Investigate questions about cultural and personal identity through the documentaries of award-winning filmmaker Allan Holzman.
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Beyond The Mesas

Produced with the full participation of the The Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, Beyond The Mesas tells the stories of the federal government's efforts to assimilate and acculturate Hopis, the visit by four Hopi chiefs to Washington, the subsequent Oraibi split, and the forced removal and experiences of Hopi children in off-reservation boarding schools such as the Sherman Institute and the Phoenix and Stewart Indian Schools.

Faced with the enforced loss of their language in their children, vastly outnumbered by a technologically advanced military that had the power to annihilate them, enlightened Hopi leadership sought a peaceful middle ground that would preserve the best of Hopi culture and combine it with the best of the white man's culture. Both federal policies and pressure to resist from within the Hopi community challenged this strategy.

( Film Length: 35 minutes)

Reviews

In this beautifully wrought film, Hopi people recount their community's modern struggle with pressures from the outside world. In their voices and with their stories, the narrators recount this history while demonstrating a remarkable spirit of persistence and optimism. Beyond the Mesas teaches both about the past and the present.

Frederick E. Hoxie
Swanlund Professor of History
University of Illinois, Urbana/Champaign

Beyond the Mesas serves as a testament to the resistance and resilience of Hopi Indians forcibly removed from the tutskwa, the sacred and ancestral Hopi homelands in northeastern Arizona to Sherman Indian boarding school in Riverside, CA. This compelling and provocative film illustrates how Hopis did not yield to the assimilative pressures of the boarding school experience, but instead "turned the power" and used the experience to protect and preserve their culture, language, and traditional ways of life. Produced by Hopi historian, Matthew Sakiestewa Gilbert in collaboration with the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, this film tells the story from a uniquely Hopi perspective that celebrates the vitality of a people committed to the ways of their ancestors.

Dr. Angela A. Gonzales
Assistant Professor
Cornell University
Department of Development Sociology