A Oglala Lakota woman who grew up on North Dakota’s Spirit Lake Reservation and was sexually abused as a child is the subject of a 2-part documentary airing tonight and tomorrow night on the PBS as a co-production Frontline and the Independent Lens.
“Kind Hearted Woman” follows Robin Charboneau as she speaks out about the sexual abuse she alleges she went through as a child and struggles to raise her two children.
Charboneau, whose Lakota name gives the documentary its title, attempts to further her education, navigate the tribal court system and overcome her alcoholism in the two-part documentary.
She says she wanted to take part in the film to show how the abuse she experienced as a child affected every aspect of her life, and try to help others dealing with some of the same problems she did.
Filmmaker David Sutherland has been making documentaries for nearly 30 years. His first for PBS was 1998’s “The Farmer’s Wife,” a 3-part that spent 6-1/2 hours film telling the story of a struggling Nebraskan farm family.
Sutherland spent three years shooting more than 200 hour of unrehearsed, as-it-happened film with Juanita and Darrel Buschkoetter, who lived with their 3 daughters on a farm about 40 miles south of Grand Island.
The Chicago Tribune hailed it as “one of the extraordinary television events of the decade” and it drew 18 million viewers and over 60,000 emails.
Sutherland says Kind Hearted Woman deals with someone who’d been abused because he felt the issue had been in the background of The Farmer’s Wife and Country Boys…his last PBS film which took 7 years to film…but that he’d missed it in the final product.
He says he was also trying to bring light to “another forgotten corner of the American landscape (and put) a face on a Native family…close-up with all the detail that illuminates the rich reality of their lives.”
The Spirit Lake Reservation has only about 6,600 residents, and the tribe’s social services agency has been run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs since last October, the result of a letter of “grave concern” by a federal official on the reservation last April about incidents of child abuse that had gone uninvestigated and unpunished.
Both parts of Kindhearted Woman run 2-hours and will air at 7:00 MT in both Nebraska and South Dakota and at 8:00 on Wyoming PBS. Part one is tonight and Part two tomorrow night with repeat airings at various times.