TV REVIEW : KPBS ‘Spirit’ Strong, Chilling

“Where the Spirit Lives” on “American Playhouse” dramatizes a shameful, essentially unknown chapter in Canadian history: the systematic destruction of native Indian culture.

Americans, however ignorant of Canada, will feel the resonances of this story down to their bones (tonight at 9, Channel 15). The Canadian feature-length movie, with a mesmerizing performance by a young Alberta Mohawk actress (Michelle St. John, is richly produced and its statement reverberates with topical force in a so-called North American Playhouse story of white supremacy.

The plot, set in 1937 and shot against stunning, endless plains that will remind of scenes from that Texas epic “Giant,” is fictional, but the events reflect ugly contemporary history: the forced assimilation of Canada’s Indian children into an alien, white culture.

“Where the Spirit Lives” displays the sensitivity to native Indians that few U.S. films ever have. Keith Ross Leckie’s script effectively exposes--even most Canadians are reportedly in the dark about this--the almost Charles Dickens-like tale of the methodical mistreatment of a race of children. Here they’re called “savages” until they learn to speak English.

The story depicts the devastating effect of Canada’s notorious 1925 Indian Education Act. We see a bounty hunter kidnap Indian children from their reserve (they’re lured by candy into an airplane) and dispatch them by train to an Anglican-sponsored, God-fearing segregated boarding school in the middle of nowhere, where they are brutalized into assimilation with the manners and language of whites.

Sexual abuse was reportedly rampant in these schools, and in this case, it is off-camera lesbianism, tactfully suggested. (The last Indian residential schools, as the government called them, were shut down in Canada two years ago.)

This film, directed by Toronto native Bruce Pittman, premiered at the Toronto Festival of Festivals last fall.