John Sayles Talk and Book Signing

Doors open at 6pm with the lecture starting at 6:30.

Free for CCHS Members / Non-Members $10 Get your Ticket Here

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In the vein of Never Let Me Go and Killers of the Flower Moon, one of America’s greatest storytellers sheds light on an American tragedy: the Wounded Knee Massacre, and the ‘cultural genocide’ experienced by the Native American children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School . . . In September of 1890, the academic year begins at the Carlisle school, a co- educational military-style boarding school in Pennsylvania for Indians founded and run by Captain Richard Henry Pratt, who considers himself a champion of the country’s rapidly dwindling Native population. His motto, “To save the man, we must kill the Indian,” is enforced in both classroom and dormitory: speak only English, forget your own language and customs, learn to be white.

As the students navigate survival, they begin to hear rumors of the “ghost dance” moving its way through their home reservations on the Plains—tribal people dancing and chanting and reporting visions, all in the desperate belief that their efforts will cause the Creator to return the buffalo to the Plains, raise the Indian dead, and destroy all the white people with fire or flood. The yellow press hype the story with exaggeration and falsehood, spreading panic among local whites and forcing the deployment of federal troops onto Lakota land, a situation almost certain to end in slaughter.

When news reaches Carlisle that legendary medicine man Sitting Bull has been killed by native police working for the government that holds them as “wards of the state,” each student, no matter what their tribe, must make a choice: to follow the white man’s path, or to be true to a way of life that may hold no future . . .