Shan Goshorn Resisting the Mission by Trout Gallery

Shan Goshorn Resisting the Mission

RESISTING THE MISSION

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Shan Goshorn Resisting the Mission

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Shan Goshorn Resisting the Mission Edited by Phillip Earenfight

E S S AY S B Y

Jacqueline Fear-Segal, Suzan Shown Harjo, Barbara Landis, Gina Rappaport, Heather Shannon, and W. Richard West Jr.

THE TROUT GALLERY The Art Museum of Dickinson College

Dedicated to the Ancestors

Contents 6

Director's Foreword

Introduction W. Richard West Jr.

Resisting the Mission Shan Goshorn

Weaving History, Lives, Justice, and Beauty into Art with Something to Say Suzan Shown Harjo

Filling the Silence: Protecting the Names Barbara Landis

In the Archives with Shan Goshorn Gina Rappaport and Heather Shannon

Two-Faced Photographs Regenerated in Warp and Weft: Shan Goshorn’s Carlisle Baskets Jacqueline Fear-Segal

Shan Goshorn’s Resisting the Mission and the Origins of Before-and-After Photographs at the Carlisle Indian School Phillip Earenfight

Exhibition Catalogue

108

Exhibition Checklist

110

Artist Biography

112

Selected Exhibitions and Honors

114

Selected Public Collections

115

Bibliography

116

Contributors

118

Acknowledgments

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Director’s Foreword Museums frequently compete for the honor to organize and host exhibitions by leading contemporary artists. Often, when demand is high, such glittering prizes go to those institutions located in the dominant metropolitan areas. But on rare and noteworthy occasions, market interests bow to greater forces and the spiritual, symbolic, and historically significant prevail. Shan Goshorn’s exhibition Resisting the Mission is just such an exhibition. It brings together a concentrated, profoundly moving collection of the artist’s work that addresses the Carlisle Indian School (1879–1918), the nation’s first and most influential off-reservation boarding school. Because of the exhibition’s content, the artist’s deep connection to a number of the institutions, scholars, archivists, and materials in Carlisle, and the fact that two of her great-grandparents attended the Carlisle Indian School—Resisting the Mission had to be in Carlisle. In light of The Trout Gallery’s proximity to the former grounds of the Carlisle Indian School and the museum’s reputation for organizing important exhibitions on this subject, it was the museum to organize and host Resisting the Mission. Indeed, the title of Goshorn’s exhibition—Resisting the Mission—addresses issues also explored in Visualizing a Mission: Images and Artifacts of the Carlisle Indian School, 1879–1918, an exhibition that I previously organized for the museum. This earlier exhibition, organized as part of a senior curatorial seminar at Dickinson College, considered ways in which photographs, drawings, and artifacts from the Carlisle Indian School could help one visualize the institution’s assimilationist mission. In essence, the exhibition sought to analyze the visual counterparts of the often repeated words of Richard Henry Pratt, the school's founding superintendent—“Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” Important scholarly findings presented in this exhibition led to A Kiowas Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion, organized in conjunction with the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University, and which drew interest from a range of prominent museums who wanted to host it. In a manner that curiously anticipated Resisting the Mission, however, A Kiowa’s Odyssey traveled only to venues in areas that were spiritually, symbolically, and historically meaningful to the Indians associated with Fort Marion, the “prequel” to the Carlisle Indian School. Location notwithstanding, the timing of Resisting the Mission is of particular significance as well. The opening of this exhibition coincides with the Carlisle Indian School Centennial Commemoration, a national, multiday program of lectures, events, exhibitions, and panels that mark the closing of the Carlisle Indian School in 1918. As part of this program, The Trout Galley is also hosting Re-Riding History: From the Southern Plains to Matanzas Bay, a traveling exhibition of contemporary responses to Indian incarceration at Fort Marion, curated by Emily Arthur, Marwin Begaye, and John Hitchcock. Incidentally, Shan Goshorn is among the artists represented in Re-Riding History. The Trout Gallery is honored and privileged to host Resisting the Mission and to share this important exhibition with the Carlisle community—particularly the descendants of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School a century ago. Phillip Earenfight Director The Trout Gallery / The Art Museum of Dickinson College

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Shan Goshorn, Unexpected Gift (detail), 2015, cat. 6.

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Introduction With power, poignancy, and undeniable historicity, Resisting the Mission and the art of Shan Goshorn address perhaps the most shameful chapter in the long and often tragic deculturalization of Native peoples pursuant to nineteenth-century Federal Indian policy. This exhibit spotlights that disastrous and misguided chapter and its most notorious symbol and emblem— the Carlisle Indian School and Superintendent Richard Henry Pratt’s infamous and ultimately unsuccessful cultural mantra to “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” I see this subject through more than the eyes of a museum director—it also has a deeply personal meaning and import to me. My Southern Cheyenne great-grandmother, Rena Flying Coyote, daughter of a chief, Thunder Bull, matriculated—if it can be called that—at Carlisle from 1896 to 1904. She was the mother of my father, Walter Richard West Sr., whose name in Cheyenne was Wah-Pah-Nah-Yah or Light Foot. Like his mother, my father spent over a decade attending Indian boarding schools in Concho, Oklahoma, and then Haskell Institute in Kansas, where he was trained as a carpenter and bricklayer. He ultimately became one of the leading artists in the Oklahoma Native fine arts movement that grew and flowered beginning in the mid-twentieth century. I applaud and honor all that Shan Goshorn, a brilliant and insightful artist and a profoundly empathetic humanist, has accomplished for Native peoples and communities—and for all of non-Native America, for that matter—in this exhibit. For the millennia, artists have been and continue to be Native culture bearers, and often, as well, the “canaries in the mine” for Native communities. Their role and responsibility through time, in addition to the creation of compelling art, inevitably encompasses a cultural underbelly, a dimension that is more communal than individual in nature and charts Native collective continuance, including its many challenges. In Resisting the Mission Goshorn touches all these elements. Her creativity was motivated by very extensive research she conducted personally concerning Carlisle, which some of her own relations had attended. Through that process she learned much that pained and moved her about the catastrophic impact institutions like Carlisle had on Native family and community. She openly mourned the students who were involuntarily separated from their parents and sent away to Carlisle, and who never returned home and are now still resting in a cemetery far from their Native community’s homelands. But in the end, as Goshorn states in her essay here, the endpoint of Resisting the Mission is not tragedy and truth, although the understanding and acceptance of that midpoint is essential. It is, instead, the potentiality of ultimate healing, resolution, and redemption—the liberation of silenced Native voices, the understanding of a legacy of wrong that besmirched the history of a great nation, and the profound and abiding mutual cultural reconciliation that could follow: There is healing that desperately needs to happen. Giving Native people an opportunity to add their voices to this work feels like a small step toward helping us reclaim our stolen voices. It is my prayer that these baskets will help inspire a new dialogue to spark and generate such changes.

W. Richard West Jr. President and CEO, Autry Museum of the American West Founding Director and Director Emeritus, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution

OPPOSITE

Shan Goshorn, Two Views (detail), 2018, cat. 1.

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Resisting the Mission

This exhibition has been a long time in the making, beginning when I approached my teen years and learned that both of my great-grandmother’s parents attended Carlisle Indian School.1 I’m not sure when my specific questions about boarding schools arose, but it took my relatives years to talk with me about them. I created my first boarding school basket—which was a complicated double-weave technique AND the first time I wove a photograph—in 2010. Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School (fig. 1) received the Best of Show award at the Red Earth Indian Art Festival in Oklahoma City, resulting in coverage in the Oklahoma City newspaper.2 This is noteworthy because the write-up attracted a Native elder to make a two-hour trip and pay the entry fee to the event, with the specific plan to visit my booth and see this basket. She listened attentively from her wheelchair while I explained the research involved, the Carlisle student imagery, related text, and the weaving process. She began to weep quietly and said, “This is our piece. It belongs in a museum. It tells our story.” I was deeply moved by her response and slowly found myself inspired to deliberately begin creating work to “tell our story.” In 2013, I received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, which allowed me access to the archives of the Smithsonian Institution, including the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Anthropological Archives (NAA). It was part of my family knowledge that we had many relatives who attended Carlisle, but it was not until I actually saw their names on the Carlisle student roster that I realized the resounding power that written words embody. As I had communicated in advance with several curators involved in my fellowship about specific interests, they pulled many boxes of photos for my perusal.3 At the NAA, the very first photo I viewed featured a large group of young Carlisle students seated seventeen rows deep (fig. 2). Their wool military uniforms, shorn hair, and unsmiling brown faces shook my mother-heart to the core. I had to excuse myself to collect my composure. It was the goal of the Carlisle Indian School’s founder, Richard H. Pratt (fig. 3), to stamp out anything that was slightly reminiscent of Native culture, punishing the children frequently and often harshly for the crime of “acting Indian,” especially for speaking their tribal languages.4 In one of his famous propaganda speeches, Pratt coined the phrase “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” which became the guiding mantra for subsequent boarding schools that sprang up all over the United States and Canada.5 As my research continued, I read multiple accounts of confused children who, despite years of enduring this “social experiment,” knew they did not

Shan Goshorn

1. Shan Goshorn, Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, 2011. Woven basket: Ink, archival pigment, and acrylic on paper splints. Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ. Museum purchase, acquisition fund; 2015.12.a, b. Photo: Peter Jacobs.

2. John. N. Choate, Carlisle Indian School, 1884. Albumen print. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA, PA-CH2-001.

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Detail of print of Alaskan Indians for Resisting the Mission prior to cutting into splints and weaving.

3. John N. Choate, Richard Henry Pratt, n.d. Albumen print mounted on card. Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle Indian School, PC 2002.2, folder 1.

fit into white culture. When they returned to their people, they looked, dressed, and acted very differently than the children who had left, many no longer able to speak their native tongue due to Carlisle’s strictly enforced rules. One narrative recounts a boy’s reintroduction to his family; his inability to understand anything his grandmother said led her to finally ask, “Then who are you?”6 The attempt by the US government to eliminate all Native practices almost worked. Carlisle graduates didn’t or couldn’t teach their children their language, customs, and spiritual beliefs. As a result, three generations of Native culture were silenced. Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence—seven pairs of baskets (fig. 4)—was conceived to involve as many Native voices as possible to address this void. The before-and-after images were chosen after viewing photographs from countless museums and historical facilities; these images were enlarged to approximately 15 by 19 inches (fig. 5) and either hand carried or mailed to almost a dozen communities, asking participants to write their own personal messages on the surface of the photographs (fig. 6). It is these original documents that were cut into splints and woven with Pratt’s infamous speech. The interior of this set of baskets is printed with names from the Carlisle student roster and painted a deep red, symbolic of Native people (fig. 7). I followed my weaving with a social media request asking for donations of cedar, sage, sweet grass, and tobacco along with any personal notes the participants cared to add. From these contributions, my daughter Neosha and I created enough bundles to place on each individual grave in the student cemetery; we carried these to Carlisle and included a sage ceremony

4. Shan Goshorn, Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017. Woven baskets: ink, archival pigment, and acrylic on paper splints, polyester sinew. O P P O S I T E TO P L E F T

5. Before-and-after photographs for Resisting the Mission in the artist’s studio, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2016. O P P O S I T E TO P R I G H T

6. Detail of print of Alaska Indians for Resisting the Mission, prior to cutting into splints and weaving. O P P O S I T E B OT TO M

7. Interior of basket from Resisting the Mission.

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

RESISTING THE MISSION

8. Shan Goshorn placing bundles on each of the

with our prayers as we visited every one of these deceased children, who were never able to return home (fig. 8).7 It was a tremendously powerful experience for me. While boarding schools are not the only subject matter I use in my work, my commitment to the topic remains consistent. After the creation of Educational Genocide, Dickinson College, which is located near the Carlisle Indian School, approached me about having a solo exhibition featuring only Carlisle baskets. I turned down several repeated requests, as it seemed too big a commitment. But in 2016, I finally felt led to accept this offer, in part due to the timing; 2018 is the hundred-year commemoration of the closing of this school, which was such a source of generational trauma. There is healing that desperately needs to happen. Giving Native people an opportunity to add their voices to this work feels like a small step toward helping us reclaim our stolen voices.8 It is my prayer that these baskets will help inspire a new dialogue to spark and generate such changes. I wish to express my sincere, grateful thanks to my family, friends, and colleagues who have encouraged and supported me during my quest. But most of all, I acknowledge the ancestors who have had a strong, stable hand in guiding me. Repeatedly, the very material I needed (photos, documents) would show up unexpectedly…the ancestors made it clear from the beginning that they were not just supportive of my work but rather, they were IMPATIENT for this information to be shared.

grave markers in the Carlisle Indian School Cemetery, Carlisle, PA, 2016. Photo: Neosha Pendergraft.

These are OUR stories.

NOTES 1. Mose (Moses) Powell and Elkan (Elkany) Wolf (Wolfe). 2. Daily Oklahoman, June 2011. I hauled this basket back and forth between my home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and father’s home in North Carolina, during his final illness. At one point, I was working on it ceaselessly, during many quiet hours at his bedside. I could not have poured more sorrow into this piece, but it felt appropriate. It was a gift to have that kind of connection made all the more powerful during his transition. 3. Heather Shannon and Rebecca Trout, both of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and Gina Rappaport of the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 4. On Indian boarding schools in general, see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). For Carlisle, see Genevieve Bell, “Telling Stories Out of School: Remembering the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879–1918” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1998); and Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). 5. Richard Henry Pratt, Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59, repr. in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880–1900, ed. Francis Paul Prucha (Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–71.

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Shan Goshorn, Three Sioux Students from Resisting the Mission (detail), 2018, cat. 2.5.

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

6. Floyd Red Crow Westerman, interview with Charla Bear, in “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” Morning Edition, NPR, May 12, 2008. For a transcription of the news story, see “American Indian Boarding Schools Haunt Many,” NPR, accessed June 18, 2018, www. npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=16516865. 7. On the remains of the Indian children buried at the school, see Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club; Fear-Segal, “The History and Reclamation of a Sacred Space: The Indian School Cemetery,” in Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, & Reclamations, ed. Jacqueline Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose, (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016), 152–84; Barbara Landis, “Death at Carlisle: Naming the Unknowns in the Cemetery,” in Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 185–200; and J. W. Joseph, Hugh Matternes, and Matthew Rector, Archival Research of the Carlisle Indian School Cemetery: U.S. Army Garrison, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pennsylvania (New South Associates Technical Report 2635, Contract W912P9-16-D-0015, Task Order 6, July 5, 2017). See also “Cemetery Information,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, Archives & Special Collections, Dickinson College, http:// carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/cemetery-information. 8. Postcolonial scholarship has focused considerable attention on the role of voice in society. Regarding Indian boarding schools, see Barbara K. Carbonneau-Dahlen, John Lowe, and Staci Leon Morris, “Giving Voice to Historical Trauma Through Storytelling: The Impact of Boarding School Experience on American Indians,” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment and Trauma 25 (2016): 598–617.

RESISTING THE MISSION

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Weaving History, Lives, Justice, and Beauty into Art with Something to Say

Multifaceted and Nuanced Art Statements Shan Goshorn is a brilliant, wise, and beloved woman—brave, caring, passionate, and compassionate. A truth seeker, she is a stronghearted, good-humored activist for the rights of Native Peoples, women, artists, the environment, and more. A mixed-media, concept-based artist of great renown, she utilizes photography, painting, basket making, silversmithing, and collage and montage artistry to make her two-dimensional and three-dimensional works. Her many series make fulsome, cohesive statements, and she masters each subject in a manner worthy of acknowledgment as a scholarly dissertation. As both a friend and curator, I have long been a “Shan fan,” and I am privileged to offer these words about her as a sister in arts and activism. A daughter, citizen, and honored artist of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians in North Carolina (Wolf Clan), she was given the name of Yellow Moon. She has lived and worked in Oklahoma for over half of her life in Tulsa, a city that grew from the convergence of lands and peoples of the Cherokee, Muscogee (Creek), and Osage Nations. Oklahoma boasts thirty-nine Native Nations, with distinct cultures and histories, and whose citizens include an astonishingly high ratio and variety of artists. Shan is recognized as a courageous artist-activist, a champion of fairness and justice in our time, for the ancestors, and for the coming generations. Public descriptions of her often say that Goshorn is “best known for her baskets,” but she considers herself an artist who uses the “medium that best expresses a statement.” I have curated her work in exhibitions and have known her over the decades as one of the best artists in whatever medium she was working at the time. She is also a captivating storyteller and a most effective advocate. In making art or otherwise imparting knowledge, she is clear and unflinching about treaty violations, grave robbing, violence against women, torture of children, harm to Mother Earth, mascoting and stereotyping, and damage to Native languages and sacred places. Her statements give heart to those searching for ways to present issues and to reach for solutions to our myriad emergency situations. The impact of her work is incalculable. In our Tsistsistas (Cheyenne) way, we are instructed to choose our friends as we would choose people to take into battle and to make peace, after or even without fighting. Goshorn is such a person. For years, I have considered my friendship with her as one of my defining features, but it is not necessary for the visitor or reader to meet her in person to know the multifaceted and nuanced Shan Goshorn through her body of work. I would like to introduce or reintroduce her, in some leaps through time, with a few examples of her art and advocacy periods and pieces that led to this magnificent exhibition of her multimedia basketry work.

Suzan Shown Harjo

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Shan Goshorn, High Stakes: Tribes Choice #2, 2011. Digital photograph: archival pigments and glitter on paper.

