I dunno man ep 1 goes pretty fucking hard on the Noble Savage and Evil White Religious People angle.
I don't get why TV writers all have these weird BDSM related fetishes and feel the need to project them into their shows. That ridiculous bath scene could have been straight out of Handmaids Tale.
Yes, writers, I'm sure nuns really stood around watching while they forced crowds of Indian girls to bathe in individual tubs.
So far this episode informs us that evil white people forced Indians to learn about soap and bathing. I'm skeptical that either concept was actually new to them, but I will go so far as to say that if these people really existed without soap or bathing then a few slapped wrists is a small price to pay for literally bringing them out of the stone age. Fuckin A, can you imagine the smell?
That said, I'm standing by "it never happened" and its just a TV writers' weird fetish.
Really, every iteration of this show has been guilty of it. Yellowstone, 1883, and now 1923 all do this same cartoonish bullshit with regard to Indians.