At an academic conference on Marianne Moore, I needled one of the editors of Moore's letters for writing assertively that in 1896 the Moore family moved from Pittsburgh to "nearby Carlisle." Even a century later, with a turnpike, the trip is four and a half hours by a fast car; at the end of the nineteenth century, it must have been akin to burning your bridges behind you. "Oh, that's all right," said this professor from Pomona College, "from California every place in Pennsylvania is nearby." If unguarded, perspective can trump historical reality every time.
The Trout Gallery of Dickinson College, with its superb staff and surprisingly deep resources, shares the college's mission of liberal arts grounding with practical arts training. When a methods seminar in the art department tackles the odd but intriguing collection of Indian Industrial School materials that the college possesses, I want them to succeed for two reasons. First, interesting items will be shared with the public in an intelligent, contextual, and professional setting (the practical arts aspect). Second, the people involved both in training and in being trained are good people who seek the truth in difficult subjects that demand open and honest inquiry (the liberal arts aspect).
Dr. Gutwein, writing from both a Lakota and an academic background in an accompanying essay, concludes that the presentation and the interpretation did not succeed either as an opportunity for research or as a venue for cultural empathy. My thoughts, written from a non-Indian and non-academic background, tend toward the same conclusion even though they journey from another direction. I find that in the case Visualizing a Mission, perspective almost always trumped the evidence.
Richard Henry Pratt, founder of the school and theorist of aboriginal education (one of many in the nineteenth century), was a pragmatic man. Firsthand he saw that the Indian peoples of North America faced literal extinction if the conflict begun almost three hundreds years before continued as it had in his lifetime. Hoping that he could make a difference against this seeming inevitability, Pratt decided to do all he could to salvage what was left of the Indian future. Allowing his friends to perish in all their ethnographic purity was profoundly inimical to his character and to his Christianity. He did not want to be a curator of artifacts and images. He sought to be a present help by which people he admired and their children could live into the twentieth century. In effect, his motto (as it is called in the opening group-written essay), "Kill the Indian, but save the man," was an intention to put the "Indian-ness" of his friends and his wards into the historical past. Pratt had seen that insistence upon it for current identity was a certain death warrant.
This Pratt will not be found in the catalog of the show. Even his religious beliefs, which he was as open about as almost all else in his life, are misconstrued. He did not require "each student to attend mass regularly" (8). He was Presbyterian, not Catholic. (See both Sandy Mader's article on Etahdleuh Doanmoe and Daniel Heisey's essay on Father Henry Ganss elsewhere in this journal.) His comment that "in Indian civilization I am a Baptist, because I believe in immersing the Indians in our civilization . . . " (8) is taken by the seminar members to be a religious declaration instead of an analogy. In a single paragraph, then, we have two errors regarding Pratt before we find in the final line the bald assertion with absolutely no documentation that "he considered [the Indians] to be savage and inferior" (8). In subsequent essays, Kathleen McWeeney gets into a logical bind by portraying Pratt as manipulative regarding the Indians' drawing and yet also as generous and supportive of such creative expression; Molly Fraust announces straightforwardly that Pratt's use of photography was propagandistic and useful for showing the school's "power to suppress traditional Native American clothing and culture" instead, perhaps, for systematic recordkeeping in an innovative technical medium; Kathryn Moyer sees the lack of art instruction as Pratt's dogmatic assimilationism instead of, perhaps, a knowledge of what was a marketable trade and what was not. Once Pratt is removed from his historical context and viewed only with a predetermined perspective, he is indeed an easy target. It is not, however, fair history.
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