Native Visions and Voices in the Columbus Quincentenary Shan and I first met in Tulsa in 1992, during the ramp up to the high-visibility Columbus Quincentenary (or The Invasion, as it is known in Native circles). We were there to celebrate the work of Chiricahua Apache artist-activist Bob Haozous, at Tulsa’s dedication of his monumental sculpture Artificial Cloud, and to amplify Native visions and voices on these main points: First: This red quarter of Mother Earth was the home of great civilizations and cultures for millennia before the lost Columbus washed upon our shores. Second: 500 years of genocide, ecocide, and erasure caused the deaths of millions and ongoing misery and trauma for survivors.1 Third: Native Peoples are still here. We are trying to explain what happened to us since 1492, with persistent, urgent hope that knowledge will help prevent it from happening again. We are engaged in reclamation and education work to make a better world over the next 500 years and beyond.2

1. Bob Haozous, Artificial Cloud, 1991. Steel. Tulsa, Oklahoma. Photo: Jay Goebel / Alamy Stock Photo.

Artificial Cloud is one of Bob’s important public art statements on these points (fig. 1). At 71½ feet tall, his steel sculpture is capped by a wide billowy cumulus-cloud shape on a broad-based, three-tiered pedestal that narrows skyward to a spire supporting the cloud. On the pedestal are cutout and welded figures: gingerbread-style people with missing hands or feet; disembodied hands; airplanes flying and falling; humans right side up, upside down, and sideways; directional arrows pointing both up and down; and a few oversize manacle ankle rings resembling giant door knockers. The sculpture is made of untreated steel, to show the corrosive effect of pollution over time. After the dedication, Shan and I hit it off, recognizing common concerns with human rights, the environment, and the continuing genocidal tendencies hemisphere-wide. Indigenous and allied writers, visual artists, teachers, parents, and students were busier than we ever expected, with 1992 exhibits, concerts, and forums; campaigns against the emotional violence inflicted on our youth by the advertising and sports worlds through caricatures and false narratives; and sunrise ceremonies and observances commemorating those Native Peoples who did not survive and celebrating those who did.3 Our intensive work and focus kept the years from 1992 to 1994 from becoming a massive “discovery” extravaganza that portrayed us, if at all, as onlookers at the march of history. Collectively, we persuaded many cities, schools, cultural centers, and social justice organizations to invite Native speakers, to commission and show Native artists’ work, and to hire indigenous teachers. With stepped-up media coverage of Native America, our “rock the boats” campaign tamped down multiyear plans for replicas of the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria to make dockings in ports never seen by Cristobal Colon. Goshorn’s imaging and speaking abilities were invaluable in this broad public relations movement, and it was in this context that she was making visual imprints with her people’s art. Our consciousness raising then helped grow the ongoing movements toward Native Studies and designations of Indigenous Peoples Day. Mascoting, Stereotyping, and Commodification Goshorn’s constructions and montages provide visual commentary on the social injustice of invidious discrimination and the distortions of cultural identity in popular culture. She points

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

out that the names of great nations are better known as vehicles, insurance companies, sports teams, and buildings, and argues that our cultures should be respected, “not flaunted like some advertising gimmick.” Her work on “Indian” mascoting and name-calling in sports is part of the widespread movement that has eliminated two-thirds of all so-called Indian symbols, logos, caricatures, mascots, and behaviors from American educational athletic programs. Native Peoples and allies have consigned more than 2,000 of these race-based stereotypes and cultural appropriations to museums and history books since the first one was removed in 1970, when the University of Oklahoma formally retired its dancing mascot, “Little Red.”4 Goshorn’s Honest Injun collection, launched in 1992, shows the wide range of misrepresentations of Native ceremonies, clothing, appearance, histories, and values resulting from 500 years of commodification. Her hand-painted black-and-white photographs of commercial brands that use so-called Native names and imagery to sell their products include the Land O’Lakes butter maiden (fig. 2) and “Chief Wahoo,” a former symbol of Cleveland’s Major League Baseball team. In 2015, California became the first state to ban public schools from using the vile name they shared with Washington, DC’s National Football League franchise.5 With only 1,000 remaining on the “Indian” mascot horizon, and with more changing every month, these branded disparagements soon will go the way of the once ubiquitous lawn jockey. Goshorn continues this vital work in other mixed-media pieces such as No Honor, which she writes was informed by historical connections between a slur on a sports pennant and Indian bounty hunting (fig. 3). Many colonies and trading companies, and some states proclaimed bounties on certain targets, such as the Massachusetts bounties (1775) for the capture or scalps of Penobscot Nation men, women, and boys and girls under age twelve, “that shall be killed and brought in as evidence of their being killed.”6 Others aimed at generic Native targets—as with the Pennsylvania bounties (1764), assigned according to a sliding scale, on “hostile Indians”7; the California bounties (1850s) for heads or scalps of Indians who stood in the way of goldrushers; and the Minnesota “reward” (1863) for “every red-skin sent to Purgatory”—or related practices involving scalping, skinning, parading, and cashing in “war trophies” of parts of Indian bodies, notably documented in three military inquiries by Congress and the Secretary of War into the Sand Creek Massacre (1864).8 Some proclamations used the word “scalps,” also using “topknots” for hair from the head, both of which involve skinning. While topknots might be enough proof for bounty payers that the hair and skin came from dead Indians, or arguably were tribally specific, they were insufficient to prove the gender or maturity of a deceased person. That evidentiary level required the scalped genitalia, entire skins, or whole bodies, but the latter were not viable in terms of transportation or storage. Goshorn and other human rights activists have decried the use of racial slurs for years. (I have done so since 1962 in the movement that started before my time.) In No Honor, Goshorn combines the slur on a sports pennant with identical dictionary definitions for it and for offenses against others that are long absent from polite society. “Why,” she asks, “is one term acceptable and the other not?” In another series she approaches wrongheaded notions by bringing actual Native people to the fore. Her installation Reclaiming Cultural Ownership; Challenging Indian Stereotypes presents thirty-six documentary-style images of Native people living everyday life. Related to this series is Indin Car, which was featured in an exhibition at the District of Columbia Arts Center (fig. 4). In this work, she recontextualizes the pejorative cliché “Indian car”—meaning a vehicle “so worn-out, beat-up and pitiful” that it had to be “owned by an Indian”—as simply a car of Indians. Hers is an image of a carload of Cherokee warriors wearing traditional regalia, and red

2. Shan Goshorn, Land O Lakes Margarine, from Honest Injun, 1992. Hand-painted black and white photograph.

3. Shan Goshorn, No Honor, 2014. Woven basket: archival inks and acrylic paint on paper.

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4. Shan Goshorn, Indin Car, 2007. Digital photograph: archival inks on paper. 5. Shan Goshorn, High Stakes: Tribes' Choice #1, 2011. Digital photograph: archival pigments and glitter on paper. 6. Shan Goshorn, High Stakes: Tribes' Choice #2, 2011. Digital photograph: archival pigments and glitter on paper.

and black face and body paint. Of all the excellent work in this show, by a dozen top Native artists, Goshorn’s Indin Car was the lead image selected by The Washington Post for its first feature on the exhibition.9 Goshorn’s work supports many human rights causes and efforts to inform the general public where the education system has failed to do so. As just one example, she has worked with other Native artists in Oklahoma to set the record straight on the state-revered traditions of the “Boomer Sooner” legacy and the ongoing ill effects of non-Native settlers’ land rushes for Native territories. In the late 1800s, tribal lands were declared “excess” by a federal law that was discredited and overturned a half-century later, but not before two-thirds of the Native land base had been lost to taxes, oil and land speculators, railroad barons, and shady bankers, judges, lawyers, and government agents. Goshorn also tackles various aspects of the often-contentious issues surrounding tribal gaming operations, informing non-Natives about the inherent sovereignty of Native Nations that courts and Congress affirm as the authority for these businesses, and trying to stop the endless gibes about rich casino Indians. In High Stakes: Tribes’ Choice #1 and High Stakes: Tribes’ Choice #2, she addresses the related topics of self-stereotyping and cultural exploitation (figs. 5, 6). She hand-colored two black-and-white silver-gelatin photographs of a Native woman and Native man in traditional outfits, making the companion images sparkle in fine-grade glitter. She describes the works as commentary on the tensions between the glitz of casinos and traditional tribal culture that is used to attract customers. This work is a cautionary note for Native Nations to consider carefully “how we allow ourselves and our traditional ways to be marketed.” Earth Renewal and Earth Return Series From 1997 to 2010, Goshorn produced work for two series, Earth Renewal and Earth Return. Describing Earth Renewal as conceived during a very difficult pregnancy, Goshorn has written 20

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

that she followed medical advice and withdrew from political activism to focus on supportive imagery that would help her create a healthy pregnancy and birth of her daughter. Her double-exposed, hand-tinted black-and-white photographs began during “this meditative time,” and are illustrative of traditions and ceremonies regarding the “nurturing qualities of our original mother, the earth” and the “caretaking duties” of her human children. One of her personal favorites in the Earth Renewal series is Kituwah Motherland, showing the translucent image of a Cherokee woman, symbolic of ceremonial renewal, superimposed on the Kituwah Mound, the Cherokee origin place (fig. 7). Located on Eastern Band Cherokee land near the Tuckasegee River in the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina, the Kituwah Mound also is recognized as the spiritual and historical Mother Town by the Cherokee Nation and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. Goshorn made her homage after part of the mountain overlooking Kituwah was bulldozed for a power plant, which the energy developer agreed to build elsewhere when faced with an outpouring of concern and organized action. Goshorn’s work helped raise awareness and funds to address ways to protect the sacred place. The Eastern Band designated Kituwah as a “sacred site” in 2013, saying it holds ancestral remains and embodies the “sacredness of all that existed [and] for future generations.” Earth Return “gives voice to the struggle” of Native Peoples in protecting and repatriating ancestors and sacred and cultural patrimony from collections and holding repositories throughout the United States. After centuries of grave robbing at burial grounds and looting and defacing ceremonial places—with both Native remains and sacred items fenced, bought, and sold as art and artifacts—the US Congress enacted the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 and other related human rights laws. Despite the legal protections, both Native people and objects continue to be trafficked, auctioned, and marketed at escalating prices; displayed, studied, and exploited for tourism or profit, or in the name of science; and exhumed, poisoned, and otherwise desecrated by drilling, mining, vandalism, recreation, and other geophysically damaging activities.

7. Shan Goshorn, Kituwah Motherland, from the series Earth Renewal, 2010. Hand-colored black-and-white photograph.

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The “wounds inflicted by institutionalized racism,” cannot heal, says Goshorn, “until we are perceived as human beings” rather than as “archeological artifacts.” In 2003, Goshorn’s repatriation work was in a two-artist show with Comanche artist Juanita Pahdopony at the American Indian Community House Gallery in New York City. Otoe-Missouria playwright Annette Arkeketa’s play Ghost Dance was performed, and Shan, Annette, Juanita, and I made remarks on a post-play panel. It was one of the best discussions on repatriation issues in my memory (and that includes over fifty years of talking about and working on repatriation and museum policy issues, since 1967). The images and voices of Goshorn and other artists have contributed significantly to efforts at instituting and enforcing US policies that address these cultural imperatives, and to the ongoing efforts of Native Peoples to improve the laws and complete returns. Goshorn’s art and explanations of these protective policies and why they are necessary have helped to educate many people who might be otherwise confused. Some tend to resent such policies, wrongly thinking they confer special privileges to Native Peoples, and somehow take something away from non-Natives. In fact, other segments of American society do not need remediation, because non-Natives already enjoy policy privileges and have not been subjected to the harrowing, multigenerational experiences and unjust laws that we have endured. While such remedial legal action is essential, it still may need to be explained. Through her art, Goshorn makes this type of history and information accessible to people who know little about laws of this nature and our unique need for and relationship to complex substantive legal policies.

8. Shan Goshorn, Industrial Trade Blanket #1, 2007. Acrylic with brass, copper, steel, and metallic foil.

Industrial Trade Blanket Series and 10 Little Indians Goshorn’s Industrial Trade Blankets series was inspired by the colors and symbology of the wool blankets Native Peoples initially acquired as trade items, first from the English, Scots, Spanish, French, and Irish, and later from the Americans. Native Peoples in what are now the Northeast and mid-Atlantic US were wary of the trade blankets, because word that some carried smallpox spread almost as quickly as the deadly disease, and many believed that it was a military weapon to clear the land. Native lack of immunity to the diseases brought here by Europeans—from the common cold, consumption, influenza, measles, mumps, pneumonia, tuberculosis, and whooping cough to bubonic plague, chicken pox, cholera, syphilis, typhoid, and others—eradicated entire Indigenous Peoples and untold numbers of Native persons in wave after wave of epidemics. Eventually, trade blankets became more common than hides or furs as outerwear, sleep covering, and shelter, due to the rapidly dwindling numbers of buffalo, elk, antelope, beaver, fox, and other animals that were being hunted, trapped, and pushed to the edge of extinction by the increasingly lucrative Euro-American markets and the growing immigrant populations. By 1900, the Native population was below 250,000, while non-Natives in the United States numbered more than 75 million. Trade blankets also symbolized Native “primitiveness” and “savagery.” “Back to the blanket” and “blanket ass” were pejoratives used against Native students and adults who, after being “civilized,” returned to traditional ways, speaking heritage languages, painting and dancing in ceremonies, and wearing long hair and hides, furs, trade cloth, and blankets.10 Goshorn’s Industrial Trade Blankets series is comprised of multimedia works that feature paint, brass, copper, steel, and metallic foil, symbolizing bullets, mining, scourges, and other pressures that caused the swarms of non-Natives and the vanishing Native populations. Goshorn

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started the series in 2006 and completed it in 2008. Among the works in the series is Blanket #1 (fig. 8), which features a red-orange field and a wide strip of metallic foil, suggesting the stripes found on original wool trade blankets. On either side of the foil, Goshorn shows small round metal objects, which resemble the abstracted images of bone sections with missing marrow commonly seen on Native blankets, where they symbolize industry, precious metals, and pox. Goshorn continues to explore blanket symbolism in her work in other formats, notably in 10 Little Indians (figs. 9, 10), a single-weave basket that deals with dancing and dead Indians. She interwove two historical photos with three versions of the song “10 Little Injuns,” including the original lyrics of 1868, hate filled and graphic, about how the “little Indians” were killed or committed suicide. The basket exterior integrates a pair of before-and-after photographs, one representing a group of Native boys in blankets upon their arrival at the Hampton Boarding School and another of boys at the Carlisle Indian School in military uniforms. Inside the basket are drawings taken from the song’s music sheet of what Goshorn describes as “dancing children dressed as pretend Indians.” Her 10 Little Indians reminded me of two items in The Indian Helper, the weekly newsletter of the Carlisle Indian School, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania.11 A story in the March 23, 1888 issue is about “a party of Apache Indians,” after a trip to Washington, DC, “visiting their children and relations at Carlisle before starting west again” with an interpreter and their 10th Cavalry escort. The other item, “Our Exhibition,” begins: “Monday night the Apache chiefs did not come…. There were ‘Ten Little Indian Boys,’ however, who counted themselves out and in again in a most mathematical and delightful way….”

9. Shan Goshorn, 10 Little Indians, 2013. Woven basket: archival inks and acrylic on paper. 10. Detail of 10 Little Indians.

Displacement Installation In Goshorn’s installation Displacement, images of songbirds are painted on seven small canvases, with nine wood cutouts on the wall of swallows in flight (fig. 11). Calling her dark cutouts “shadows of hope,” Goshorn here expresses the wish that indigenous cultures “will persevere.” A lifelong fascination with birds led her to qualify for a federal wildlife license, W E A V I N G H I S T O R Y, L I V E S , J U S T I C E , A N D B E A U T Y I N T O A R T W I T H S O M E T H I N G T O S AY

11. Shan Goshorn, Displacement, 2010. Acrylic on canvas with wood cutouts.

specializing in orphaned and injured migratory songbirds, which she calls “barometers of the earth’s health.” She is particularly concerned about two invasive species—the European starling and English sparrow—and their devastating impact on and the alarming decline of indigenous songbirds. Emphasizing that she is speaking of birds, she says “it is not a far jump” to “think about Indians.” Defending the Sacred—Standing with Standing Rock Immersing herself in historical research, Goshorn diligently looks for the context, meaning, and details of her subject imagery and content. In 2017, she made Defending the Sacred (figs. 12, 13), a mixed-media sculpture, to promote awareness of the environmental and humanitarian battle taking place on the original and treaty land of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and others of the Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires), Great Sioux Nation. Dakota Access, LLC, and Energy Transfer Partners proposed—and the US Army Corps of Engineers approved in April 2016—a pipeline to haul 450,000 barrels of fracked oil sludge each day underneath the Missouri River and Lake Oahe, risking burst pipes that would contaminate the sole source of fresh, safe water for the entire region, as well as severely damage the ancestors and ceremonial lands and waters of several Native Nations. The pipeline would extend for more than a thousand miles, from North Dakota’s Bakken oil fields through South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois, and then be transported separately to the Gulf of Mexico.12 After a federal finding that the pipeline would not harm Native historical places, supporters joined with the Standing Rock Tribe to peacefully oppose threats to the water and sacred landscape. Rallying around the message Mni Wiconi (“Water Is Life”), thousands camped at the confluence of the Cannonball and Missouri Rivers, and hundreds of Native Peoples sent supplies and other support. In September 2016, UN Indigenous Peoples Rapporteur Victoria Tauli-Corpuz and many other UN experts called for a halt to construction because it threatened water, burial grounds, sacred places, treaty rights, and the health and well-being of Sioux Peoples, and because Standing Rock was denied consultation and information regarding the “presence and proximity” of pipeline routing and siting to the Reservation.13 Article 19 of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples mandates UN countries’ good-faith consultation and cooperation with Indigenous Peoples and that they “obtain their free, prior and informed consent before” taking “measures that may affect them.”14 The US Army assistant secretary for civil works, Jo-Ellen Darcy, announced in December 2016 that the pipeline easement at Lake Oahe would not be granted, and that it was most 24

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responsible and expeditious to explore alternate routes for the pipeline crossing.15 That good news and two blizzards brought the encampments to an end. However, in January 2017, as one of his first acts following inauguration, President Donald J. Trump reversed the army’s decision with a presidential memorandum, fulfilling a campaign promise to fast-track construction of the $3.8 billion pipeline (without disclosing he had owned stock in the pipeline companies that he only recently had divested).16 Within weeks, the army announced its intent to grant a thirty-year easement to the Dakota Access for a 30-inch diameter underground light crude pipeline at Lake Oahe Dam and Reservoir. Goshorn’s Defending the Sacred is a briefcase-shaped basket woven in the Cherokee “water” design that covers the outside and inside walls. Photographs and text are interwoven on the interior and exterior surfaces of the briefcase. The interior walls include a photo of a prayer fan woven among splints that bear the words of Lakota prayers, symbolizing protection and Standing Rock’s commitment to peace. The fan faces an image of the vast Oceti Sakowin camp. The exterior walls display the text of the Horse Creek Treaty (1851) as well as a photo and the text of the Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868), between the United States and the Sioux Nations. As the standoff at Standing Rock caught the attention of the world, comparisons between the pipeline and a snake were capturing the imagination of many, including Goshorn. Lakota and Dakota visions, dreams, and prophecies revealed an approaching black snake made of greed’s pure poison, and those who spoke publicly about those things said that the snake arrived as the pipeline. Standing Rock’s then-chairman David Archambault II, of the Hunkpapa and Oglala Lakota, referenced the comparison in a New York Times opinion piece.17 He wrote that the pipeline “would snake across our treaty lands and through our ancestral burial grounds…. a half-mile from our reservation…[crossing] the Missouri River, which provides drinking water for millions of Americans….” Goshorn wove the snake motif over Dakota Access propaganda on her briefcase’s remaining outside wall and featured another image of the Oceti Sakowin camp of “protectors

12. Shan Goshorn, Defending the Sacred, 2017. Woven suitcase: archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, with wood, antler, artificial sinew, glue, brass. 13. Detail of Defending the Sacred.

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of the sacred earth and water.” She chose the briefcase structure because the battleground is the judicial system, where the court case, initiated in July 2016, has lasted longer than the ten-month standoff. She writes that the briefcase’s handle hardware is made from antler, signifying the “strength of our resolve.” Not only has she given the issue her creativity and voice, she also donated all proceeds from Defending the Sacred to the Standing Rock Sioux legal fund. This is yet another example of why Goshorn is respected, admired, and beloved. Message in a Vessel In her long, successful career as an independent artist, Goshorn did not try to make a basket until 2006, but she is a natural at making conceptually based baskets of watercolor-paper splints, using the shapes, patterns, and methods of traditional Cherokee baskets. She prints the text of presidential messages, congressional records, quotations, treaties, and laws, as well as maps, photographs, and other texts and images on the paper before cutting it into splints that she then weaves. In the short documentary profile Shan Goshorn by Seminole and Muscogee filmmaker Sterlin Harjo, the artist recalls the hostility toward her activist work as “people wrapping themselves up in barbed wire,” denying any possibility that their “ideas were bigoted.”18 That changed when she started making woven statements, a change she attributes to the “unassuming shape” of a basket, “a vessel for mothers or grandmothers” to gather, carry, or support something, “maybe a baby.” Calling the basket vessel a “nurturing part of our history, of our memories,” the film shows her weaving in the midst of artworks in progress. She describes people being comfortable with the nonthreatening nature of the basket and becoming “so curious” about the colors, patterns, images, or words that “they literally lean in so they can understand and see.” And “that’s the moment” for this “conversation I’ve been trying to have for thirty years.” She is joyous that people “actually get it,” understanding through her baskets what is problematic about their attitudes and expressions regarding mascots, treaties, sovereignty, and other issues Native Peoples deal with daily.

