People of the West — Season 1, Episode 6: Boarding Schools
62 min • 1 season, 10 episodes
Episode synopsis
When a young Paiute boy cuts his hair in anger, his grandmother relives her own trauma as a survivor of the Sherman Indian Boarding School. In flashback, teenage Kaiba and her cousin Wahiti are torn from their families and forced into a system built to erase their culture. Hair is shorn, names are changed, and language forbidden as Richard Pratt’s doctrine—“Kill the Indian, save the man”—takes hold across California. Through Kaiba’s defiance and remembrance, a legacy of survival endures, revealing how assimilation tried—and failed—to silence Native identity.
About People of the West
People of the West is a ten-part premium documentary series that reclaims the history of California through Indigenous perspectives. Blending oral histories, tribal archives, expert insight, and cinematic recreations, the series spans from creation stories and pre-contact life through colonization, state-sponsored violence, resistance, and cultural survival. Each episode centers Native voices and lived experience, reframing well-known events—from the mission system and Gold Rush to Alcatraz and modern sovereignty movements—through those who endured them. Visually ambitious and emotionally grounded, the series pairs sweeping landscapes with intimate storytelling to reveal California as it has always been: Native land. Designed to live both on screen and in classrooms, People of the West offers a corrective to dominant narratives while highlighting the resilience, continuity, and contemporary presence of Native nations shaping the state today.