Philip Earenfight, ed., Visualizing a Mission: Artifacts and Imagery of the Carlisle Indian School 1879-1918. Carlisle PA: The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, 2004.
While attending the exhibition Visualizing a Mission: Artifacts and lmagery of the Carlisle Indian School, 1879-1918, my thoughts were continually drawn to the memory of my Lakota grandfather who was a student at the Flandreau Indian School (circa late 1890s), a school that was modeled after the Carlisle Indian School. I was reminded of him because of the stories that he told about his experiences at the Flandreau Indian School; many of the stories were about the loneliness he and the other students suffered, and the harsh treatment they often encountered. The personal stance from which I write this essay, the familial and historical connection to the American Indian Education Movement of the mid-19'" century, provides a backdrop from which I have come to consider how Native Americans have been represented.
In the accompanying catalogue to the exhibition, Phillip Earenfight's introductory essay states that the exhibit and its documented essays are an examination of "artifacts associated with the nation's first boarding school for Native Americans" (4). According to Earenfight, "the artifacts illustrate various educational, cultural, and visual facets of the Carlisle Indian School and how the institution served to "civilize" Native Americans as part of a larger process of governmental directed cultural assimilation" (4). After attending the exhibit and reading the essays, I was left with an uneasiness that asserts itself when I read works that portray Native Americans either in historical or contemporary contexts. The issue of representation, when dealing with Native Americans, is complex. As a result, I critically consider the sensitivity by which the "history" of Native Americans is told. While the members of the seminar attempted to show Pratt's mission, I believe they missed a crucial facet of Pratt's mission and the history of the Carlisle Indian School. The missing facet is the story of the students who attended the school. By using staged images that only show Pratt's side of the story, they have avoided the inhumane experiences the students encountered. The images do not fully present the way students were stripped of their physical identity, their native languages, their shorn hair, and ultimately their way of life. The photographs, artifacts, and accompanying essays in the catalogue do not fully present the harsh reality of Pratt's mission to civilize the Indian. The one-sided representation of Pratt's mission fails to illustrate the detrimental consequences of governmentally directed assimilation practices. In my opinion, the essays and exhibit further objectify Native Americans in a 21st century setting under the academic guise of representing, through the use of "before" and "after" pictures, what "directed assimilation" could accomplish. The dispassionate portrayal does nothing but further propagandize Pratt's and the government's misguided efforts to civilize the Indian.
Earenfight claims that the catalogue's "six essays provide insight into the Carlisle Indian School and how the surviving photographs and artifacts open a view into the complex and controversial topic of the Indian boarding school experience" (6). I argue that the essays do not fully present the scope and depth of the Native American boarding school experience in Pratt's and the government's process of assimilation. Furthermore, the hope that the seminar members' "findings [will] help us to better understand artifacts that visualize the mission" ( 6) implies, whether intended or not, that Pratt's "mission" to "civilize" the Indian disregards the harsh realities of the Native American's boarding school experience.
First, consider the essay on Pratt. The seminar participants write one paragraph in which they acknowledge the struggles the students encountered. In my opinion the brief statement, "some students died at school; an alarming number ran away . .. No longer able to speak their native language and with little opportunity to find respectable work in white society, many discovered their education had made them ill-suited for either world" (8), hardly addresses the damage done to the students and their families by the United States government and Pratt's mission. If the intent of the seminar members was to fully visualize the mission, to assess the consequences, and bring to light the controversy, then their claim should have been made more prominent in the essays in the accompanying exhibition catalogue
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