14. Shan Goshorn, Pieced Treaty: Spider’s Web Treaty Basket, 2007. Woven basket: ink and acrylic on paper. National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

Pieced Treaty: Spider’s Web Treaty Basket—Goshorn’s First Two Single-Weaves It was my good fortune to be in the vicinity at the origin of Goshorn’s career of mixed-media basketry excellence. One day in the mid-2000s, she called and asked what I was working on, and I updated her on the Nation to Nation treaties exhibition and book I was guest curating and editing for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI).19 W. Richard West Jr., of the Cheyenne, green-lit the project in 2003, and I co-curated it with Standing Rock Sioux author, theologian, historian, activist, treaties expert, and dear friend Vine Deloria Jr. We had constructed the spine and arc of the exhibition and book, and decided on certain treaties, objects, oral histories, and texts to illustrate treaty making, what each party wanted, and how treaties are living, breathing, continuing, and exercised daily. We were looking for contemporary artwork that would help convey the nation-to-nation continuum, make sovereignty understandable, and place treaties in the present and future tenses. Goshorn promised to think about what she might create with a treaties theme, perhaps in a basket: “I’ve always wanted to make a basket; maybe this is the right time.” Time passed, but before I could follow up, she had emailed a photo of Pieced Treaty: Spider’s Web Treaty Basket (fig. 14). It was sculptural, contemporary, tradition based, and the first basket she ever made. She printed the Cherokee Nation–Oklahoma Tobacco Compact on watercolor paper, which she painted and cut into splints that she then intertwined in the traditional Cherokee spider’s web pattern.

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Pieced Treaty is a large woven mixed-media basket, with a shock of long unwoven splints of text sprouting from the woven top, and others cascading down the sides. The weaving techniques, paints, and text contribute shades of pink, from champagne and cherry blossom to Persian and rose. The large pink basket fit right in with our foundational color palette, based on the purple, lavender, and white beads made from quahog clamshells and whelk shells, which are used for wampum strings to verify authority, credentials, or memory, and for the woven wampum strips that are many Native Nations’ records of treaties and events. The palette was set early on, when we decided to display as many Nations’ wampum as possible and to feature the Two Row Wampum (the Haudenosaunee-Dutch Treaty of 1613) as a visual, thematic thread of the exhibition. West jumped at the chance for the NMAI to acquire Pieced Treaty, and it became part of the museum’s permanent collection in 2007; both he and incoming director Kevin Gover, of the Pawnee, were enthusiastic about showing it in our exhibition. Goshorn later wrote that Pieced Treaty refers to the continual breaking of agreements. Her basket was deliberately left unfinished to reflect the tobacco compact’s contentious renegotiation status. When our exhibition opened in 2014 at the NMAI on the Mall, Goshorn’s premiere basket was prominently placed at the exit, to give visitors a visual takeaway of the intricate, continuing, unfinished story of treaties, and sovereign Nations’ promises of peace and friendship forever. A Greater Degree of Difficulty: First Double-Weave, Sealed Fate The intense interest in her first mixed-media baskets encouraged Goshorn to tackle the more difficult double-weave. She explains that the double-weave basket is “very tricky,” because it is woven from the inside bottom to the desired height, then down the outside, and finished on the bottom with no obvious indication of beginning or end. She taught herself by carefully examining a finished basket and finding her own “tricks of the trade.” Her first one—Sealed Fate; Treaty of New Echota Protest Basket (fig. 15)—took her more than a year to figure out. Goshorn

15. Shan Goshorn, Sealed Fate; Treaty of New Echota Protest Basket, 2010. Woven basket: ink and acrylic on paper.

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later recalled that a top Cherokee basket maker told her the “man-in-the-coffin” lid shape of her debut venture into double-weaves is sacred and the “most difficult one to make.” The Museum of the Cherokee Indian, in Cherokee, North Carolina, at that time, declared Goshorn to be the fourteenth living maker of double-weave baskets. The outside paper splints of Sealed Fate carry the Treaty of New Echota, which purportedly agreed that the US could move the Cherokee Nation from its homeland to Indian Territory. The inside splints carry names from ninety-five pages of the signatures of Cherokee citizens, disputing the legal authority of the signatories in 1835 at the capitol of the Cherokee Nation in New Echota (now, Georgia, where the non-Natives were the most rancorous and murderous gold-rushers and squatters on Cherokee lands). The splints of the man-in-the-coffin lid are printed with the signature of President Andrew Jackson. Goshorn notes that a Cherokee warrior saved his life at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend (1814), but as president, Jackson refused to even view the protest documents. The US Senate ratified the treaty, and Jackson signed it into law in 1836, less than three months after the signing in New Echota. Jackson even defied a US Supreme Court ruling that could have stopped the bloody Removal. Color of Conflicting Values In Color of Conflicting Values (fig. 16), Goshorn intertwines her painted version of the $20 bill with the face of President Jackson and the words of his Indian Removal Act (1830). Both cruel and deceptive, the Removal allowed the United States to act under the color of law to wrench Native Peoples from their homelands and herd them on to Indian Territory (most of present-day

16. Shan Goshorn, Color of Conflicting Values, 2013. Woven basket: archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, with gold foil.

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Oklahoma, much of Kansas and Nebraska, and parts of Colorado, Missouri, Montana, North and South Dakota, and Wyoming, now mostly owned by non-Natives).20 Countless children, women, men, and entire families were killed on the Potawatomi Trail of Death, Cherokee Trail of Tears, and the Long Walk of the Navajo and many other Native Nations. The wrenching experiences, survivor guilt, and deep wounds of loss, humiliation, torture, and injustice continue to traumatize present generations, nearly two centuries after the original genocide. For this basket, Goshorn combined Jackson’s words and image with the greens and browns of the lush forests of Cherokee homelands in the Great Smoky Mountains and the green, gold, and other colors of money in the heinous Removal chapter of US history. Feminine Sacred: A Commentary on Domestic Violence in Indian Country Feminine Sacred (fig. 17) commemorates the reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (2013), which affirmed Native Nations’ inherent sovereignty to protect their citizens from domestic violence.21 The law recognizes tribal jurisdictional authority to arrest and try all perpetrators. This is particularly important because non-Natives commit most of these crimes against Native women and children, and some non-Natives have moved to reservation land specifically to be free from prosecution though a legal loophole that placed them beyond the reach of tribal police, investigators, jails, and courts. That changed with the enactment of the law, and now Native families have recourse against non-Natives who terrorize them, as some have for decades. Goshorn is one of the few artists to call attention to this part of the law, the reasons for it, and its implementation, all of which are vital in light of expected challenges by those perpetrators of anti-Native violence who want to continue a lawless existence. There also will be persons, ranging from the uninformed to the prejudiced, who commit crimes, report on crimes, and judge criminality; and they all need to be educated, as the US Congress was, about the legitimacy and capacity of Native Nations’ law enforcement and judicial systems, to avoid arduous litigation on the soundness of the law itself. This is another area in which Goshorn’s work helps convey complexity but also makes the issue understandable. Her purple and lavender Feminine Sacred is woven into single diamond shapes, each of which showcases a purple ribbon—symbol of domestic-violence awareness—a pattern that is repeated up, down, and around the basket. She combines splints printed with the law and those with a quote from Oglala Sioux author, educator, and performer Luther Standing Bear, who was in the first class at Carlisle in 1879. “It is the mothers, not the warriors,” he wrote, “who create a people and guide their destiny.”

17. Shan Goshorn, Feminine Sacred, 2015. Woven basket: archival inks and acrylic paint on paper.

This River Runs Red Goshorn joined other artists in the exhibit Bring Her Home: Stolen Daughters of Turtle Island (2018), to sound an alarm about the epidemic of Native women being murdered, kidnapped, and trafficked in the US and Canada. Some missing women have been found in urban sex-work districts and in the remote “man-camps” of North Dakota’s fracked oil fields; the bodies of others are discarded in abandoned cars, at construction sites, and under docks and pilings; and still others are never found or counted among the missing. Goshorn’s woven work This River Runs Red (fig. 18) is in the Cherokee water pattern, and its splints contain statistical information in black and white. A white rectangular map shows the Red River, which runs from Winnipeg to South Dakota, and whose name Goshorn says is “heartbreakingly fitting.” She marked part of the river with a blood-red “visual gash” as a reminder of this place, where Native women have been “discarded and seemingly forgotten.” The basket’s top outside rim is red, as is the entire interior, which lists the names of hundreds of murdered and missing women and their W E A V I N G H I S T O R Y, L I V E S , J U S T I C E , A N D B E A U T Y I N T O A R T W I T H S O M E T H I N G T O S AY

18. Shan Goshorn, This River Runs Red, 2018. Woven basket: archival inks and acrylic paint on paper with artificial sinew.

First Nations, compiled by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wrongly declared their cases solved. Pointing to the deep historical roots of this crisis, Goshorn states that Native women, valued as leaders in all aspects of Native national life, often are devalued by non-Native men as “disposable sexual commodities.” Today’s disproportionately high rate of violence against Native women and a judicial reluctance to prosecute these crimes support the theory that the historic devaluation appears to be ongoing. She argues it is time to recognize the women’s humanity and value, and to “put a stop to this terror.” Warrior Bloodlines Series and Not Your Pocahontas Statement In the ten baskets of her 2017 Warrior Bloodlines series, Shan made what she calls an “homage piece to celebrate the strength and courage” of Native women. While she was “inspired” by 30

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her Smithsonian research in 2013, she was taken aback by the way that Native women were described or captioned in the collections, especially by the use of squaw as an identifier. The term is “not a favorable one,” she wrote, but rather a “word for vagina,” indicating the “white newcomer’s perceived use or value of Indian women.” She said she “felt fiercely” that these women “deserved recognition and honor beyond these labels.” One of the baskets in the series features Ta tow ou do sa, a Pawnee woman who was photographed in the 1880s. The basket carries the names of contemporary Native women woven on the inside (fig. 19). It was shown in the 2017 exhibition, We Are Native Women, at the Rainmaker Gallery in Bristol, England, along with Viable 1, a digital composite of a quote about mothers and an image of Jasha, a young mother-to-be “carrying our most precious cultural legacy,” said Shan. We Are Native Women exhibited works by a dozen artists on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the 1617 death of Matoaka (Pocahontas, Amonute; Powhatan) at Gravesend, Kent, England. Shan’s artist statement, “Not Your Pocahontas” takes aim at the way the historical figure has been distorted in popular culture and made into a fictional character, a cartoon of a “scantily clad Indian princess” who abandoned her people and traditions for her “white man hero, and thus his white culture.” Instead, Pocahontas was “kidnapped” and used as leverage in trade talks with her father, Chief Powhatan. “Dooming a person’s existence to that of a stereotype is worse than never having lived at all,” wrote Shan. Shan Goshorn’s Photograph Elsie Davis, Carlisle Indian Cemetery There are some women who show up to speechify for the sisterhood, but seldom show up for the sisters. There are some artists who just show up to make a sale. And there are some activists who only show up for the show or to profile against the sunset. Shan is not any of these. Shan shows up. Full stop. She should be taught as a life lesson on the kind of human being we all might strive to become. She has huge ideas and a lot of them, and she takes great care with what others might dismiss as the small stuff. The process and inspiration for her boarding school works and her journey toward the before-and-after pairs—Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence—are ably detailed by Goshorn and others elsewhere in this publication. I will say only that I have the highest regard and admiration for what she has done, the way she has done it, and the astonishing work itself. Here is the kind of thing she does as she is about the business, duty, and cultural imperative of making art and living life. This is a closing note in the nature of an appreciation to Shan for an act of kindness for my family that she made time for as she was preparing this extraordinary exhibition. She let me know in May 2016 that she had placed a blue bundle, with cedar from the Wyandotte Ceremonial Grounds, at the headstone on which is carved the agency name of my ancestor: Elsie Davis / Cheyenne. Shan emailed a photograph of the headstone (fig. 20), which I had not seen in more than a year. It made me cry—for Elsie, for our family, for our Cheyenne People, for a world that might have been—but also for the loving ways that Shan and others placed bundles and other precious things at Elsie’s headstone, and for the kindnesses in the world that is. Her name is Vah-stah (Washita). She walked on in 1893, not in 1898, as her headstone reads. July 16, 1893, is when she died, not five years later. She was sixteen. The name Elsie Davis was imposed on her when her birth was noted by the federal agent at Darlington, Indian Territory. She was number 131 in Richard Henry Pratt’s record of deaths of January 1, 1904. A scant notice of her death was printed on page 3 of the four-page weekly newsletter of the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, The Indian Helper: “The remains of Elsie Davis

19. Shan Goshorn, Ta tow ou do sa, Pawnee, from the Warrior Bloodlines series, 2017. Woven basket: archival inks and acrylic paint on paper with artificial sinew.

20. Stone marker for Elsie Davis, Cheyenne (misdated July 16, 1898), Carlisle Indian School Cemetery, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Photo: Shan Goshorn.

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were laid quietly to rest in the school grave yard on Monday afternoon. Elsie has been a sufferer for several months and died Sunday afternoon of consumption.”22 Also reported on page 3 were such items as: “The lawn is getting dry.” “The gable end of gymnasium has been rebuilt.” “Capt. Pratt and daughters…are spending a few days at the seashore.” There was news of school visits by two “eminent” men: “sculptor Brown…on his way to Gettysburg to get the details of the General Meade statue he is about to build”; and Frederick Douglass, whose address on the “‘Self-made Man’…has been printed in pamphlet form for our pupils.” Also noted was a report from the Plains: “We are informed that there was big dancing going on at Rosebud Agency, Dak, on the Fourth, and many an Indian made himself poor by giving away all he possessed. The author of our information…seems to think that the Indians are progressing backwards.” This last item was not casual information, as Indian dancing and ceremonies had been criminalized under the federal Civilization Regulations for more than ten years (and would last another forty), and offenders could be branded as “hostiles” and jailed or starved indefinitely.23 Giveaway ceremonies, like the one described at Rosebud, were specifically banned in the Civilization rules, which elaborated that the “excuse that one was a mourner” was “no defense.” That was the policy backdrop for Carlisle and its corporal punishment for children “talking Indian” or “singing Indian” (or for doing anything in the ways of the peoples and families of the hostage-students). At the historic burial place where Vah-stah’s headstone rests, there is a plaque that reads: “INDIAN CEMETERY. Buried here are the Indians who died while attending the Carlisle Indian School (1879–1910). The original Indian Cemetery was located to the rear of the grandstand on Indian Field in 1931. The graves were transferred to this site.” Carlisle’s own records present a more circuitous route from death by foreign disease to finally resting in peace. Bodies were first moved for road construction and transferred at least once more for building construction. It is not known whether some, all, or none of the bodies moved around the campus now lie with or near their headstones. There are still questions, many more than answers. Are all the students accounted for? Are they buried individually or in a mass grave? Are all their body parts there? Might they have been exhumed for the US Army Surgeon General’s Indian Crania Study (1860–1890), which “harvested” more than heads? Today, some Native Nations are seeking return of their citizens’ remains, and the army seems anxious to repatriate all the remains. It is not known to the Native public if there are plans for something else to be done with that hallowed ground. I want you to love Vah-stah, so I will write more about her when some immediate questions are answered. Love her anyway and now. She was sixteen and died of tuberculosis. Both her mothers were gone. Her father had passed within the year. She had close relatives at the school. She also was contagious. Her older brother and her sister-in-law, both of whom were former Carlisle students and new parents, lived and worked there, at the dairyman’s cottage behind the historic farmhouse. Their eldest child was my mother’s mother, who was four years old when her father’s baby sister, Aunt Vah-stah, died. After she walked on, the whole family moved to Indian Territory on Cheyenne land along the Washita River. So, love her now. She’s been by herself for a very long time. And love Shan Goshorn. Perhaps through her good works, good vision, and good words, we can find answers, respect the unanswerable, and fill the silence. Nae’ese. Vooheheva’e.

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NOTES 1. American Indians in the Federal Decennial Census, 1790–1930, Records of the United States Census and the National Archives.

11. “Our Exhibition,” The Indian Helper (Carlisle Industrial Indian School) 3, no. 82 (March 23, 1888).

2. “Statement of Vision Toward the Next 500 Years,” from the Gathering of Native Writers, Artists and Wisdom Keepers, Pueblo of Taos, New Mexico, October 14–18, 1992, sponsored by The Morning Star Institute and The 1992 Alliance.

12. Richard D. Harnois (Sr. Field Archaeologist) Not Eligible and No Historic Properties Determinations, Oahe Project, US Army Corps of Engineers, Omaha District, Department of the Army, United States) to Fern Swenson (Deputy State Historic Preservation Officer, North Dakota Historical Society) April 22, 2016: “Concurrence with Findings and Recommendations of Dakota Access/Oahe Crossing Cultural Resources Survey Report”; John W. Hendersen, Colonel, Corps of Engineers, District Commander, “Mitigated Finding of No Significant Impact, Environmental Assessment, Dakota Access Pipeline Project, Williams, Morton, and Emmons Counties, North Dakota” (July 25, 2016); Standing Rock Sioux Tribe v. U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, US District Court for the District of Columbia (Motion for Preliminary Injunction, Request for Expedited Hearing, August 4, 2016); Dakota Access, LLC v. Dave Archambault II et al., US District Court for the District of North Dakota Western Division (Complaint, August 15, 2016).

3. Stephanie A. Fryberg, “American Indian Social Representations: Do They Honor or Constrain American Indian Identities?” paper presented at “50 Years after Brown vs. Board of Education: Social Psychological Perspectives on the Problems of Racism and Discrimination,” University of Kansas, May 13–14, 2004. Accessed August 20, 2018, http://www.indianmascots.com/ex_15_-_fryberg_brown_v.pdf 4. “Ending the Legacy of Racism in Sports & the Era of Harmful ‘Indian’ Sports Mascots,” Report of the National Congress of American Indians, Washington, DC, October 2013. 5. Melanie Mason, “California Schools Barred from Using ‘Redskins’ as Team Name or Mascot,” Los Angeles Times, October 11, 2015. 6. Spencer Phips, Governor of Massachusetts, Bounty Proclamation on the Tribe of Penobscot Indians, November 3, 1755, cited in Egerton Ryerson, The Loyalists of America and Their Times: From 1620 to 1816 (Toronto: William Briggs, 1880), 2:79. 7. Richard Henry Pratt, letter to the editor, Army and Navy Journal, March 20, 1911, regarding the Pennsylvania Bounty Proclamation of 1764, “for the scalps or capture of hostile Indians, for every male above ten years, scalped, being killed, $150; for every male above ten years, scalped, being killed, $134; for every female above ten years, captured, $130; for every female above ten years, scalped, being killed $50,” citing Gordon’s History of Pennsylvania. Richard Henry Pratt Papers, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Library, WA MSS S-1174, box 25, folder 793. 8. “Dakota Man Exposes Vile History of ‘Redskins,’” The Daily Republican (1863) reprinted in Indian Country Today Media Network, April 28, 2013. The text includes the following: “The State reward for dead Indians has been increased to $200 for every red-skin sent to Purgatory. This sum is more than the dead bodies of all the Indians east of the Red River are worth.” US Congress, Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War, “Massacre of the Cheyenne Indians,” in Report of the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War at the Second Session Thirty-eighth Congress, vol. 3, pt. 6 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1865); and US Congress, Senate, Report of the Secretary of War, Sand Creek Massacre, Sen. Exec. Doc. no. 26, 39th Cong., 2nd sess., Referred to the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1867). 9. Layana Romanathan, “A Native American Vision for D.C.,” The Washington Post, April 13, 2007. 10. Commissioner Circular pursuant to Civilization Regulations, 1884, 1894, Letter to Superintendents, January 13, 1902, in Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1902, Indian Affairs, Part 1, Report of the Commissioner, and Appendixes (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1903), states: “Long Hair Prohibited…. The wearing of long hair by the male population of your agency is not in keeping with the advancement they are making, or will soon be expected to make, in civilization. The wearing of short hair…will certainly hasten their progress towards civilization. The returned male student…goes back to the reservation…. He also paints profusely and adopts all the old habits and customs which his education in our industrial schools has tried to eradicate…. You are therefore directed to induce your male Indians to cut their hair, and both sexes to stop painting…. if they become obstreperous about the matter a short confinement in the guard house at hard labor, with shorn locks, should furnish cure…The wearing of citizens clothing, instead of Indian costume and blanket, should be encouraged. Indian dances and so-called Indian feasts should be prohibited. In many cases these dances and feasts are simply subterfuges to cover degrading  acts and to disguise immoral purposes. You are directed to use your best  efforts in the suppression if these evils.”

13. Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, United Nations, Statement of September 22, 2016. See also, end of Mission Statement, March 3, 2017. 14. Article 19, Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, United Nations General Assembly, adopted (144 in favor, 4 against, 11 abstentions), September 13, 2007. 15. Jo-Ellen Darcy, Army Assistant Secretary for Civil Works, Department of Defense, United States, December 4, 2016; and Notice of Intent to Prepare an Environmental Impact Statement in Connection with Dakota Access, LLC’s Request for an Easement to Cross Lake Oahe, North Dakota, Department of the Army, Department of Defense, United States, Federal Register, 5543–5544, document no. 2017–00937, 82 FR 5543, January 18, 2017. 16. Donald J. Trump, President of the United States, Presidential Memorandum for the Secretary of the Army—Construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, Office of the Press Secretary, the White House, January 24, 2017. And Paul D. Cramer (Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Army [Installations, Housing and Partnerships], Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army [Installations, Energy and Environment]), Announcement Notice of Intent to Grant 30-Year Easement to Dakota Access at Lake Oahe Dam and Reservoir, letter to Honorable Raul Grijalva, Ranking Member, Committee on Natural Resources, US House of Representatives, February 7, 2017. 17. David Archambault II, “Taking a Stand at Standing Rock,” opinion, The New York Times, August 24, 2016. 18. Sterlin Harjo, dir., Shan Goshorn (Tulsa, OK: Fire Thief Productions, 2016), 9 min. accessed August 21, 2018. http://www.sterlinharjo. com/shortdocs/ 19. Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations, edited by Suzan Shown Harjo (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 2014). 20. Andrew Jackson, President of the United States, Message to Congress of December 8, 1829, called for enactment of the Indian Removal Act: “Professing a desire to civilize and settle them, we have…thrust them farther into the wilderness….and the Indians….have retained their savage habits….” And The Indian Removal Act of 1830, 21st Congress, Signed by the President on May 28, 1830. 21. Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act of 2013, 113th Congress, P.L. 113-4, Signed by the President on March 7, 2013. 22. The Indian Helper, 8, no. 44, July 21, 1893. 23. Civilization Regulations of the US Secretary of the Interior, in “Civilization” (issued, 1884; reissued, 1894, 1904; withdrawn, 1935), Solicitor’s Library, US Department of the Interior, Washington, DC.

W E A V I N G H I S T O R Y, L I V E S , J U S T I C E , A N D B E A U T Y I N T O A R T W I T H S O M E T H I N G T O S AY

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Filling the Silence: Protecting the Names

Barbara Landis

It was when I first saw a photograph of Shan Goshorn’s Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School that I realized the thousands of names of the Carlisle Indian School students had become memorialized and protected in a profound medium—the interior of a basket (figs. 1, 2). For thirty years, I have been collecting, sorting, and editing those very names, organizing them by nation, weeding out the duplicates, and uncovering new names found in Carlisle Indian School documents. My intention has always been to make those names accessible to the nations, including them as lists with every Indian School descendant inquiry I have answered in my work as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Archives Specialist for the Cumberland County Historical Society (CCHS) in Carlisle (fig. 3). I developed those lists as web pages ready to be distributed upon request by relatives. Whenever I answer inquiries from descendants, I always include their nation’s list(s), and oftentimes my correspondents make discoveries of additional

1. Shan Goshorn, Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, 2011. Woven basket: archival inks, acrylic paint on paper splints. Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ. Museum purchase, acquisition fund; 2015.12.a, b. Photo: Peter Jacobs. 2. Artist working on Educational Genocide.

OPPOSITE

Shan Goshorn, Educational Genocide (detail), 2011, cat. 8. Photo: Peter Jacobs.

3. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA.

names of Carlisle relatives whose stories had become lost to them. I have learned from corresponding with Native American archivists that it might not be appropriate to make those names easily accessible to the general public researching the Indian School because name lists might be printed and carelessly handled, buried under stacks of books, or wadded up and dropped into trash cans. Because of that, the student names I collect are not publicly linked, and relatives must know the URLs for the web listings in order to access them. The names are the sacred remnant of what we know as “Carlisle,” along with the stories held within descendant genealogies. These are the same names woven into Goshorn’s Educational Genocide basket on blood-red splints, in the shape of a coffin. They are held together in the interior of that basket coffin, protected by a lid, surrounded on the outside of the basket by images of the first children to be sent to Carlisle. The names have been put to rest, sheltered, and woven by the loving hands of a descendant, Shan. They have become the respected and honored representation of thousands of individual stories woven together and reconnected to one another in a good way. Several of Goshorn’s other baskets include splints of names of Carlisle Indian School students. Swept Away is Goshorn’s rendition of children swallowed up into the darkness of assimilation, inspired by a dream after visiting Carlisle (fig. 4). The fluidity of movement of chil-

4. Shan Goshorn, Swept Away, 2016. Woven basket: archival inks, acrylic paint on paper splints, polyester sinew. Artist’s collection. 5. Shan Goshorn, Unexpected Gift, 2015. Woven basket: archival inks, acrylic paint on paper splints. Artist’s collection. 6. Shan Goshorn, Roll Call, 2016. Woven basket: archival inks, acrylic paint on paper splints. Artist’s collection. 7. Shan Goshorn, Decline, Challenge, 2014. Woven basket: archival inks, acrylic paint on paper splints. Artist’s collection.

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

dren’s names embodied in the interior of the basket’s rippling water is recognizable to anyone imagining the trauma and hopelessness of offspring carried away in the darkness. Other baskets include student rosters, most notably Unexpected Gift, Roll Call, and Decline, Challenge (figs. 5–7), where the names that appear on the exterior of the basket seem to fade away. The Fire Within replicates the Cherokee Council Fire and includes the names of Cherokee students sent to Carlisle (fig. 8). Among the names found on and within these baskets is a unique set of names also found in the student rosters of the Carlisle Indian School—the names found on gravestones in the Indian Cemetery (fig. 9). The Indian Cemetery at Carlisle has been memorialized in many ways over the years. A pan-tribal group, the American Indian Society, based in the greater Washington, DC, area visits the graveyard on the Saturday of every Memorial Day weekend in May to freshen up the silk flowers in front of each stone, to sing, to pray, and to burn cedar, sage, tobacco, and sweetgrass. In 2000, during Cumberland County’s Powwow 2000, hundreds of descendants came to dance, and spiritual leaders from several nations memorialized the Carlisle student burials in unique and private ceremonies. In 2014, during the Cumberland County Historical Society’s initial Carlisle Journeys conference, a Lakota elder mixed soil from the grave of his great-grandfather Spotted Tail (South Dakota) and soil from the grave of Geronimo (Oklahoma), with that from the graves of Carlisle Indian School children from Apache, Lakota, and other graves, to bring familiar soil to the Carlisle children buried there. Although the US Army’s official Carlisle Indian School cemetery report includes a 1927 newspaper reference describing these burials as “unclaimed” remains, a recent discovery by the Dickinson College Special Archives Digitization Project contradicts this assertion. Rosebud Sioux leaders White Thunder and Swift Bear, whose children died at Carlisle, requested their children’s remains be returned to them. In a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs dated December 27, 1880, they wrote in response to the deaths of Maud Swift Bear and Ernest White Thunder:

8. Shan Goshorn, The Fire Within, 2016. Woven basket: archival inks, acrylic paint, copper foil on paper splints. Artist’s collection.

9. Indian Cemetery, Carlisle Barracks. Photo: Charles Fox.

We cannot bear to have them sleep so far from their earthly home. Our hearts will grieve too long if we do not have what is left of them [returned] back to our homes. We want to deck their graves with our own hands. We want, when the birds begin to sing and the flowers begin to bloom to have them where we can strew their graves with flowers and have them hear (in their spirits) the sweet songs of the angel birds that f[l]utter around and about their quiet resting places. (fig. 10) When Shan, her daughter Neosha, and Emily Arthur toured the Indian School grounds in mid-May 2016, I accompanied them on a visit to the cemetery (fig. 11). We were there to plan Goshorn’s and Arthur’s respective exhibitions at The Trout Gallery for the centennial of the closing of Carlisle in 2018. I had visited the cemetery many times before, trying to find answers to nagging questions born out of my fear that the names found in the historic records did not FILLING THE SILENCE: PROTECTING THE NAMES

10. Letter from Maud Swift Bear and Ernest White Thunder to the US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, December 27, 1880. US National Archives, record group 75, entry 91, Letters Received by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (1881–1907), box 1, item 339, pp. 1, 2. 11. Shan Goshorn, Emily Arthur, and Barbara Landis at the Indian Cemetery, Carlisle Barracks, 2016. Photo: Neosha Pendergraft.

perfectly match the names on existing stones. There are sets of plot maps showing names recorded when the cemetery was first moved in 1927, then again when stones were rearranged in 1947, and once more on the most recent map, which is currently posted on a plaque at the site. The three plot maps created after the reinternment of the Indian Cemetery show three different pairs of names for two sets of stones. While walking among the rows of stones and praying for every child, one by one by one, I was struck by how sincerely loved and protected each child had become at that moment. One of Shan and Neosha’s own community’s relatives was buried among the stones, a revelation found during Goshorn’s preliminary research. I watched Shan, the mother, with Neosha, the daughter, move through their memorializing process completely in sync, in quiet reverence to what was needed during their sojourn, photographing the names, placing the tobacco ties and the collected prayers and testimonials at the base of each stone. And then there was their connection to Mattie Oocumma, the Eastern Cherokee child buried there. It was a time of quiet reverence—a visitation profoundly sacred in its silence. It was a memorial act for those precious lives lost but whose names are not forgotten. And now those names live on—in a basket. Interest in the Indian Cemetery at Carlisle has brought the history of the school into broad public awareness during the past several years because of the efforts of groups of relatives determined to repatriate the remains of their Carlisle forebears (fig. 12). In the fall of 2015, a group of Rosebud Sioux youth passed through Carlisle on their way home to South Dakota from a visit to the White House Tribal Youth Gathering held by President Obama. The students’ chaperones designed a trip to the Carlisle Indian School grounds to make them aware of the history of their ancestors’ boarding school experiences. After touring the campus, the group

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

stopped at the cemetery. Dozens of teenagers walked through the graveyard and were confronted with their own surnames on the gravestones. Stunned by their discovery, they returned to South Dakota to advocate for the return of those relatives. After their intentions were publicized, the Rosebud Sioux contingency collaborated with an Arapaho woman who had tried to repatriate her own relatives ten years earlier. Her first efforts had been rebuffed by the US Army War College’s legal representative, but by the time the Rosebud youth began their quest, she had become the tribal historic preservation officer for her community. Hearing of the efforts of the Rosebud youth, she and her relatives revisited their own efforts to bring home three of their children who were buried in the Indian Cemetery at Carlisle. The Army Corps of Engineers offered their support and organized listening sessions and sent letters to all the nations representing students buried in the cemetery at Carlisle. The US Army acquiesced to the petitions of relatives and agreed to accommodate and pay for the return of the Northern Arapaho children sent to Carlisle in 1881 who had never come home. Affidavits were filed, elders were consulted, and arrangements were made to begin the process of repatriating three Arapaho children. In the summer of 2017, a contingent of relatives from Wyoming traveled to Carlisle to collect and return home the remains of Little Chief, Horse, and Little Plume. The group consisted of elders, youths, their chaperones, and their tribal historic preservation officer. During a tour of the school grounds, the young people received gifts of tobacco pouches that had been set aside from Goshorn’s packet of remembrances during her previous visit to the Indian Cemetery. It seemed as if her efforts of the previous spring to protect the children buried in Indian Cemetery now served to protect those who had come for their ancestors’ remains.

12. Warren Petoskey plays his flute at the Indian Cemetery, Carlisle Barracks, 2012. His grandfather and great-aunt attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photo: Charles Fox.

NOTES 1. The Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA, is the primary repository for archival materials associated with Carlisle Indian School. Additional materials can be found in the Pennsylvania State Archives, Harrisburg; the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and the National Archives, Washington, DC. The Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, Archives & Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, draws together resources from a wide range of sources for online research. See http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/page/contact. 2. For information regarding the cemetery, see http://carlisleindian. dickinson.edu/cemetery-information; Genevieve Bell, “Telling Stories Out of School: Remembering the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1879–1918” (PhD diss., Stanford University, 1998); Jacqueline FearSegal, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Fear-Segal and Susan D. Rose, Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, & Reclamations (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016); J. W. Joseph, Hugh Matternes, and Matthew Rector, Archival Research of the Carlisle Indian School Cemetery: U.S. Army Garrison, Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, Pennsylvania (New South Associates Technical Report 2635, Contract W912P9-16-D-0015, Task Order 6. July 5, 2017); Barbara Landis, “Death at Carlisle: Naming the

Unknowns in the Cemetery,” in Fear-Segal and Rose, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 185–200; “Cemetery Information,” Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, Archives & Special Collections, Waidner-Spahr Library, Dickinson College, accessed July 14, 2018, http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/cemetery-information/ resources. 3. The American Indian Society was established in Washington, DC, in 1966 to preserve Native culture by teaching and promoting customs and arts, by promoting health education, and through other civic duties that continue to contribute to the social advancement and wellbeing of American Indian communities. 4. “Cemetery Information” (see note 2). 5. Ibid. 6. Indian delegations to Washington, DC, dating back to the nineteenth century, often included an excursion to Carlisle, to visit family, friends, and students associated with the Indian School. See Herman J. Viola, Diplomats in Buckskins: A History of Indian Delegations in Washington City (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1981).

FILLING THE SILENCE: PROTECTING THE NAMES

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

In the Archives with Shan Goshorn

Gina Rappaport and Heather A. Shannon

The contemporary historian has to establish the value of the study of the past, not as an end in itself, but as a way of providing perspectives on the present that contribute to the solution of problems peculiar to our own time.1

On October 22, 2013, Shan Goshorn emailed a number of Smithsonian Institution employees to thank them for facilitating her research during the first part of her Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (SARF). We were among the recipients: Gina, the photo archivist at the National Anthropological Archives (NAA), and Heather, then the photo archivist at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Archive Center. Shan returned to Tulsa, she wrote, with her “brain so full of information and ideas” that she had only just settled in to make baskets “motivated by [her] research” at the Smithsonian. She looked forward to returning to Washington, DC, to complete her fellowship and to show the new work to the Smithsonian archives and collections staff who had gone “out of the[ir] way to inspire” her research. She signed off: “In the belief of who we are, Shan.”2 In the belief of who we are. These words, so generously written, included rather than implicated us in a difficult shared history, and they made us part of Shan’s remedy—her solution—to the problems peculiar to our own time. She invited us to consider and feel with her the history, represented by archival records, of violence and oppression perpetrated against indigenous Americans. These same records, Shan made clear, also offered evidence of Native resistance, determination, and resilience. Shan gathered facts and information from a perspective fully alive to the implications of archival data. We watched her engage with the materials in the NAA and the NMAI archives on intellectual, emotional, and critical levels. These responses confirmed our own convictions that archival practice with respect to indigenous peoples is not just inadequate—it is problematic. Like the historian, Shan uses primary sources to reconstruct the past; however, the histories Shan tells are experienced rather than read. Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, a series of seven pairs of baskets (fig. 1), embodies Shan’s ability to reconfigure archives and their narrative potentials into a history to be experienced by the viewer. John Choate’s before-and-after photographs of Carlisle Indian School students serve as the source imagery of the baskets (figs. 2, 3). Richard Pratt, founder and superintendent of the school, commissioned the photographs to demonstrate the success of the institution’s mission to assimilate and acculturate Native children. The baskets confront us with the human cost—past and present—of Pratt’s notorious undertaking. The baskets also reveal to us the ways in which archival practices mediate access to collections and shape interpretation. Archival protocols, for example, dictate that researchers keep collection materials flat on the table, giving the researcher little choice but to understand

OPPOSITE

1. Shan Goshorn, Four Pueblo Children (Before/ After). One of seven pairs of baskets from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017. Archival inks, acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew. Artist’s collection. A B OV E TO P

2. John N. Choate, Four Pueblo Children (Tsai au-tit-sa, Mary Ealy; Jan-i-uh-tit sa, Jennie Hammaker, Teai-e-seu-lu-ti-wa; Frank Cushing; Tra-wa-ea-tsa-lun-kia, Taylor Ealy) From Zuni, NM upon their arrival at Carlisle, ca. 1880. Albumen print. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA, PA-CH1-044a. A B OV E B OT TO M

3. John N. Choate, Four Pueblo Children (Teai-e-se-ulu-ti-wa, Frank Cushing; Tra-wa-ea-tsa-lun-kia, Taylor Ealy; Tsai au-tit-sa, Mary Ealy; Jan-i-uh-tit sa, Jennie Hammaker) From Zuni, NM, after several months at Carlisle, ca. 1880. Albumen print. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA, PA-CH1-033a.

4. Detail of Four Pueblo Children (After).

5. Shan Goshorn working on Resisting the Mission: Filling the Silence, Tulsa, Oklahoma, 2017.

them as two-dimensional. Yet Shan envisions these archival objects, both photographic and textual records, in three dimensions. The imposing height and columnar forms of the baskets give the children’s bodies volume and allow them to occupy our physical space. Compellingly, Shan does the same with texts. She renders Pratt’s speech, infamous for the phrase “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” three-dimensionally. In the baskets these words, printed on splints, lend structure to the bodies of the children, but like so many wounds, they also puncture the young bodies. Pratt’s speech, Shan reminds us, represents the lived trauma that manifested physically and mentally in the children and their descendants (fig. 4). In weaving together photographs and text, Shan transforms the documents. This transformation is an act of authorship whereby Shan strips away the authority that the archives confer on a document’s creator and on the document itself. For us, her appropriation of the documents underscores the problematic nature of archival structures and descriptions. The governing principles of archival management—provenance and original order—emphasize aspects of a collection that typically privilege the source or creator rather than the subjects represented. For example, with respect to the Carlisle photographs at the NAA, the collection is titled “The John N. Choate Photographs of Carlisle School Students.” The title emphasizes Choate’s relationship to the photographs (as their author) more than it does the children depicted. The naming convention subordinates the children to the maker of the photographs. Is Choate’s authorship necessarily the most significant attribute of these photographs? Shan’s intervention reminds us that, no, it is not. She cuts reproductions of the photographs into splints for the creation of a traditional form of Native art. This resolute act indicates that Choate’s authorship is perhaps the least important attribute of the photographs (fig. 5). By destroying and reconstituting the images, Shan restores the the children’s central importance to the photographs and unites us with the children’s histories. How do we, then, as stewards of repositories whose major focus is on indigenous peoples, build on Shan’s example? How do we establish the centrality of the children in the context of the archives? Shan’s baskets show us what is at stake if we fail: descendants and communities are unable to locate archival records; individuals remain nameless, their stories subsumed into an archival system whose logic is is often opaque to all but archivists. Our experience with Shan makes clear that we must depart from archival rules. As works of art, Shan’s baskets are an expression of her understanding of the world; they represent her subjective vision. Archives, on the other hand, have historically been mistaken to be objective—neutral receptacles for unbiased fragments of history.3 The very form of Shan’s art, the basket, calls to mind the archive. After all, like an archive, the basic function of a basket is to serve as a repository. As such, Shan’s baskets hold and generate collective memory; however, unlike the archives, they give voice to the enduring trauma of the boarding school experience. Assumptions of neutrality obscure the fact that the archives are complicit in the genesis and perpetuation of trauma sustained by indigenous Americans. Choate’s photographs arrest moments of trauma experienced by indigenous children. The photographs’ inclusion in the archives consigns the trauma to the past. Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence argues otherwise. Shan’s engagement with a traditional art may put us in mind of the archives, but her baskets eliminate the distance between the past and present, and potentially the future. The splints of the basket interior are printed with the names of the more than 8,000 children who attended Carlisle, while those on the exterior have been annotated by contemporary community members. Together, the interior and exterior splints reveal, rather than conceal, generational trauma (fig. 6). The baskets point to the subjective nature of archives and their contents and thus erode the notion of archival neutrality and objectivity.

