massacres, to rounding up people, to marching them to Oklahoma and escaping,” he adds. “How many massacres had to take place? It’s very hard.” Back in 1981 when Ridgway sought Herman’s advice for Littlemoon, there was “not much talk about it” when it came to Indian boarding schools, Ridgway noted. She and Littlemoon started to create his memoirs for his children, the way his grandmother, a survivor of three massacres and a forced march, had done for her descendants. “A lot of those experiences we still live with today,” Little Moon said. “We are what those memories were.” He recounts that in his case, “I realized I was estranged from my own children who were all grown up and all left home. Jane and I were talking about trying to bridge that gap, so we decided to write down our memories. “I didn’t realize this would open up a whole door I wasn’t even aware of,” he said. “When we got to boarding school, my mind just shut down. When things got painful, I would change the subject. She recognized it and tried to keep a train of thought going.” For her part, Ridgeway’s background in health care and her personal relationships while living in the greater New York City area had brought her into close contact with Nazi Holocaust survivors of World War II and their second- and third-generation offspring who were undergoing counseling for intergenerational trauma. “I recognized a look on people’s faces,” she said. “That was who I was recognizing in the people out here.” With Littlemoon recollecting and Ridgway scribing, then literally cutting and pasting together the broken pieces of his life story on the living room floor, the result turned out to be the book “They Called Me Uncivilized,” on which the movie is based. “It feels like a story that is telling itself and using us,” Ridgway said. “We didn’t set out to write a book, we set out to write down Walter’s memories for his children.” Then Colorado State University Anthropology Department Chair Kathy Sherman encouraged the couple to publish it. It just so happened that, while the memoirs were underway, independent Los Angeles filmmaker Randy Vasquez also consulted Herman with questions about a Canadian First Nations member who had committed suicide after her boarding school experience. Herman directed him to Littlemoon, who later agreed to make the movie about his experience. They started making the movie in about 2003, and for the next seven years they plugged away at filming on the reservation. Meanwhile, Littlemoon and Ridgeway were being called to lecture on the university circuit. Now they say they are glad they have a documentary to show, so they don’t have to repeat messages and can use it as a point of departure for new discussions. Ridgway said the movie gives the couple a vehicle to assist others who yearn to cut through the fog. “We’re learning it is true that there are universal aspects of this story,” she said. “Most of it is let’s start understanding each other a little bit more and stop blaming each other.” Among those who have expressed gratitude for the film, she cited not only Jews with Holocaust memories, but also a survivor of a U.S. WWII concentration camp for Japanese and the offspring of a British elite prep school graduate. “Sometimes it’s easer to recognize our own problems as we see them in other people first,” Ridgway said. Anyone who has been institutionalized in childhood can relate similar stories, she said. “But the difference for Native Americans, and the hard thing for me to grapple with — because my family has been here for 400 years and I’m very patriotic — was when I realized this was cultural genocide, to take away from children the very essence of who they are and create intense shame in them about that,” she said. “It is a worse crime than physical genocide because they have to live this for the rest of their life.” The film also is scheduled to show at the Reel Civil Rights Film Festival in Little Rock, Ark., on Sept. 23, the Mexican Film Festival of the Americas in Chicago on Sept. 26, the San Diego Film Festival on Sept. 29, and the Hot Springs Documentary Festival in November. (Contact Talli Nauman at talli.nauman@gmail.com)
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