Cowboys and Indians interviews Georgina Lightning, the director of Older Than America. Lightning is Cree from Alberta, Canada.

"C&I: In Older than America, the daughter of an Indian boarding school survivor unravels the mystery of her mother's trauma, which has significantly affected her own life, through a series of haunting visions. Why have the Indian boarding schools had such an ongoing impact on Native American communities?

Lightning: Over 50 percent of the students who attended boarding schools died in boarding schools, but it is not in the history books. And even though 1975 was the last account of mandatory assimilation, the transgenerational trauma continues to affect everybody. It affects me, it affects my children. I learned from a young age that how you're raised affects you as an adult. My dad was a victim of boarding schools; I am a product of boarding schools. My dad was institutionalized from the age of 6 to 18, and he committed suicide when I was 18 years old. Never in my life growing up did I ever even know that my dad had been in a boarding school. The whole boarding school mentality is, "Shut up and don't talk about it. Don't tell us what you think, don't tell us what you feel. Don't speak unless you're spoken to."And you don't bring up the past, ever. So there was no mention of the boarding schools.

C&I: Was making Older than America a cathartic process for you?

Lightning: It has been extremely intense. You have to talk about it all the time, and just getting that out is very therapeutic. But at the same time, hearing these tragic stories over and over, just when you think you've heard the last of it or the worst of it, someone hits you like a Mack truck up the side of your head and it will just floor you. You cannot believe the discrimination that went on and what people have to live with. My heart just breaks.

C&I: You have talked openly about your father's alcoholism and abuse, but you credit him with being the inspiration behind your film career. Why is that?

Lightning: Whenever I heard my father coming home, I would try to hide before he saw me. But one time when I was 6 years old, I was watching television and didn't hear him come in. I was caught sitting on the couch watching a program, and he came in and sat down. I looked over without letting him know that I was looking at him, straining as hard as I could to see him out of the corner of my eye, and he got emotional for a second. I don't remember what the program was, but for that minute I didn't feel scared. I was like, Wow, something could move my dad. A seed was planted at that time. You are a kid, you don't know the reasons. I figured it was the actors on that screen that made my dad human for a moment. And so I wanted to be that. I started taking every drama class in my junior high and high school."

Get the Story:
Georgina Lightning: the first Native female director of a feature-length film (Cowboys and Indians September 2009)