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

6. Detail of Four Pueblo Children (Before). 7. Shan Goshorn, Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, 2011. Woven basket: archival inks, acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew. Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ. Museum purchase, acquisition fund; 2015.12.a, b. Photo: Peter Jacobs.

At the Smithsonian, as at so many other institutions, Western perspectives permeate archival collections and the standards used to arrange and describe them. What would happen if archivists broke with professional standards to accommodate other perspectives, other voices? In her catalog essay for Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, Shan recounts an interaction with a Native elder at the 2010 Red Earth Indian Show in Oklahoma City. After taking in the first of Shan’s Carlisle baskets, Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian School (fig. 7), the elder was moved to tears. She encouraged Shan to place the basket in a museum, where it would “tell our story.” Shan uses the archives to help tell that story. But her baskets also tell a story of the archives and have implications for our work as stewards of archival records. Shan’s work resists the pretense of archival neutrality. So must we. NOTES 1. Hayden V. White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 41. 2. Shan Goshorn, “Post SARF visit,” email message to the authors, 2013. 3. For a revised view of archival neutrality, see Verne Harris, “Postmodernism and Archival Appraisal: Seven Theses,” South African Archives Journal

40 (1998): 48–50; Randall C. Jimerson, Archives Power: Memory, Accountability, and Social Justice (Chicago: Society of American Archivists, 2009); Joan M. Schwartz and Terry Cook, “Archives, Records and Power: The Making of Modern Memory,” Archival Science 2, no.1–2 (2002): 1–19; and Francis X. Blouin and William G. Rosenberg, Processing the Past: Contesting Authority in History and the Archives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).

IN THE ARCHIVES WITH SHAN GOSHORN

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Two-Faced Photographs Regenerated in Warp and Weft: Shan Goshorn’s Carlisle Baskets

Educational Genocide A unique and astonishing characteristic of Shan Goshorn’s work is the photographs that she weaves into traditional Cherokee baskets. When I asked her if anyone else has done this before, she said, “I’ve never seen any work like that.”1 What first drew Goshorn to my attention was seeing the panoramic photograph of the Carlisle Indian School student body (1912), woven around the deep rim of the lid of Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School (fig. 1), just shortly after this basket had won the 2011 Red Earth Festival’s Grand Award for Best in Show.2 I was in the process of researching the Carlisle Indian School’s extensive photographic archive and exploring how Native artists are reclaiming and reframing some of these disturbing, colonial images.3 I was flabbergasted to discover that in Educational Genocide Goshorn had fused this nineteenth-century technology—photography—with the centuries-old tradition of Cherokee double-weave basket design. Educational Genocide measures almost two feet in length, and when looking at the image around the lid one can clearly make out the features of individual faces, the insignia and buttons of dark uniforms, and neat collars topping white blouses. The Olympic athlete Jim Thorpe was at the school in 1912, as was Goshorn’s great-grandmother. Goshorn came across the photograph hanging in her cousin’s restaurant in Cherokee, North Carolina. At this point, she had not yet woven any photographs, but she thought to herself, “That would wrap around a basket very nicely.” She borrowed the photograph and took it to Kinkos to make a scan, which she then used for her basket (figs. 2,3). Goshorn had only very recently started weaving seriously and had completed just one single-weave and one double-weave basket; Educational Genocide was only her third basket. When she told her Mom, “I’ve got this idea. . . . I think I’m going to try to weave a photograph into a basket,” her Mom just said, “Whaat!” Goshorn explains that a double-weave basket is one basket sitting inside another, joined around the rim (fig. 2). Construction starts on the interior bottom, and weaving continues up the sides to the desired height and then back down the sides to be finished on the bottom. When I asked her if the double-weave design has any particular function in telling this history, she reflected and replied, “I like the fact that this is a Cherokee basket. I also like the sturdiness; it has more presence, more weight, more sense of self.” The exterior of Educational Genocide is woven from beige paper splints printed with the words of the infamous “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech made by Carlisle’s founder and first superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt (fig. 4).4 Goshorn has sliced up the text to create the splints. Individual words are still

Jacqueline Fear-Segal

1. Shan Goshorn, Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, 2011. Woven basket: archival inks and acrylic paint on paper. Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ. Museum purchase, acquisition fund; 2015.12a, b. Photo: Peter Jacobs. 2. Educational Genocide, in the artist’s studio during weaving, Tulsa, OK, 2014.

OPPOSITE

Shan Goshorn, Educational Genocide (detail), 2011, cat. 8. Photo: Peter Jacobs.

A B OV E TO P

ABOVE

3. Thompson Photo Co., Poughkeepsie, NY, Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Carlisle,

4. Detail of exterior of Educational Genocide.

Pa., 1912. Albumen print. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC.

B E LOW R I G H T

B E LOW L E F T

6. Detail of interior of Educational Genocide.

5. The artist working on Educational Genocide.

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legible, but when integrated into this basket they contribute to a very different narrative (fig. 4). The interiors of basket and lid are bright red—the color of anger, blood, passion, and danger, but also love (figs. 5,6). And these interiors are woven out of thousands of paper splints, each of which carries the name of one of the more than 8,000 students who were enrolled at the school during its thirty-nine-year history. Shan Goshorn has done her research meticulously. The names of individual students, printed in the neat lettering of their Carlisle record cards, are clear and visible; but now they are enfolded by the double, protective sides of the basket, and shielded and safeguarded from voyeuristic view by the lid.5 Goshorn knows the importance of names. She recalls, “When I got into the Carlisle archives, I saw my great-grand parents’ names in the student roster. We had always known they had gone, but to see them listed . . . made it so real (figs. 7, 8).” Just as her ancestors would spend weeks locating and gathering the rivercane, white oak, and honeysuckle they needed to make their baskets, so too Goshorn needs time and expertise to acquire her materials. But instead of riverbanks and copses, Goshorn’s search grounds are archives and libraries, where she becomes a hunter-gatherer, harvesting written and visual documents as well as listening to conversations: “I gather information from everything that happens around me,” she explains, “That’s my preparation.” As a result of her research, Educational Genocide is multivocal. It incorporates a historical document outlining the genocidal mission of Carlisle, along with the bureaucratic record meticulously kept by the school on each and every one of the students, together with the human side of the story—visible in the photograph that shows the faces of the students. The basket draws in the viewer to marvel at the rendering of a photograph in warp and weft. It then delivers the realization that on this basket the students are not posed to demonstrate the success of the school, but instead to expose the pain and horror of a campaign that obliterated tribal names, reduced hundreds of traditional regalia to a single uniform, and forced children from disparate nations into an individual but regularized “Indian.” Combining the aptitude of the evidential historian with her weaving skills and artistic talent, Educational Genocide carries a strong message about the terrible cultural devastation that Carlisle and other boarding schools inflicted on Native peoples and the continuing legacies of these programs in Native communities today.

7. Carlisle Indian School Enrollment Record, Elkan(y) Wolf(e), Cherokee, 1906. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA. 8. Carlisle Indian School Enrollment Record, Moses Powell, Cherokee, 1904. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, PA.

The Carlisle Indian School and Photography The founding of the Carlisle Indian School (1879–1918), the first US government boarding school, marked the beginning of the coordinated, state-run campaign of educational genocide that would be directed at all indigenous youth.6 Carlisle was an audacious experiment in cultural transformation, and it was here that the blueprint for the federal system of Indian schools was developed, and would be copied in Canada. Carlisle’s founder and first superintendent, Richard Henry Pratt, was a man with a mission; it is appropriate that his words and ideas are remembered by being incorporated into Goshorn’s baskets. After fighting Native nations who were defending their lands and lifeways on the Plains, Pratt was appointed by the US Army to be the jailor of captured warriors, imprisoned for three years (1875–78) at Fort Marion in Saint Augustine, Florida (fig. 9). Pratt opened a fortress school for the prisoners and became convinced that he had found the answer to the nation’s “Indian problem.” He insisted that if Native children were treated in the same way as the Florida prisoners and transported to schools far from their reservation communities, they could be stripped of all vestiges of their traditional cultures and readily reeducated in the religion, language, values, and behavior of T W O - FA C E D P H OTO G R A P H S R E G E N E R AT E D I N WA R P A N D W E F T : S H A N G O S H O R N ’ S C A R L I S L E B A S K E T S

9. George Pierron, The Kiowa Prisoners, 1875. Albumen prints mounted on stereo-card. Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT. Richard Henry Pratt Papers, MSS S-1174, box 23a, folder 746. 10. John N. Choate, Richard Henry Pratt with Twelve Navajo Students, Bandstand, Carlisle Indian School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 1882. Albumen print on card. Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College. Carlisle Indian School, PC 2002.2, folder 3. 11. John N. Choate, Group of Eleven Navajo Students, 1883. Albumen print on card. Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College. Carlisle Indian School, PC 2002.2, folder 4.

mainstream settler society. Pratt projected that at schools like Carlisle this transformation of the “Indian” from “savagery” to “civilization” could be accomplished in a single generation.7 His objective at Carlisle was twofold: first, to “civilize” Native children from across the United States in preparation for their assimilation; second, to demonstrate to skeptical Americans that this transformation was possible. From the first days of the Carlisle Indian School, Pratt recruited the new medium of photography to provide visual “proof” that the dramatic transformation he promised could indeed be rapidly achieved.8 A convincing public visual record was vital to his purpose. With the willing cooperation of local commercial photographer John Nicholas Choate, he carefully choreographed and assembled an extensive colonial photographic archive to document the “success” of his school. The morning after the midnight arrival of the first children, following their long journey from Dakota, Pratt made certain that Choate was on the campus with his stereoscopic camera and mobile studio to make the first photographs of the new students, still dressed in their regalia, with girls and boys grouped separately. Sometime later, Choate took pictures of these same groups in their uniforms. He then assembled the first before-and-after pairs (figs. 10, 11). Choate had quickly grasped the profit he could make from selling pictures of Indians, and he developed a commercial catalog of Indian School images totaling more than a hundred in under two years. These first before-and-after pairs always featured at the top of Choate’s commercial list. This commodification, described by cultural studies scholar Curtis Marez as “the photo-conversion of Indians into property,” thus permitted white voyeuristic ownership of images of Native students. Purchasing and possessing 48

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these images, and perhaps arranging them in the plush albums so popular at the time, encouraged white Americans “to combine visual and tactile registers and take sensual pleasure in the imaginary experience of controlling or ‘owning’ Indians.”9 The huge and enduring popularity of images of Native peoples can in part be linked to an emotion that Renato Rosaldo has called “Imperialist nostalgia,” a paradoxical phenomenon linked to “mourning for what one has destroyed.”10 Choate profited from this emotion, and as he gained experience in photographing “Indians,” he honed his practice of the before-and-after genre by directly matching and naming the Carlisle students he included in the image duos, as well as by focusing on smaller groups, so that the constructed changes he presented could be more easily scrutinized. Despite the hundreds of photographs that Choate made of Carlisle’s students and activities, it was the before-and-after pairs that were most popular with white viewers and they became the photographic signature of the school, as well as an instrument of its propaganda. Mass-produced as albumen boudoir and cabinet prints, Pratt sent them out to the US president, congressmen, government officials, and prospective donors, and also offered them as “rewards” to any reader of the school’s Indian Helper who signed up ten new subscribers.11 At Choate’s downtown studio and on campus, the photographs were sold to members of the public. Intended to provide indisputable proof of the success of this federally sponsored campaign of cultural genocide, the before-and-after photographs carried a forthright message of a seemingly straightforward and easy transition from “savagery” to “civilization,” in binary pairs that elided all reference to the processes of change demanded by the school, and that totally disregarded the disruption, loss, and pain inflicted on the students, as well as subsequent generations. Despite their apparent simplicity, these photographs are highly complex visual constructions that carry covert narratives. Embedded in these photographic dyads is a new rendering of the “vanishing Indian.” Here, under the eyes of the viewer, instead of being subject to physical disappearance—the traditional solution12—individual tribes are rendered culturally extinct, a process described by Ted Jojola, an Isleta Pueblo, in an essay about boarding school images entitled “Photographs from Hell,” as “a magic act called ‘The Vanishing American.’”13 Reflecting on photography and how it has “abused” Native Americans, Anishinabe writer Gerald Vizener demands, “Photographers abused the native sense of privacy to capture an image and then either sold or distributed the pictures to various agencies. How should we now respond to photographs that have violated the privacy of the natives?”14

12, 13. Shan Goshorn, High Stakes; Tribes’ Choice #1 and #2, 2011. Digital photograph: archival pigments

Before-and-After Photographic Baskets Shan Goshorn’s response to this question is to weave the Carlisle photographs into traditional Cherokee baskets.15 Goshorn is herself a distinguished photographer who has directly used the power of her camera to expose and combat visual racist stereotypes (figs. 12, 13).16 But she finds that her baskets have been much more effective in conveying the difficult messages she wants to communicate. “Up until I started making baskets,” she notes, “my work was very confrontational and people would wrap their arms around themselves and practically back out of a room, because they didn’t want to deal with that confrontation.” Reflecting on how that response has now changed, she observes:

and glitter on paper.

There’s something about baskets…maybe it’s the familiarity of the shape—it’s a domestic vessel, they’re not threatening, they’re very nurturing—so I think people are intrigued. People literally lean into these baskets. Instead of backing up and separating and distancing themselves, they actually want to engage in this conversation. T W O - FA C E D P H OTO G R A P H S R E G E N E R AT E D I N WA R P A N D W E F T : S H A N G O S H O R N ’ S C A R L I S L E B A S K E T S

14. Shan Goshorn, Alaskan Children (before/after) from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017. One of seven sets of baskets: archival ink, and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew. Artist’s collection.

The conversation she hopes to open up through her Carlisle baskets directly engages Native peoples, but Goshorn also wants “the general public to be educated about this history and about the terrible impact it has had on tribal cultures.… I’m stunned by how many people in America are still just so surprised that there are Indians left… so unaware. Our history is not taught in schools.” Like Educational Genocide, the exteriors of the before-and-after baskets that make up her most ambitious series of baskets—Resisting the Mission: Filling the Silence—are woven from the words of Pratt’s “Kill the Indian” address, and their red interiors are made from splints carrying the students’ names (fig. 14). While creating this series, Goshorn engaged directly with members of the communities who have been affected by the historical trauma instigated by Carlisle’s program and who have experienced firsthand the enduring legacies of cultural destruction. 50

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Sending the before-and-after images out to communities and carrying them with her on her travels, she invited descendants to inscribe their own thoughts and feelings directly onto the photographs (figs. 15, 16). Then she cut the images into splints and wove them into seven pairs of Cherokee single-weave baskets, each standing nearly two feet high. The photographic pairs Goshorn selected for these baskets cover the wide range of Native nations enrolled at Carlisle—Inuit, Lakota, Pueblo, Apache, Navajo. The school included representatives from almost every single Native nation whose lands were incorporated into the United States; few were left untouched by its genocidal mission. Navajo/Diné student Hastiin To’Haali, known at Carlisle as Tom Torlino, arrived at Carlisle in 1882. 17 He is one of twelve Navajo posed for a photograph on the school bandstand with Pratt (see fig. 10).18 There is also a solo portrait of him; the only before-and-after pair that Choate made of an individual student (figs. 17, 18). When members of the public have been made aware of the history of Indian boarding schools, including Carlisle, it is often after seeing Torlino’s before-and-after photographs.19 These iconic Carlisle images were used to demonstrate the “marked contrast between a Navajo as he arrived in native dress, and as he now looks, and worth 20 cents a piece.”20 Created by carefully cropping a three-quarter length portrait so that it closely matched the image made of Torlino three years earlier, Choate succeeded in displaying striking changes in Torlino’s dress, hair, ornamentation, gaze, and even skin color, all of which served to made his supposed transformation appear particularly dramatic. As with all such duos, the visual narrative embedded in this pair of photographs powerfully suggested that a dramatic change had taken place and deftly implied that the exhibited exterior changes had been matched by analogous interior changes. Responding to Torlino’s persistent exploitation through the misuse of his teamed photographic images, in Two Views Shan Goshorn refutes Carlisle’s binary message by weaving a portrait that unites and merges these two photographs (fig. 19). “I wanted to show the division in this one person,” Goshorn explains. The portrait nestled in this basket is mesmeric; the extraordinary resilience demanded of Torlino is suggested by the serene power that seems to radiate from his face. Torlino’s bureaucratic Carlisle record is reproduced in the tan splints that encircle this basket (fig. 20). But Goshorn does not allow his story to end with Carlisle. After his four years at the school, Torlino returned to Coyote Canyon, New Mexico, to resume his traditional studies and to serve as medicine man to his people until he died. So, unlike the original before-and–after photographs, Goshorn’s basket embraces his whole life, with the later period being described by his great-great-granddaughter, Nonabah Sam. Her handwritten account is written on the basket’s rust colored splints, which speak of the continuing impact of Torlino’s years at Carlisle on his Diné family, who respect education but remain true to Diné teachings, as was his wish. (Interestingly, Choate had made his long hair a striking feature of Torlino’s “before” photograph, but Goshorn discovered from his relatives that Torlino kept his hair short for the rest of his life.) The basket’s white, black, blue, and yellow splints carry a Navajo prayer for wellbeing in the four sacred colors, but the irregular blackbird-eye pattern of the basket references the discomfort and divisions internalized by many students. All the photographs woven into these baskets were made by Choate in Carlisle. Either the students visited his studio at 21 Main (High) Street, 500 yards from The Trout Gallery or were photographed on the Carlisle Indian School campus (now the US Army War College), just two miles up the road. In an era when hundreds of Carlisle images are now available online, Goshorn is intensely aware of the importance of the photographic encounter and the saliency of the physical photograph. “It’s very different when you hold the image…because that photo

15. Prints for Resisting the Mission: Filling the Silence, assembled for signing, Tulsa, OK, 2016. 16. Detail of Eskimo Children, with inscriptions, for Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2016.

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17. John N. Choate, Tom Torlino (upon arrival at Carlisle), c. 1882. Albumen print on card. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, RG 75, series 1327, box 18, folder 872. 18. John N. Choate, Tom Torlino (three years later), c. 1885. Albumen print on card. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC, RG 75, series 1327, box 18, folder 872. 19. Detail of Two Views.

is literally the link between the photographer’s eye and the subject…so that really informed my research process.” The photographs of these students have now returned to Carlisle, the place where they were made. In this exhibition, Resisting the Mission, Shan Goshorn entirely transmutes the meaning of “before” and “after.” She invites us to position Choate’s photographic duos as the “before,” with her Cherokee baskets being the “after.” Now integrated and carried in a traditional craft form, the photographs are no longer instruments of propaganda. They can offer a means for Native and non-Native audiences alike to view, ponder, and begin to understand the history of Carlisle and its legacies.

20. Shan Goshorn, Two Views, 2018. Woven basket: archival ink and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew. The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College. Purchased with funds from the Friends of The Trout Gallery, 2018.12.

