Lois was more of a fan of the television series Yellowstone than I, (she wants a “Don’t Get Beth Dutton-ed” coffee mug), but together, we are keen on the prequels, “1883” and “1923,” the last episode of which dropped on April 6, 2025. We loved the character of Elsa in “1883” and were brokenhearted to watch her die at the end of the series. Season one of “1923” was terrific, but season two has moved too slowly for our tastes. It is still, however, good entertainment. There is one thematic thread, though, that weaves through both seasons of “1923” that is reliably and ruthlessly upsetting. That thread involves the life story of Teonna Rainwater, an Indigenous girl, a member of the Crow (Apsáalooke) tribe who was forcibly removed from her family and the Broken Rock Reservation. Her grim narrative reflects historical accounts of federal government-funded, but Catholic Church run boarding schools where Indigenous children were subjected to beatings and abuse, even death. These children were stripped of their identities, forbidden from wearing their own clothes, speaking their native language, or even using their real names. They had their hair forcibly cut and were made to adopt American religious education. The website details the tragic impact of such institutions: The children spent as many as 10 years in these schools, and once they returned to their reservations, they often had difficulty reassimilating at home, not accepted by either Americans or the reservations. The brutal objective of these schools, as depicted in “1923,” was to "Kill the Indian, Save the Man." Historical records reveal that in one Michigan school alone, over 230 children perished between 1893 and 1931. Teonna’s story is horrific. She was deeply traumatized, but, in the end, she is a heroic character, while the behavior of both the federal government and the Catholic Church, along with the hateful racist attitudes of Americans, are abhorrent.
A month ago, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated five documentary feature films for Oscars. “No Other Land,” won the award, not surprisingly because of its brutally realistic reporting on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in the West Bank. A synopsis reads as follows:
A young Palestinian activist named Basel Adra has been resisting the forced displacement of his people by Israel's military in Masafer Yatta, a region in the occupied West Bank, since he was a child. He records the gradual destruction of his homeland, where Israeli soldiers are tearing down homes and evicting their inhabitants in order to enforce a court order maintaining that the area designation as an Israeli military firing zone was legal under Israeli law.[10] He befriends Yuval, a Jewish Israeli journalist who helps him in his struggle. They form an unexpected bond, but their friendship is challenged by the huge gap between their living conditions: Basel faces constant oppression and violence, while Yuval enjoys freedom and security.
One of the documentaries that did not win was called “Sugarcane,” produced by National Geographic Documentary Films and revealing the same horrific facts as those contained in the storyline of Teonna Rainwater and “1923.” “Sugarcane” earned these words of tribute:
A stunning tribute to the resilience of Native people and their way of life, Sugarcane, the debut feature documentary from Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie, is an epic cinematic portrait of a community during a moment of international reckoning. In 2021, evidence of unmarked graves was discovered on the grounds of an Indian residential school (St. Joseph’s Mission) run by the Catholic Church in Canada. After years of silence, the forced separation, assimilation, and unspeakable abuses children experienced at these segregated boarding schools was brought to light, sparking a national outcry against a system designed to destroy Indigenous communities. Set amidst a groundbreaking investigation, SUGARCANE illuminates the beauty of a community breaking cycles of intergenerational trauma and finding strength to persevere.
The highly acclaimed movie critic Roger Ebert offered his thoughts, saying:
“Sugarcane” is soul-shaking. It’s profoundly evocative, with spoken memories and moments of inability to muster the words gut-punching with equal measure. The landscape of the communities’ culture as a backdrop – stunning, sprawling topography and a score of diegetic traditional soundscapes – counters the revelation of tragedies with the reminder of the colorful, resilient culture that persists.
Finally, in the opinion of Alissa Wilkinson, a Times movie critic since 2005, Sugarcane is:
… immersive and incredibly beautiful, shot like poetry and scored by Mali Obomsawin. The result is both stunning and sobering. And because Kassie and NoiseCat narrow their focus to the stories of St. Joseph’s survivors and their descendants, it’s breathtaking when they widen out to remind us that these stories are not isolated — that people all over North America are living with the repercussions of truth suppressed and violence enacted in the name of love and faith.
Tragically, stories like these and far too many others, toxify our nation’s history, a history that includes dark narratives that document the experience of people, and subsequent generations forced to live with the repercussions of “truth suppressed, and violence enacted in the name of love and faith.”
A week or so ago, I referred to a book titled Legacy, by Jamer Kerr. In it, the author sites an acronym used by the United States military, VUCA: Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. Later in Legacy he uses this acronym to describe the world in which we live. Surely, we are all that and more. I would add capitulating and inhumane. The dangerous conditions of which future documentaries might well be made.
