Older than America

Older than America (alternatively titled American Evil) is 2008 American suspense drama film directed by Georgina Lightning and starring Adam Beach, Wes Studi, Tantoo Cardinal, Georgina Lightning and Bradley Cooper. The film explores the devastating personal and cultural effects of the American Indian boarding schools on the members of a Native American family in Minnesota. Plot Three intersecting stories are told centered on the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation and the adjacent town of Cloquet in the Arrowhead Region of northeastern Minnesota. The answers to the outstanding questions in these stories are all hidden in the secrets from a generation ago at the now abandoned Catholic boarding school on the reservation. In Story One, Ojibwe Native Americans Rain Many Lightnings O'Rourke (Georgina Lightning) and Johnny Goodfeather (Adam Beach), a teacher and a police officer have been living together for ten years, off the reservation despite Johnny's job solely out of circumstance. They have not felt ready to get married until now, Johnny asking her which coincides with his announcement that he has been accepted into the FBI training program in Washington, DC. Rain isn't sure if she is prepared to move, since her mother, Irene, has long been institutionalized in a local psychiatric institution diagnosed as schizophrenic, she inching closer to being in a vegetative state. Under this circumstance, Rain was raised by her Aunt Barbara ("Auntie Apple"), a devout Catholic who has long assimilated into western society and who turns to local priest Father Bartoli for any guidance. One day, after Rain swerves to avoid some children in the road and winds up in a car accident, Johnny swears there were none. What Rain eventually confides to Johnny is that she of late has been seeing visions of things she doesn't understand, she fearing that she may be going the way of her mother. She is later transferred to a psychiatric institution; when Johnny challenges Auntie Apple and tries to force his way to her, his hotheadedness gets him arrested. Rain eventually finds out the children she's been seeing running around the community are not living children, but the spirits of dead children. Through visions and investigations she discovers these unquiet dead are the little girls and boys who were murdered at the Indian boarding school that used to kidnap, institutionalize, and abuse children in the community.