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NOTES 1. Shan Goshorn, interview by the author, November 15, 2016, Frankfurt, Germany. All Goshorn quotations are from this interview. 2. Red Earth is the primary multicultural resource in Oklahoma for advancing the understanding and continuation of traditional and contemporary Native culture and art. It was founded in 1978 with the establishment of the Center of the American Indian in Tulsa, a museum dedicated to promoting the rich traditions of American Indian arts and cultures through education, a premier festival, a museum, and fine art markets. In 1987, a group of influential community and tribal leaders founded the Red Earth Festival to showcase Native dance and art. The two groups merged in 1992 to create Red Earth, Inc. 3. E.g., Dorothy Grandbois, Crucifixion, 1994, digital photo-print on canvas; Steven Deo, Indoctrination #3, 2000, mixed media; and N. Scott Momaday, Carlisle, 2012, acrylic on board. 4. Official Report of the Nineteenth Annual Conference of Charities and Correction (1892), 46–59, repr. in Richard H. Pratt, “The Advantages of Mingling Indians with Whites,” Americanizing the American Indians: Writings by the “Friends of the Indian,” 1880–1900, ed. F. P. Prucha (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), 260–71. 5. With close observation, one can make out the names of specific individuals (for example, Mary Hunter (Caddo) and Nellie Hollie Cloud (Rosebud Oglala). It should be noted that Shan Goshorn conducted her research for Educational Genocide before the student records had all been made available online by Dickinson College’s Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center, http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/. 6. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1878–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995). 7. For Pratt’s own account of his founding and running of the Carlisle Indian School, see Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867–1904, ed. Robert Marshall Utley (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964). 8. On before-and-after imagery, see the essay by Phillip Earenfight in this volume. 9. Curtis Marez, “Looking Beyond Property: Native Americans and Photography,” Rikkyo American Studies 29 (March 2007), www. academia.edu/8671758/Looking_Beyond_Property_Native_ Americans_and_Photography.

11. Preserved in the Hayes presidential archive, the first student beforeand-after images were among the more than three dozen photographs Pratt sent to the president, which today are held in the Lucy Webb Hayes Photograph Collection (Hayes-Ph-2), Rutherford B. Hayes Presidential Library, Ohio; Indian Helper 5, no. 12 (November 8, 1889). 12. General Philip Sheridan is supposed to have first spoken the apocryphal and oft-repeated words, “The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.” 13. Ted Jojola, “Photographs from Hell,” in Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection, ed. Simon J. Ortiz (Tucson: University of Arizona Press by arrangement with Haskell Indian Nations University, 2004), 79. 14. Gerald Robert Vizenor, Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 162. 15. We know the abuse went far beyond cultural obliteration. The revelations of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission have made public the horrifying extent of all levels of abuse inflicted on Native children attending residential schools. In Canada, as in the US, there were no safeguards in place to protect them. 16. Leon Grodski de Barrera, “Taking Ownership: Exhibit Explores the Exploitation of Native American Stereotypes, Smoky Mountain News, October 13, 2010, accessed July 28, 2018, http://www.smokymountainnews.com/news/item/1957-taking-ownership-exhibit-explores-the-exploitation-of-native-american-stereotypes. 17. Cindy Yurth explains that Tom Torlino was a mistranscription of his Navajo name, Hastiin To’Haali; Yurth, “Manuelito’s Legacy,” Navajo Times, February 14, 2013, accessed July 28, 2018, http://www.navajotimes.com/news/chapters/021413coy.php. 18. He attended the Carlisle Indian School from October 21,1882, to August 28, 1886; Tom Torlino Student File, accessed July 28, 2018, http://carlisleindian.dickinson.edu/sites/all/files/docs-ephemera/ NARA_1327_b018_f0872.pdf. 19. See Bill Bigelow, ed., Rethinking Our Classrooms: Teaching for Equity and Justice, vol. 2 (Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools, 2001). 20. Indian Helper 5, no. 12 (November 8, 1889).

10. Renato Rosaldo, Culture & Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993), 69.

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SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Shan Goshorn’s Resisting the Mission and the origins of Before-and-After Photographs at the Carlisle Indian School 1

Phillip Earenfight

“A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase then natural ambiguity of the photographic image.” 2

The compelling imagery that Shan Goshorn has woven into the pairs of baskets that comprise Resisting the Mission: Filling the Silence are enlarged versions of vintage before-and-after photographs made of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School (fig. 1).3 These photographs show selections of the Indian students—Alaskan, Apache, Navajo, Pueblo, Sioux—upon their arrival at the Carlisle Indian School (before) and several months later (after) (figs. 2, 3). They were made by John N. Choate, a prominent local photographer in the small town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, during the last decades of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century.4 The before-and-after pairs of photographs were conceived and staged by the founding superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School, Richard Henry Pratt, who commissioned them, in part, to demonstrate what he regarded as the efficacy of assimilationist practices at the first and most

1. Shan Goshorn, Three Sioux Students from Mission Resisted: Filling the Silence, 2017. One of seven pairs of baskets: archival ink and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew. Artist’s collection.

2. John N. Choate, Wounded Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, Timber Yellow Robe; Upon Their Arrival in Carlisle, n. d., Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Carlisle Indian School, PC 2002.2, folder 6. 3. John N. Choate, Wounded Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, Timber Yellow Robe; 6 Months after Entrance to the School, n. d., Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Carlisle Indian School, PC 2002.2, folder 7.

4. Mathew Brady Studio, Gordon, 1863. Albumen print on card. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, NPG.2002.89.

influential of the nation’s off-reservation boarding schools. According to Pratt, Choate’s beforeand-after photographs offered indisputable, visual proof that his school was physically—and by not so subtle implication—culturally transforming “blanket” Indians (to use Pratt’s term) into “civilized” members of white society.5 The paired photographs are well known among scholars and archivists of the Carlisle Indian School and, more broadly, of those who study and follow matters associated with Native Americans. Indeed, the paired photographs are, perhaps, the most widely recognized images, dare one say, icons, of the school and its mission. The photographs, however, are more than documents of a mission. They, like the photographs of former Black slaves, which display the marks of brutal torture at the hands of their owners, bear witness to the systematic abuse of minority ethnic populations by dominant whites (fig. 4).6 In the case of the tortured slave photographs, a “before” image is unnecessary; one can easily visualize the skin smooth and even, prior to the scars. However, unlike the photographs of mutilated slaves, where evidence of hate stands visible as many and deep scars, Choate’s formal portraits of the Indians present an air of late-Victorian pleasantness. The damage to the person is not immediately apparent. And some viewers see no damage, only improvement. In these images, the destructive effects are subtler; the photographs more pernicious. While few could fail to recoil at the sight a of a deeply scarred physical body, it requires imagination and empathy to visualize the scarring of one’s cultural identity, particularly in images that appear so refined and adhere faithfully to the portrait conventions of the day. In selecting Choate’s before-and-after photographs as the focus for Resisting the Mission, Goshorn seized on imagery that emerged during a pivotal moment in US history, when matters of cultural assimilation, photography, evidence-based science, and advertising intersected in significant and, at times, nefarious ways. Although Pratt’s work with Choate in creating beforeand-after photographs at the Carlisle Indian School is well documented and published, the story of how Pratt arrived at using paired photographs—initially at St. Augustine and then at the Hampton Normal Agricultural Institute in Virginia—to demonstrate the acculturation of Indians has received little scholarly attention.7 By considering these earlier practices, one gains a broader picture of this material and the place of Resisting the Mission within it. Before-and-After Imagery Prior to Pratt The practice of using images to document and promote change over time emerged during the Industrial Revolution, enabled by the development of larg-scale printing operations and the advent of modern print advertising. Indeed, the last quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the weaving together of various strands of imagery, art, science, colonialism, capitalism, and notions of civilization and citizenship that led to the emergence of before-and-after imagery. And just as photography has two simultaneous points of origin (Paris and London), so too, the surviving evidence suggests that the earliest before-and-after images appeared in England and the United States at the same time, cultivated by similar cultural forces. Among the earliest known uses of photographs to document and promote acculturation appears in the before-and-after photographs made during the US Civil War of “Taylor” or “Contraband Jackson,” a young runaway slave who became a Union drummer in the 78th Infantry Regiment, US Colored Troops (figs. 5, 6). As James Brookes notes: In slavery, the boy appears in rags and tatters, his body exposed and with no props to symbolise his social worth. In the second image he stands as a drummer in formal military dress, wearing a frock coat and white gloves. The instrument, a martial symbol of organisation and of keeping

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

5. Photographer unknown, Taylor [aka Jackson], young drummer boy for 78th Colored Troops Infantry, in rags, 1864–1865. Albumen print on card. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, DC. 6. Photographer unknown, Taylor [aka Jackson], young drummer boy for 78th Colored Troops Infantry, in uniform with drum, 1864–1865. Albumen print on card. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, DC.

time, provides evidence that he was able to rise from the oppression of slavery to the position of one who would beat the step that the Union Army marched to in its destruction of the South’s slave society in the last years of the war.8 The pair of photographs were used by abolitionists to demonstrate the uplifting and civilizing influence that military service could have on African Americans, transforming them from penniless slaves to men of rank and status. Such service and self-sacrifice to the country were touted as a means towards enlightenment, emancipation, citizenship, and assimilation.9 The photographs provided tangible evidence to Frederick Douglass’s argument: Once let the black man get upon his person the brass letters U.S., let him get an eagle on his button, and a musket on his shoulder, and bullets in his pocket, and there is no power on earth or under the earth which can deny that he has earned the right of citizenship in the United States.10 Here, photography provided the weight of seemingly unbiased documentation of such service. As Susan Sontag later observed, “[a] photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened.”11 Although the photographs of the Union drummer seem stiff and staged to modern eyes made cynical by the ease of digital manipulation, one must consider the power of such imagery at this time. In an age when photography was new, trust in its veracity was high, and its potential to sway opinion was at its peak, it is difficult to overestimate the persuasive power of the medium. A second example of photographic before-and-after images are the those made for Dr. Thomas John Barnardo, an Irish philanthropist and founder of homes for poor children in the East End of London.12 To promote the efficacy of his institutions and raise charitable funds, SHAN GOSHORN’S RESISTING THE MISSION AND THE ORIGINS OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER PHOTOGRAPHS

7. Thomas John Barnes, E.E.J.M. Home for Working & Destitute Lads. No. 35. “Buy ‘Daily News’ or ‘Echo’!” (The same lad as on card No. 36.), from Barnardo Before and After Picture, c.1872. Albumen silver print cabinet card. Barnardo’s Photographic Archive, London. Photo © Barnardo’s Photographic Archive. 8. Thomas John Barnes, E.E.J.M. Home for Working & Destitute Lads. No. 36. “Going to Sunday School,” from Barnardo Before and After Picture, c.1872. Albumen silver print cabinet card. Barnardo’s Photographic Archive, London. Photo © Barnardo’s Photographic Archive.

Bernardo commissioned a series of before-and-after images—which he called “contrasts”—to illustrate the transformation of destitute street children into healthy youths of promise under his care (figs. 7, 8). He produced tens of thousands of the mounted photographs, which he sold or gave away. In one instance, he claims to have used the “contrasts” to convince a would-be child prostitute named Bridget to enter his care. Ever the promoter, Barnardo exceeded the bounds of British credulity and, in July 1877, he was accused by rival philanthropic organizations in court for staging his photographs and enriching himself on the charitable donations they inspired. As part of the attack on Banardo, George Reynolds, an evangelical Baptist minister, self-published a pamphlet entitled “Dr. Barnardo’s Homes: Startling Revelations,” where he alleged that Barnardo, in an effort to exaggerate the contrast that appears in the paired photographs, “tears their clothes, so as to make them appear worse than they really are. A lad named Fletcher is taken with a shoeblack’s box upon his back, although he never was a shoeblack.”13 Pressed with the truth, Barnardo admitted to artistic license: “we are often compelled to seize the most favorable opportunities of fine weather, and the reception of some boy or girl of a less destitute class whose expression of face, form, and general carriage may, if aided by suitable additions or subtractions of clothing ... convey a truthful picture ... of the class of children received in unfavourable weather, whom we could not ... photograph immediately.”14 Ultimately, the court of arbitration cleared Barnardo of wrongdoing. While his accusers were motivated in part by the considerable amount of charitable funds his scheme attracted, the case was pivotal in the history of photography because it further undercut Victorian notions of the photographic image and its veracity. More significant for this study, however, is that a “deliberately manipulated photograph of a child was considered not just an assault on notions of representational truth, but an assault on the innocence of the child itself.”15 A final example of before-and-after imagery dates from the 1890s, which is well into the period when the Carlisle Indian School was in operation. Although made in the wake of Pratt’s before-and-after photographs, it provides a valuable insight into the age and the moral depravity 58

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to which such promotional efforts could descend. It concerns the work of Thomas James Barratt, the chairman of A&F Pears and “father of modern advertising,” who played a key role in England in using the before-and-after concept in drawing together marketing, colonialism, and capitalism. In a series of racist ads from the 1890s for Pear’s Soap (fig. 9), the company produced two-panel before-and-after designs. The first features a white child presenting a black child with soap, brush, and a basin of water. In the subsequent panel, the black child, “after” using the soap, appears gleaming white from the neck down, demonstrating the astonishing effect of the soap’s “cleaning” ability. The promotional text reads: “Pear’s Transparent Soap. For Improving the Complexion.” This ad visualizes in the most insulting, literal terms the effects of “enlightenment.” Produced at the height of colonization, when expansionist greed brought the world’s powers into increasing contact and conflict with indigenous peoples, the before-and-after advertisement linked Pears Soap with British imperial culture, enlightenment thought, a growing obsession with hygiene, global marketing, and the country’s self-styled civilizing mission.16 While there is no evidence to indicate that Richard Henry Pratt knew anything of these specific examples (although his experience in the Civil War and the sheer volume of Barnardo’s photos leads one to speculate as much), the use of photographs and prints to demonstrate change through a pair of before-and-after images was an increasing popular rhetorical device in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Thus, consistent with the promotional activities of his day, Pratt, in an effort to promote his self-fashioned approach to assimilating the Native Americans, visualized the results of these efforts through before-and-after photographs, first at St. Augustine, then clarifying the practice at the Hampton Institute, and finally expanding and codifying it at Carlisle.

9. Pear’s Soap Advertisement, c. 1890s, color lithograph. Photo courtesy ALAMY stock photos.

Before-and-After Photographs at Fort Marion and Hampton (1875–1879) Pratt’s first efforts at assimilating Native Americans and documenting such practices began with a rather humble assignment. In 1875, Pratt was selected to escort and supervise seventy-two Indian prisoners of war from Fort Sill, Indian Territory (later, Oklahoma) to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, where they were to be incarcerated until conflict with white settlers on the Plains subsided.17 Despite his detailed account of the twenty-four day passage from the Plains to the coast, Pratt makes no mention of plans to photograph the Indians upon arrival at Fort Marion, and nothing of his plans to transform—without the approval of his commanding officer—a routine transport/prison detail into an experiment in forced acculturation.18 Nevertheless, shortly after they arrived at the old Spanish fort, Pratt and the town’s local photographer (probably George Pierron), arranged to take photographs of the Indians (fig. 10).19 After the photo session, Pratt began his assimilationist experiment: stripping the Indians of their language, clothes, customs; cutting their hair; and reforming them as Western-thinking, English-speaking military cadets. Whether the immediate and obvious physical change (haircut and uniforms) prompted another round of photographs, thereby setting in motion the first before-and-after images of the Indians at the fort, it is not known. Regardless, Pratt had photos taken of the Indians in uniform over the course of the next three years. In one example, among the many preserved in Pratt’s papers at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University (fig. 11), two rows of uniformed soldiers stand at attention in the fort’s courtyard, along the arched stairway that leads up to the elevated terreplein. Their consistent dress and comportment belies the differences in language, identity, allegiances, and beliefs that lay below the veneer of martial order. Commissioning such photographs (and selling them to the city’s tourist population) were periodic occurrences at the fort, evident by the more than fifty negatives known to have been made at the site. SHAN GOSHORN’S RESISTING THE MISSION AND THE ORIGINS OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER PHOTOGRAPHS

10. Photographer Unknown, Indian Prisoners upon Arrival at Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida, 1875. Albumen print, Richard Henry Pratt Papers, WA MSS S-1174, box 23a, folder 745. Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. 11. Photographer unknown, A Group of Plains Indian Prisoners of War in Military Uniform Assembled in Courtyard, Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida, c. 1875–1878. Albumen prints mounted on a stereo view card. Richard Henry Pratt Collection, MSS S-1174, Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut.

While the Plains Indians were, by the late nineteenth century, increasingly familiar with the practice of photography, which they would have encountered on occasion at the reservations and forts on the Plains, being the subject of tourist photographs that were bought and sold in St. Augustine must have been a novel experience. Indeed, the practice was curious enough for Making Medicine, a Cheyenne warrior held captive at the fort, to create a marvelous drawing from a uniquely Indian perspective that illustrates Pratt and his staff photographing Indians (fig. 12). Indeed, it captures a scene almost identical to the stereograph describes above. From a bird’s-eye-view, the drawing presents the perimeter wall of the court yard and the uniformed Indians at attention, with the photographer, Pratt, and George Fox (his interpreter) opposite the Indians, directing the scene. Unlike the stereograph, which shows only the perspective of the photographer’s gaze through the camera’s lenses, Making Medicine’s drawing shows all parties equally, from a third-person point of view. Seen in light of this drawing, the photographs made 60

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under Pratt’s authority at the fort appear entirely one-sided, intrusive, peering, and subject to the gaze of those in control. Perhaps it was the knowledge of other before-and-after images he might have seen, or simply the sight of the photographs made of the Indians upon arrival at the fort and later, that led Pratt to see their value as persuasive evidence to prove the efficacy of his assimilationist experiment. Regardless of what stirred his thoughts, by 1878, when the US government permitted the Indians to return to the Plains, it is certain that Pratt was aware of before-and-after imagery and of its potential. This is confirmed by a trompe-l’œil illustration in the New York Daily Graphic (which is based on photographs and drawings made at the fort) that shows a “before” and an “after” drawing of the Indians tacked to either side of the central, circular image —the first, on the Plains in their own clothes, and the second, at Fort Marion in military-issue uniforms (fig. 13).20 The two drawings are labeled “Past” and “Present” respectively. Upon releasing the prisoners of war from Fort Marion in 1878, seventeen of the surviving sixty-three stayed with Pratt, who took them to the Hampton Institute, where they joined recently freed slaves to further their Western education and assimilation.21 At Hampton, Pratt worked with Samuel Chapman Armstrong to develop a biracial, segregated educational environment. Not long after Pratt’s arrival, the subject of photographs emerged. In a letter that Armstrong sent to Pratt, who was in Nebraska on an admissions tour at the time, he urges: “We wish a variety of photographs of the Indians. Be sure and have them bring their wild barbarous things. This will show whence we started.”22 While Armstrong’s request seems to suggest that the concept of before-and-after photographs might have been new to Pratt, which would be unusual in light of the proceeding discussion, perhaps it was meant as a reminder of what Pratt was already well acquainted, rather than the introduction of a new idea. Whether such photographs were made is uncertain; none have been identified with this request from Armstrong. That said, by the time Pratt parts company with Armstrong the following year to accept the superintendent

13. Scenes at the Fort. The Indian Prisoners Released from Fort Marion, Florida, Daily New York Graphic, April 26, 1878. 12. Making Medicine, Indian Prisoners at Fort Marion Being Photographed, c. 1875–1878. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, MS-39B.

