ABSTRACT
The building was quite cold that day. The sun was shining bright but February in northern Idaho is cold no matter the conditions. I was working with a colleague on a film about an Indian Boarding school on the Couer d’Alene reservation. To the best of our knowledge, the building was erected around 1901 and had operated as a boarding school until 1985. Since the closing of the school, the tribe had been using the building as their education offices, but had just vacated the premises for new space in a town about 20 mins north. Although the building operated as a boarding school for over a century, it did not match the image of a boarding school we expected to see. We felt that the building and the Jesuit-run education that occurred on this site might provide a unique insight into the history of Indian boarding schools. Except for my presence and a few abandoned or stored items; the building was empty. My purpose this day was to experiment with using the confines of the camera lens to make sense of the space that the building simultaneously occupies and creates.
