Indigenous film showing proves true for Mankato locals

By JOEY ERICKSON Variety Editor

Students escaped the cold weather Monday to watch a screening of “Our Fires Still Burn: The Native American Experience” in the Centennial Student Union. The film serves as a compelling one-hour documentary, offering its viewers a vis-à-vis look at the experiences contemporary Native Americans go through in the Midwest.

The film also confronts and promptly dispels the myth that American Indians have faded out of the country’s picture, showing firsthand how they continue to survive, thrive and keep their culture alive.

North America’s past of genocide is a stain that will forever stay imprinted on the country’s record, and the painful deletion of Native Americans from their land and from the history of the country’s beginnings should never be forgotten or downplayed.

“When the (white) people came from Europe, there were a hundred million Native Americans in North and South America, and today there’s a handful. I mean, it was an American Holocaust,” said Scott Badenoch, one of the speakers in the film, a part of the Bo Chunk tribe.

Recalling his childhood, Badenoch spent his childhood living in the Chicago suburbs with his father as well as the Ojibwa reservation with his mother. For him, this was the best of both worlds,

“Being able to go back and forth and be able to move through the different cultures was something that was really ingrained in me. It was the perfect thing for a little boy,” Badenoch said.

Despite his enjoyment of being able to transition between the two different cultures, Badenoch still had his reservations about identifying with his Native American culture. For him, being out and proud with his culture could mean being captured, and forcibly stripped of their identity.

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