SHAN GOSHORN’S RESISTING THE MISSION AND THE ORIGINS OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER PHOTOGRAPHS

14. John N. Choate, Back of photographic card from Choat’s studio, Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Carlisle Indian School, folder 12.

position at the newly created Carlisle Indian School, he left for Pennsylvania with a firm command of before-and-after imagery and how it can be used to visualize and promote the mission of acculturation at the school. Thus, by the time he met Choate at his studio on 21 West Main (High) Street, he had a clear idea of what he would like the photographer to do. Once in Carlisle, Pratt put Choate to work documenting a wide range of activities at the school, with the before-and-after photographs occupying a pride of place in his work. A particularly fine example of this can be seen in his paired images of Wounded Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, Timber Yellow Robe (figs. 2, 3). In the before image, the three men appear with a range of items selected and arranged to emphasize their exotic qualities. Indeed, the standing figure appears overburdened if not nearly buried in blankets, robes, and related items, hands all but hidden. His partners, each with a feather inserted prominently in his hair, sit on a rug that covers the floor that extends back to the illusionistic studio background, which suggests an architectural element on the left and an uninterrupted view into a landscape to the center and right. The boys regard the photographer (and viewer) with extraordinary frankness. In contrast, the second photograph presents the three youths in what looks like a comfortable Victorian interior space. No longer consigned to the floor, the two flanking boys sit on upholstered furniture and strike gestures appropriate to late nineteenth-century gentlemen-in-training. Hands, a key indicator to social grace, are placed prominently in one’s lap or on the shoulders of others. The illusionistic background describes an interior space that gives way to the framed view of a mountain. The boys direct their attention to the right, in deference to the viewer. Choate (and/or Pratt), unable to restrain baser impulses, positions the group so that the plant fronds rise up behind the figure on the left, mockingly, in imitation of the feather that appears in the previous photograph. While not as patently phony as Barnardo’s “contrasts” nor as insulting as the Pear’s Soap advertisement, the subtle differences between Choate’s two photographs effectively conveyed to fellow viewers what appeared to be a major change in the nature of the sitters. Indeed, they were effective because the differences were subtle and not heavy-handed. Pratt put such photos to a range of uses. In a letter to T. C. Pound, a member of the US House of Representatives, he wrote: I send you today a few photographs of the Indian youth here. You will note that they came mostly as blanket Indians. A very large proportion of them had never been inside of a schoolroom. I am gratified to report that they have yielded gracefully to discipline and that our school rooms, in good order, eagerness to learn, actual progress, etc., are, to our minds, quite up to the average of those of our own race. Isolated as these Indian youth are from the savage surroundings of their homes, they lose their tenacity to savage life, which is so much of an obstacle to Agency efforts, and give themselves up to learning all they can in the time they expect to remain here.23 Apart from their political value, the photographs were a notable item in Choate’s inventory. On the backs of his photographs we find the following promotional text: “Photographs of all the Indian Chiefs that have visited the Indian Training School at Carlisle Barracks, also of children in native and school costumes (fig. 14).”24 It also appears that Choate and Pratt worked

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together on marketing the photos. The Big Morning Star, a newspaper of the Carlisle Indian School, published instructions on how to order photographs of the students. In its April 1881 issue, the paper lists eighty-nine photographs of the Indian School and their prices. In 1886, two new subscribers to the newspaper would receive: “…two photographs, one showing a group of Pueblos as they arrived in wild dress and another of the same pupils three years after.”25 Assimilation was not only government policy, it was a commodity. Pratt’s Tom Torlino and Goshorn’s Two Views Today, among the best known of Choate’s before-and-after images are two views of the Diné (Navajo) student Tom Torlino (figs. 15, 16). Here, the photographer presents Torlino bust-length, an image that shows little of the sitter’s clothing and symbols of status and rank and concentrates attention on his face. In this case, that concentration brings out that the face in the earlier photograph is much darker than the face in the later one. This difference, one could assume, served Pratt’s interests as it is presented in most vivid terms the physical—and by implication, cultural—changes that had taken place. Such a difference can be coincidental, or they can be achieved rather easily by the photographer—in advance (through different lighting scenarios, exposing/processing the negatives differently), after the fact (exposing/processing the photographic print paper differently), or a combination of both. From the photographs, it cannot be determined how precisely Choate achieved these results nor at what point he or Pratt seized upon their contrasting appearances and their potential usefulness. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that Pratt was pleased with the results. Today, these two photographs are iconic images that visualize, perhaps more vividly than any other, Pratt’s assimilationist mission. Indeed, they are among the most often repeated images from this context in circulation. As such, they serve as key resources for Shan Gorshorn.

15. John N. Choate, Tom Torlino (upon arrival at Carlisle), c. 1882. Albumen print on card. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. 16. John N. Choate, Tom Torlino (three years later), c. 1885. Albumen print on card. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC.

SHAN GOSHORN’S RESISTING THE MISSION AND THE ORIGINS OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER PHOTOGRAPHS

17. Shan Goshorn, Two Views, 2018. Woven basket: archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew. The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College. Purchased with funds from the Friends of The Trout Gallery, 2018.12. 18. Detail of Two Views.

In 2018, Goshorn completed Two Views, a work that features Choate’s before-and-after photographs of Tom Torlino (fig. 17). However, rather than produce two baskets with a beforeand-after image on each—as she did for seven sets of baskets that make up Resisting the Mission, she wove the two images into one, integrating them into a single portrait (fig. 18). In doing so, Goshorn has stopped time, blunting Pratt’s efforts to divide an Indian into two successive beings along a temporal continuum; one to kill and one to save. She has also stopped movement through space, seizing on a central issue of permanent dislocation and loss of place and belonging faced by so many who experienced Fort Marion, Carlisle, and related institutions. She has, in one gesture, upended the fundamental tool of Pratt’s photographic propaganda: the ability of the camera to capture time and space as a means to shape an assimilationist narrative. Her weaving technique poetically resolves the complexity of assimilation into a single, haunting image; one that conveys a sense of how it feels to be torn from one’s world and thrust into another where they are not wanted. This reading of Two Views, one that stops time and space in the before-and-after photographs, causes one to re-evaluate the seven pairs of baskets in Resisting the Mission. Rather than reading them according to Choate’s and Pratt’s sequential ordering of time, as before-and-after images, I propose that they invite an “after” to “before” reading as well. One that reversed direction and causes the viewer to imagine “what has been lost?” To look at the “before” photograph and contemplate “what could have been?”

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NOTES 1. Phillip Earenfight, “Photography and Ledger Drawing at Fort Marion,” paper presented at the symposium “A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion,” The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, October 20, 2007; and idem, “Captive Images: Ledger Drawings and Photographs from Fort Sill and Fort Marion,” paper presented at the symposium “Picturing the North American Indian, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, PA, November 20, 2009. The author is preparing this material for publication.

13. George Reynolds, Dr. Barnarbo’s Homes: Startling Revelations (1875), Goldsmith’s Library, University of London; and Oliver and McDonald, “The Echoes of Barnardo’s Altered Imagery.”

2. John Berger and John Mohr, Another Way of Telling (New York: Pantheon, 1982), 7.

14. Reynolds, Dr. Barnarbo’s Homes: Startling Revelations; Oliver and McDonald, “The Echoes of Barnardo’s Altered Imagery.”

3. For the artist’s working methods, see the essays by Shan Goshorn, Heather Shannon, and Gina Rappaport, in this volume.

15. Oliver and McDonald, “The Echoes of Barnardo’s Altered Imagery.” The British public was already alert to the problem of veracity associated with this new media. The controversy over Henry Peach Robinson’s Fading Away (1858), a photograph representing a scene of a dying girl (she was a healthy model) compiled from five separate negatives, illustrates how viewers implicitly trusted the documentary appearance of the media and how it felt bitterly betrayed when it discovered otherwise.

4. On Choate, see Richard Tritt, “John Nicholas Choate: A Cumberland County Photographer,” Cumberland County History 13, no. 2 (Winter 1996): ; Lonna M. Malmsheimer, “‘Immitation White Man’: Images of Transformation at the Carlisle Indian School,”” Studies in Visual Communication 11, no. 4 (fall 1985): 54–75. Laura Turner, “John Nicholas Choate and the Production of Photography at the Carlisle Indian School,” in Visualizing a Mission: Artifacts and Imagery of the Carlisle Indian School, 1879–1918 (Carlisle: The Trout Gallery, 2004): 14–18; Molly Fraust, “Visual Propaganda at the Carlisle Indian School,” in Visualizing a Mission: Artifacts and Imagery of the Carlisle Indian School, 1879–1918 (Carlisle: The Trout Gallery, 2004): 19–23; Antonia Valdes-Dapena, “Marketing the Exotic: Creating the Image of the “Real” Indian,” in Visualizing a Mission: Artifacts and Imagery of the Carlisle Indian School, 1879–1918 (Carlisle: The Trout Gallery, 2004): 35–41; Beth Haller, “Cultural Voices or Pure Propaganda? Publications of the Carlisle Indian School,” American Journalism 19 (2002): 65–68.

Group, 2001), 81—102; and Mark Oliver and Zeta McDonald, “The Echoes of Barnardo’s Altered Imagery,” The Guardian, October 3, 2002; and Simon Heffer, High Minds: The Victorians and the Birth of the Modern (London: Random House Books, 2013), 658.

16. Anne McClintock, “Soft-Soaping Empire, Commodity Racism and Imperial Advertising,” in Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Visual Culture Reader (London: Routledge, 2002): 304–16. 17. Brad D. Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion: Plains Indian War Prisoners (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006); Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867–1904, edited by Robert M. Utley (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1964); Everett A. Gilcreast, “Richard Henry Pratt and American Indian Policy, 1877–1906,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 1967).

5. Lonna M. Malmsheimer, “‘Imitation White Man’”, 54–75. 18. Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 112–13. 6. David Silkenat, ““A Typical Negro”: Gordon, Peter, Vincent Coyler, and the Story Behind Slavery’s Most Famous Photograph,” American Nineteenth Century History 15 (2014): 169–86. 7. Scholars of Fort Marion during the Plains prisoner of war years (1875– 78) frequently reference the photographs made at the fort during this period. The author is completing a systematic catalogue and analysis of the surviving fifty or so surviving negatives made at Fort Marion. 8. James Brookes, “An Eagle on His Button:” How Martial Portraiture Affirmed African American Citizenship in the Civil War,” US Studies Online (2014), accessed July 10, 2018, http://www.baas.ac.uk/usso/ an-eagle-on-his-button-how-african-american-martial-portraiture-affirmed-black-citizenship-in-the-civil-war/.

19. This photographer was probably George Pierron, who maintained a portrait studio in the center of town, a few blocks from the entrance to the fort. 20. New York Daily Graphic, April 26, 1878. 21. On Pratt at Hampton, see Jacqueline Fear-Segal, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle of Indian Acculturation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 23–25; 102–35; Donal Lindsay, Indians at Hampton Institute, 1877–1923 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). On the fate of the warriors who returned to Indian Territory, see Lookingbill, War Dance at Fort Marion, 174–98.

9. One can see how this sentiment contributed to Pratt’s view of the Indian “problem” and how a military-styled educational experience, such as the one he introduced at Fort Marion, represented what he believed was the solution.

22. Adams, Education for Extinction, 47; Samuel C. Armstrong to Richard H. Pratt, 26 August 1878, MSS S-1174, Pratt Papers, Yale Center for Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT; and Richard H. Pratt to Samuel C. Armstrong, 13 October 1878, Armstrong Papers, Hampton University, Hampton, VA.

10. Frederick Douglass, “Should the Negro Enlist in the Union Army?” National Hall, Philadelphia, July 6, 1863, published in Douglass’ Monthly in August, 1863.

23. Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom, 248.

11. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977), 5.

24. Turner, “John Nicholas Choate and the Production of Photographs,” 16, fig. 7. An example is back of the photograph Ouray and His Wife Chipeta, Utes, Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle Indian School, folder 12.

12. Seth Koven, “Dr. Barnarbo’s “Artistic Fictions”: Photography, Sexuality, and the Ragged Child in Victorian London,”Radical History Review 69 (1997): 6–45; Kenneth Bagnell, The Little Immigrants: The Orphans Who Came to Canada, new edition (Toronto: Dundurn

25. Turner, “John Nicholas Choate and the Production of Photographs,” 15; Malmsheimer, “‘Imitation White Man,’” 65.

SHAN GOSHORN’S RESISTING THE MISSION AND THE ORIGINS OF BEFORE-AND-AFTER PHOTOGRAPHS

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Exhibition Catalogue

Large Baskets Two Views, 2018 Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 The Fire Within, 2016 Swept Away, 2016 Prayers for Our Children, 2015 Unexpected Gift, 2015 Unsolicited Gifts, or How to Eliminate a Culture, 2012 Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, 2011

Medium Baskets Red, White and Blue, 2017 Remaining a Child, 2017 Loss, 2016 Roll Call, 2016 Red Flag, 2015 Shrouded in Grey, 2015 Civilization, 2013 Despite (a.k.a. Three Sisters), 2012

Small Baskets Direct Link, 2017 Lure, 2017 Marketable, 2017 Red to White, 2017 Valuable, 2017 Decline, Challenged, 2014 On the Shoulders of a Child, 2013 Forever a Part of Us, 2012

Catalogue entries: Shan Goshorn All dimensions height by width by depth.

1. Two Views, 2018 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 14 ¼ x 13 ½ x 13 ½ (36.2 x 34.3 x 34.3 cm) The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania Purchased with funds from the Friends of The Trout Gallery, 2018.12 Weaving technique: Cherokee double-weave; Blackbird’s-Eye pattern; the white, black, blue, and yellow splints refer to the four sacred colors of the Navajo. Inscriptions: white, black, blue, and yellow splints: Navajo prayer for well-being; tan splints: Torlino’s Carlisle Indian School student records; rust-colored splints: family stories of Torlino’s life (as told by his oldest son, Francis, to his great-great-greatgranddaughter, Nonabah Sam). Photographic sources: John N. Choate, Tom Torlino, c. 1882; John N. Choate, Tom Torlino, c. 1885. National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC. Diné (Navajo) student Tom Torlino (or Tolino) is the iconic representation of a “success” as touted by the Carlisle Indian School administration. Arriving at the school as a young man, Torlino interrupted his traditional training as a medicine man to learn “white man” ways. After four years, Torlino’s transformation was considered by the school’s superintendent, Richard H. Pratt, to be one of the most notable cases for support, recruitment, and promotion through before-and-after photographs made of the student. In this basket, the photographs of Torlino are interwoven into a single image. Many students who attended boarding schools faced identity issues when they returned home, never feeling as though they fit fully into their Native culture or the dominant white society. Upon Torlino’s return to Coyote Canyon (Brimhall), New Mexico, he resumed his traditional studies and served as medicine man for his people. He also served as translator for the first Navajo chairman, Chee Dodge. His experience at Carlisle reshaped and reinformed his life, allowing him to shift between both Diné and white customs. Although he served his people in multiple traditional capacities, they always called him “Has’tíín Bilígánáá” (White Man), due to his hair, which he kept short. Per the wishes of Tom Torlino, the family remains active and true to their Diné teachings, but also greatly respectful of the value of continued education.

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E X H I B I T I O N C ATA LO G U E

2. Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 Resisting the Mission began with the well-known before-and-after photographs taken of the Native children. These photographs were made upon their arrival at the Carlisle Indian School and, again, after some time spent there, to illustrate the purported efficacy of the school’s assimilationist objectives. The photographs are maintained in a number of collections, including the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Anthropological Archives, both Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; and the Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Over the course of a year, I encouraged varied community interactions, asking people to write their comments directly on the surface of these enlarged reproductions before I cut them into splints and wove them into baskets. Their remarks are heartfelt and poetically beautiful, ranging from family stories of tribal members who attended this iconic institution to remorse about the way these children were treated during this ugly part of US history. The Carlisle Indian School’s assimilation campaign was a heinous attempt to destroy an entire culture through government-sanctioned whitewashing techniques. Historical trauma still haunts Native people as a result of this deliberate theft of language, family, and culture. I hope this piece will give audiences, especially Native people, an opportunity to overcome the silence that has been suffered for too long. “We remember your sacrifices. You have not been forgotten.”

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E X H I B I T I O N C ATA LO G U E

SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

2.1. Alaskan Students from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Pair of before-and-after baskets: each 21 ½ x 6 ½ x 6 ½ in. (54.6 x 16.5 x 16.5 cm) Artist's collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: (exteriors) written comments by contemporary community members; Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; (interiors) names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photographic sources: John N. Choate, before-and-after images of students (Kokleluk, Esanetuck, Coogidlore Tumasock, Aneebuck, Lablok) from Port Clarence, Alaska (c. 1897–98). National Anthropological Archives, Washington, DC.

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2.2. Chiricahua Apache (Large Group) from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Pair of before-and-after baskets: each 21 ½ x 6 ½ x 6 ½ in. (54.6 x 16.5 x 16.5 cm) Artist's collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: (exteriors) written comments by contemporary community members; Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; (interiors) names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School.

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2.3. Chiricahua Apache (Small Group) from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Pair of before-and-after baskets: each 21 ½ x 6 ½ x 6 ½ in. (54.6 x 16.5 x 16.5 cm) Artist's collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: (exteriors) written comments by contemporary community members; Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; (interiors) names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photographic sources: John N. Choate, before-and-after images of Chiricahua Apache students from Fort Marion, St. Augustine, Florida (Clement Seanilzay, Beatrice Kiahtel, Janette Pahgostatum, Margaret Y. Nadasthilah, Frederick Eskelseah, Humphrey Escharzay, Samson Noran, Basil Ekarden, Hugh Chee, Bishop Eatennah, Ernest Hogee), c. 1886–87. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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2.4. Four Pueblo Children from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Pair of before-and-after baskets: each 21½ x 6 ½ x 6 ½ in. (54.6 x 16.5 x 16.5 cm) Artist's collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: exteriors: written comments by contemporary community members; Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; interiors: names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photographic sources: John N. Choate, before-and-after images of Pueblo students from Zuni, New Mexico (Frank Cushing, Taylor Ealy, Mary Ealy, Jennie Hammaker), c. 1880. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

2.5. Three Sioux Students from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Pair of before-and-after baskets: each 21½ x 6 ½ x 6 ½ in. (54.6 x 16.5 x 16.5 cm) Artist's collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: (exteriors) written comments by contemporary community members; Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; (interiors) names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photographic sources: John N. Choate, before-and-after images of Sioux Students (Richard [Wounded] Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, Timber [Chauncey] Yellow Robe), c. 1883. Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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2.6. Pueblo Girls from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Pair of before-and-after baskets: each 21½ x 6 ½ x 6 ½ in. (54.6 x 16.5 x 16.5 cm) Artist's collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: (exteriors) written comments by contemporary community members; Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; (interiors) names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photographic sources: John N. Choate, before-and-after images of Pubelo Girls (despite the title, their attire suggests Plains Indian influence), c. 1884–85. Archives and Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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2.7. Navajo Students from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Pair of before-and-after baskets: each 21 ½ x 6 ½ x 6 ½ in. (54.6 x 16.5 x 16.5 cm) Artist's collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: (exteriors) written comments by contemporary community members; Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; (interiors) names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photographic sources: John N. Choate, before-and-after images of Navajo students (Manuelito Chou, Manuelito Chequito, Benjamin Damon, Charles Damon, Saahtlie, Tom Torlino, Antoinette Williams, George Williams, and four unidentified students). Cumberland County Historical Society, Carlisle, Pennsylvania.

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3. The Fire Within, 2016 Archival inks, acrylic paint, and copper foil on paper, polyester sinew 19 ½ x 15 x 15 in. (49.5 x 38.1 38.1 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: (exterior) red splints: the names of Cherokee students who attended the Carlisle Indian School; charcoal-colored splints: text from the Indian Removal Act of 1830; (interior) recent writing about growing up Cherokee (written in the Cherokee syllabary using a digital font). This basket is woven in a contemporary shape of my own making, inspired by the Cherokee seven-sided star, which represents the seven tribal clans. It also refers to the central Council House fire, the importance of which cannot be underestimated. In the fall, at the beginning of every new year, all personal family fires are extinguished and relit from embers of this eternal sacred fire, symbolizing rebirth and tribal continuity, connecting our past to the future. Each clan is represented by a distinct wood, contributing a “V” portion of the star border that surrounded the central fire. The basket interior features a ring of brightly burning fires referencing the eternal flame (embers from the original Council House fire were carried to Oklahoma and then back to Cherokee, North Carolina) and the rekindling of contemporary Cherokee people’s passion to reclaim our cultural birthright and traditions. Interwoven into the basket exterior are texts associated with matters that were devastating to Cherokee culture: the Carlisle Indian School and the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the latter of which led to the journey known now as the Trail of Tears. Inside the basket is the text of recent writing about what it is like to grow up as a Cherokee, written in the Cherokee syllabary (in a digital font), to represent our active desire to never again relinquish our traditions. The basket’s internal fires break through to the exterior documents, illustrating the way we will overcome historical trauma by relying on the teachings of our ancestors.