On April 4, 2025, the New York Times published a transcript of a conversation among journalists David French, M. Gessen, Lydia Polgreen and Zeynep, Tufekci. The title was:
‘What Is Our Country Becoming?’ Four Columnists Map Out Where Trump Is Taking America.
David French said something that struct me as being probative and deeply concerning about the dark narratives being of our time.
We’re becoming an earlier version of ourselves. Nothing we’re seeing is truly new. Too many people forget the thousands of people prosecuted during the Woodrow Wilson administration for protesting American involvement in World War I, or the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II, much less the experience of Black Americans for centuries. The list of American injustices is long.
Thankfully, we’re not yet facing crises that grave, but America has always been at war with its darker nature, and sometimes that darker nature wins. We are living in a period of profound national regression.
Lydia Polgreen responded by submitting:
It’s useful to see your own country through the eyes of those who have felt the rough end of its power and the chill of its indifference. The question, it seemed, was less what the United States is becoming, than whether Americans realize what it already is.
While I was reading those lines, I was thinking of the extraordinary value of any documentary, No Other Land, Sugarcane, Porcelain War. It is always essential for America, or any country, any people, to see itself through the eyes of those who have felt the rough end of its power and the chill of its indifference, confronting what they have been, who they are and what they are becoming. The same is true for the church.
In today’s New York Times (April 9, 2025), Thomas L. Friedman, political commentator, author, and a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner alarmingly wrote about who we are becoming under the provocative, prophetic title, Trump and Netanyahu Steer Toward An Ugly World, Together. He writes:
Trump and Netanyahu are engaged, each in his own country, in creating a “post-America” and a “post-Israel” world. By “post-America,” though, I don’t mean an America that is losing relative power but an America that is deliberately shedding its core identity as a country, on its best days, committed to the rule of law at home and the betterment of all humanity abroad. By “post-Israel,” I mean an Israel that is deliberately shedding its core identity — that of a proudly proclaimed rule-of-law democracy in a region of strongmen that will always prioritize a permanent peace with Palestinians (if its security can be assured) over “a permanent piece’’ of the West Bank and Gaza.
One simply cannot imagine Trump or Vice President JD Vance aspiring to build the America that Ronald Reagan described in his Jan. 11, 1989, farewell address. Reagan spoke of the need to reinforce in our children “what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world.” That America was a moral and political beacon, “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors, and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
At one time, Reagan’s words inspired us. Today, they indict us, all of us. Perhaps we should consider that we are in post-Christian world, one in which we have abandoned our core identity and its requirement to love and live for one another.
We find ourselves today amid Holy Week, reliving the ancient narrative of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, followed by truth being nailed to a cross, the faith of those who followed him being scattered and love being placed in a tomb only to be resurrected on the third day. It is a narrative which includes the voice of Pilate plaintively, maybe cynically, asking “What is truth? And hearing Jesus’ voice saying, “I am the way, the truth and the life” (John 14: 6), meaning He is the embodiment of truth, and the path to God and eternal life. It is a week that invites us into its progression of events unafraid of their profound personal relevance and meaning.
Rowan Williams, theologian, and a former member of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom wrote something very profound when he scribbled:
“Truth makes love possible; love makes truth bearable.”
The other day I listened to “An Easter Hallelujah.” The melody is Leonard Cohen’s iconic “Hallelujah” but the words, as sung by Cassandra Star (10) and Callahan (19) tell the story of Holy Week and Easter. Please hum the tune while you read the lyrics that touched my heart the most.
Took from his head the thorny crown
And wrapped him in a linen gown
Then laid him down to rest inside the tomb
The holes in his hands, his feet, and side
Now in our hearts, we know he died
To save us from ourselves, oh Hallelujah
Holy Week is a timeless and profound documentary of its own, an account that reveals an ancient dark narrative about a people who wrestle with their darker nature. It is a sacred story of abandonment, betrayal, denial, persecution, prosecution, crucifixion and an ugly complicity with the suppression of the truth and the angry call for violence. Yet, it is also a glorious account of the power of God’s love over the darkness in our souls, the heinous inhumanity in our actions and death itself. We know he died to save us from ourselves. The stone is rolled away, the tomb is empty, He Is Risen! is the good news, the truth that makes love possible so that love can, in turn, make truth bearable. The light overcomes the darkness, life overcomes death, and our Risen Christ goes on before us to empower us to live the resurrection life ourselves.
May it be so for each of us this Holy Week.