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4. Swept Away, 2016 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 15 x 30 x 11 in. (38.1 x 2 76.2 x 7.9 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave; Water pattern. Inscriptions: names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photographic source: Tuckaseegee River, North Carolina. The idea for this piece visited me in a dream. The resulting work is a three-dimensional interpretation of the basic Cherokee basketry pattern called “water,” a design that is included around the base and the rim. The finished basket is woven in a familiar Cherokee weave, but expanded so that the entire basket assumes the zigzag of the pattern. Wrapping around the basket is a mournful, evening photo of the Tuckaseegee River flowing through the ancestral Cherokee homeland. This image, along with the river-like shape of the basket and plunging blue interior, epitomize the deep sorrow and dark tide of removal experienced by Indian communities throughout the northern hemisphere over the sweeping loss of their children and way of life. The interior features reproductions of the Carlisle student roster as evidence that we remember and honor the sacrifices these children were forced to endure.

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5. Prayers for Our Children, 2015 20 ½ x 11 ¼ x 11 ¼ in. (52.1 x 28.6 x 28.6 cm) Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Sam Wertheimer and Pamela Rosenthal Collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave; Cross-on-a-Hill pattern. Inscriptions: (exterior) names and tribes of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School; prayers of healing and well-being in Navajo, Lakota, Kaw, and Cherokee; lyrics to “We remember your sacrifices. You will not be forgotten.” Photographic source: John N. Chaote, Carlisle Indian School Student Body, 1884. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. This basket includes the first photograph I saw at the National Anthropological Archives (NAA) representing children at the Carlisle Indian School. The NAA staff pulled it for me knowing that I was interested in seeing images from boarding schools, but I was not prepared for the imperial size or the content of this image. It was so exceedingly emotional for me to see the solemn brown faces, the shorn hair, and the stiff military uniforms on these little children that I had to leave the room to compose myself. I’ve been thinking about this image ever since, knowing that patience was critical and that I would eventually be shown the best way to include this photo in my work. I wove this image into the exterior of this basket, integrating with relevant texts. Included throughout the interior of the basket, and within the crosses of the exterior, are the names and tribes of the more than 8,000 children listed on the Carlisle student roster during its thirty-nine-year existence. Despite the name of the traditional Cherokee weaving pattern—Cross-on-a-Hill—I use it here to symbolize the sanctity of the children, reminiscent of bright points of light in their vast sea of sorrow. Woven into the basket are prayers of healing and well-being in the Navajo, Lakota, Kaw, and Cherokee languages. Also included are the words to a memorial song: “We remember your sacrifices. You will not be forgotten.” The enclosed shape is interpretive of a protective embrace, symbolically comforting these beautiful children.

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6. Unexpected Gift, 2015 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 16 ½ x 10 x 10 in. (41.9 x 25.4 x 24.4 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave; variation of the Unbroken Friendship pattern. Inscriptions: names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photographic source: John N. Choate, Carlisle Indian School Student Body, 1912. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian, Washington, DC. Boarding schools are viewed by most Indian people as a crushing detriment to Native culture. But I see one very positive influence that I have never heard discussed: namely, the relationships that were formed among the students as a result of being sequestered with other children experiencing the same sad circumstances. Students learned to rely on each other as surrogate siblings, many marriages were later made based on these childhood friendships, and the bonds between tribes was cemented. Even today, reunions for Indian boarding schools are well attended, with former students often traveling across the country for the opportunity to reconnect with lifelong friends. In this basket, I have included my great-grandmother’s personal recollection of attending boarding school, written in my hand (blue splints), along with my mother’s handwritten memoirs of her Cherokee boarding school experience (white splints). I am adopted by a 90-year-old Kiowa woman, and she penned Indian names (yellow splints), many of which are the last names of friends she made from her many years at Chilocco and Haskell Indian boarding schools. I combined these documents with an image of children newly arrived at Carlisle Indian School; the red interior interlaces names from the student roster of this same institution. The handprints wrapping around the exterior are an ancient way of demonstrating ownership. I use them here to illustrate how these experiences belong to us as Indian people and how we are all connected. The pattern is a variation of a Cherokee design called Unbroken Friendship. I love how, in this use, the pattern shifted on each corner to include a grouping of three crosses instead of one, as if embracing future offspring. Our love extends through generations.

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7. Unsolicited Gifts, or How to Eliminate a Culture, 2012 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 7 x 16 x 11 in. (17.8 x 40.1 x 27.9 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee double weave. Inscriptions: Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; Indian Removal Act of 1830; list of commodities with Indian names; New Testament. Photographic source: alcohol bottles.

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The devastation that Native people have experienced in their struggle to maintain culture and identity can be attributed, in part, to the removal of children from loving families to raise them in military institutions; the denial of people’s right to live in their homelands; the inability to cultivate and maintain a traditional diet, with devastating results on health; the introduction of alcoholism; the criminalization of traditional religions; and the effect of a dominant society comically using Native images, names, and ceremonies for entertainment. This basket features splints printed with a variety of documents and images that represent uninvited burdens brought to the first people of this country by the new settlers, all of which have contributed to the demise of Native culture. Included are a boarding school manifesto, a removal treaty, labels from cans of commodity foods, images of bottles of alcohol, the New Testament, and a list of the stereotypical usage of Indians to promote commercial products including mascots.

8. Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, 2011 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 12 x 20 x 12 in. (30.0 x 50.8 x 30.0 cm) Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, New Jersey Museum purchase, acquisition fund, 2015.12a, b Photo: Peter Jacobs Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School.

Photographic source: Thompson Photo Co. Poughkeepsie, NY, Carlisle Indian School Student Body, 1912. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. Educational Genocide illustrates the impact that boarding schools continue to have on Native people today. The exterior features a photograph of students at the school and Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, save the man,” speech. The red interior (lid and base) weaves names from the list of more than 8,000 children who attended the Carlisle Indian School from 1879 to 1918. During my research, I found the names of two of my great-grandparents.

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9. Red, White and Blue, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 15 x 8 ½ x 8 ½ in. (38.1 x 21.6 x 21.6 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave; Eye-of-the-SacredBird pattern. Inscriptions: (red splints) names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School; (white and blue splints) lyrics to “Ten Little Injuns.” This basket combines two documents: the names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School and lyrics to Septimus Winner’s song “Ten Little Injuns.” Written in 1869, these hostile lyrics include: “one got executed and then there were nine, one got syphilis and then there were eight, one chopped himself in half and then there were seven, one broke his neck and then there were six, one dead drunk and then there were three, one passed out drunk and then there were two, one shot himself and then there was one, he went and hanged himself and then there were none.” The original lyrics were written as a way for children to learn how to count, giving an indication of the American sentiment toward Native children. This Cherokee pattern, called Eye-of-the-Sacred-Bird, was deliberately woven in red, white, and blue to suggest the stars-and-stripes and even the eye of the emblematic eagle. This basket questions the heinous impact these assimilation experiments, and thus American policy, have had on the collective psyche of generations of Native people.

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10. Remaining A Child, 2017 Archival ink on frosted vellum, x-rays (silver on polyester film), polyester sinew 10 ½ x 11 x 7 ½ in. (26.7 x 27.9 x 19.1 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave; Mountain pattern; coffin shape. Inscriptions: names of students buried in the Carlisle Indian School cemetery. Photographic source: x-rays.

While reviewing files and documents in the Cumberland County Historical Society’s library, I learned many heartbreaking stories about these children. One young woman from my tribe was bedfast in the hospital for a year before she died. I had to wonder if her parents knew and if they were given the option to participate in her healing. Another young man made a conscious and fatal decision after he was “confiscated” from a train while trying to depart with other members of his tribe; the school would not allow the boy’s release along with his cousins because the staff denied his uncle’s authority to claim him. In protest, this child refused all food until he escaped from the school in the only manner left to him. My heart aches for every single one of these children who were separated from the only family and culture they knew and thrown into an alien society that was so at odds with their upbringing. This basket is woven of splints created from x-rays and frosted vellum paper. Under normal lighting, the Cherokee basket pattern of Mountains is evident, linking these children with their homelands. However, when the LED lights (inside the basket) are turned on, the x-rays reveal images of bones, referencing human remains. This imagery is integrated with the names of students buried in the school cemetery, handwritten on the vellum. The shape of the basket is also a familiar Cherokee one called the “coffin” shape. The title was inspired by a Kiowa Black Leggings Society Dance that memorialized warriors from battles since the Korean War. The emcee recited all the names of warriors who had given their life in battle since the Korean War, also commenting for each that s/he “would forever be eighteen years old” (or their age when they died). It was a beautifully moving ceremony. While studying the Carlisle cemetery logs, I was struck that these children will forever be remembered by their age at their death. Many Indian people consider this school to be the result of a war crime, thus making the children prisoners of war. It does not seem a stretch at all to afford these deceased children with the same honor as the Kiowa warriors.

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11. Loss, 2016 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 11 ½ x 4 ¼ x 4 ¼ in. (29.2 x 10.8 x 10.8 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave; variation on the Unbroken Friendship pattern. Inscriptions: eight treaties between the US Government and a number of Native nations; (blue splints) names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Loss integrates names from the Carlisle Indian School official student roster and text from eight different treaties between the US government and a vast sampling of Native nations. They are identified in woven order from top to bottom (two are duplicated): Horse Creek, Canandaigua, Medicine Lodge, California, Navajo, Muscogee, New Echota, Medicine Lodge, Canandaigua, and Fort Wayne. Generally speaking, these treaties resulted in major land loss and relocation for Indian people. The pattern is a variation of a traditional Cherokee one called Unbroken Friendship. I chose it to illustrate how closely these government-sanctioned policies were used to eliminate the first people of this country.

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12. Roll Call, 2016 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 11 ½ x 4 x 4 in. (29.2 cm x 10.2 x 10.2) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: names of Cherokee students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. The title Roll Call refers to having your name called to indicate physical presence, typically in a school setting. The response to such a call would be “here” or “present.” Unfortunately, this would be counterintuitive to the institutionalized instruction of Native children, which hindered their ability to have a voice and to have a sense of place. After being sequestered at these institutions for years, Native children left these schools with the conflicted feeling of not belonging to either white society or their own tribal culture—they were literally silenced in both worlds. The weave for this basket is my first prototype to create a twist unique to a DNA strand.

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13. Red Flag, 2015 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 8 x 7 ¼ x 7 ¼ in. (20.3 x 18.4 x 18.4 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: single weave. Inscriptions: Medicine Lodge Treaty; names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School; prayers in three tribal languages and one in Hebrew; lyrics to “We remember your sacrifices. You will not be forgotten;” Raphael Lemkin's definition of genocide. Genocide. It is an ugly word that sums up the most inhumane of actions. And it is rarely associated with the atrocities that happened in the United States. Raphael Lemkim, a Polish attorney of Jewish descent who escaped Nazi Germany, coined the term genocide from genos- (Greek: family, tribe, race) and –cide (Latin: killing). His definition identified eight essential actions, which ranged from attacks on the social, cultural, economic, biological, physical (subcategories here include endangering health and mass killing), religious, and moral characteristics of a people. Lempkin’s definition is woven into the interior of this basket. US government policy and actions against the American Indian horrifically achieved each of these points. Massacres are remembered as battles where women,children, and unarmed men were oftentimes killed at the hands of the military. Native communities and towns were annihilated and tribes were starved while sequestered in forts. There was also a systematic cleansing of culture through the denial of language, religion, and citizenship. In this basket, two documents support this claim: the Medicine Lodge Treaty (reflecting land loss and displacement) and the names of children from the Carlisle Indian School student roster (reflecting the removal of children from their homes and teaching them government-approved ideas). These texts are woven into the basket with prayers—including one asking for healing and peace of mind—in three tribal languages and one in Hebrew. Also included is the Cherokee Memorial Song “We remember your sacrifices. You will not be forgotten.” The bright colors and X-pattern serve as a naval warning flag. If the events of the past are not truthfully remembered and taught to our children, they can easily happen again.

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14. Shrouded in Grey, 2015 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 11 ¼ x 7 ¾ x 8 in. (28.6 x 19.7 x 20.3 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide; the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Medicine Lodge Treaty; names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Shrouded in Grey combines the texts of Raphael Lemkin’s definition of genocide (see cat. 13) with three documents that support this claim: the Indian Removal Act of 1830, the Medicine Lodge Treaty, and names of children on the Carlisle Indian School student roster. The title references the burial shroud, serving as a testament to the extraordinary number of lives lost as a result of military murders. It also speaks to the fact that this is a clearcut issue not to be clouded in political rhetoric. There can be no argument that there was a genocide in this country as surely as there was one in Europe. We cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that other indigenous people around the world are still suffering from these forms of persecution. True healing cannot take place until these atrocities are openly acknowledged.

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15. Civilization, 2013 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 10 x 9 ½ x 9 ½ in. (25.4 x 24.1 x 24.1 cm) Kim Niven Collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; list of commodities with Indian names; statistics of domestic abuse directed at Indian women.

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Photographic sources: Thompson Photo Co. Poughkeepsie, NY, Carlisle Indian School Student Body, Carlisle, Pa., 1912. National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; bottles of alcohol. This basket weaves together Pratt’s infamous speech, the names of commercial products that use Indian names and images, the disproportionately high statistics of domestic abuse directed at Indian women, and photographs of bottles of alcohol. The title—Civilization—is tongue-in-cheek; all of these elements introduced by the dominant white culture contributed to detrimental changes for Native people, who moved from a traditional society into the one we experience today.

16. Despite (a.k.a. Three Sisters: Corn, Beans, Squash), 2012 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper Corn: 9 x 5 x 5 in. (22.9 x 12.7 x 12.7cm) Beans: 7 x 7 x 7 in. (17.8 x 17.8 x 17.8 cm) Squash: 6 x 9 x 9 in. (15.3 x 22.3 x 22.3 cm) Brenda Toineeta and Wilson Pipestem Collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech. Photographic sources: corn, beans, squash (at Kituwah Mound). This set of baskets features photographs of corn, squash, and beans. These three vegetables were traditionally grown together in a symbiotic relationship; not only did the beans cling to the upright stalks of the corn, but this planting combination enriched the soil more than three times that of the individual plants. To further illustrate this relationship, these are nesting baskets.

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17. Direct Link, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 2 x 1 ½ x 1 ½ in. (5.1 x 3.8 x 3.8 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave; Chain pattern. Inscriptions: statistics representing injustice experienced by Native women today; Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech. This miniature basket is woven with a Chain pattern, representing a link between the assimilation experiment of Indian boarding schools in the late nineteenth century and the pervasive violence experienced by Native women today. The boarding schools stripped Natives of their culture, language, and families. Americans perceived Natives as less than potential citizens and, at best, a glorified labor force. This sort of ideology, of Natives being objectified and undeserving of respect, continues today, evidenced by the high rate of violence directed by non-Native men toward Native women and by the number of Native women who are assaulted, raped, murdered, or missing at rates starkly higher than non-Native women. Rarely are the perpetrators prosecuted or brought before a court of law. Woven into this basket are statistics representing this particular injustice experienced by Native women and Richard H. Pratt’s infamous speech.

18. Lure, 2017 Archival inks, acrylic paint, silver leaf on paper, polyester sinew 4 ½ x 1 ¾ x 1 ¼ in. (11.4 x 4.4 x 3.2 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee fishing basket shape. Inscriptions: Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech. I wove this piece in the shape of a traditional Cherokee fishing basket; the diminutive size and light-reflective colors mimic a fishing lure. It alludes to how children were lured and sometimes forced to the Carlisle Indian School and similar institutions, in ways that were unethical and cruel. In some instances, critical government rations were withheld from tribes until family members relinquished their children to school agents. In others, military police were dispatched to intimidate families into releasing their children. These tactics were devastatingly successful in removing children from their reservations and placing them into white society. In the thirty-nine years that Carlisle was in existence, more than 8,000 Native students were enrolled and taught that their language, customs, and spiritual beliefs were wrong and needed to be replaced.

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19. Marketable, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, artificial sinew 2 ¾ x 2 ½ x 2 ½ in. (7 x 6.4 x 6.4 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: (rust splints) Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech; (brown splints) list of commodities with Indian names. This basket interweaves the text of Pratt’s famous assimilationist speech and a list of commercial products that exploit Native culture. Together, they show an equal amount of disdain for Native people. The very culture the US government strove to eliminate is now being bastardized as a source of advertising gimmicks. Despite being living, breathing human beings, indigenous people and their traditional ways have, from the very beginning, been devalued and dehumanized in the United States.

20. Red to White, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper Size: 3 x 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ in. (7.6 x 5.7 x 5.7 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave; Cross-on-a-Hill pattern. Inscriptions: (red splints) names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School; (white splints) Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech. One tactic used in the overall mission to eradicate Native culture was the removal and replacement of children’s names. Names—often having a historic link to family lineage—were anglicized upon their arrival to the schools. The children were sometimes given a choice to pick a name from a blackboard list, without ﬁrst hearing it pronounced. This new name, having no connection to family, clan, or tribe, would then be inherited by all following generations. Woven in a red Cross-on-a-Hill Cherokee pattern are the names of children listed on the Carlisle Indian School student roster. Woven in white is the speech of Captain Richard H. Pratt, founder of Carlisle, in which he describes his vision for the school—essentially a vision to replace a red culture with a white one.

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21.Valuable, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 3 x 2 x 2 in. (7.6 x 5.1 5.1 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School; boarding school memoir of the artist’s great-grandmother. This basket integrates the names of students at the Carlisle Indian School with words from the boarding school memoir of Stacy Saunooke, my great-grandmother. It took years for her to share her story. Recounting the chores all the children were required to perform and the way she personally was reprimanded for helping a new arrival by explaining a foreign procedure in Cherokee (the first language to both girls), my great-grandmother’s account is priceless to our people. The aqua and emerald gem-like colors of this basket represent the precious value of my great-grandmother and all the children who were acculturated in these schools. Much like the time-tested strength of gems, the fortitude these students demonstrated, despite extreme hardship, is a testament to their resilience.

22. Decline, Challenged, 2014 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper 6 x 3 x 3 in. (15.2 x 7.6 x 7.6 cm) David and Sue Halpern Collection Weaving technique: Cherokee single weave. Inscriptions: names of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School. Photographic source: historical map showing the decrease of Cherokee lands. This small basket combines names from the more than 8,000 children on the Carlisle Indian School student roster with a historical map showing the decrease of Cherokee lands due to colonization. Just like the borders of the original homelands, the names on the exterior are fading, illustrating the mission of boarding schools to erase Native culture. The interior names are washed a deep red to illustrate the inherent, core beliefs of Native people and our objective to maintain our identity despite the fact that others have repeatedly tried to strip them from us.

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23. On the Shoulders of a Child, 2013 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper 3 x 3 x 3 in. (7.6 x 7.6 x 7.6 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: Cherokee burden basket shape. Inscriptions: Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech. This is the artist’s first attempt at weaving a Cherokee burden basket. Regarding Pratt’s quote, burdens don’t get any heavier than that.

24. Forever a Part of Us, 2012 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper 1 ½ x 2 ¾ x 1 ½ in. (3.8 x 7.0 x 4.4 cm) Artist’s collection Weaving technique: double-weave. Inscriptions: text from Richard H. Pratt’s “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” speech. Photographic source: Carlisle Indian School student rosters, National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian, Washington, DC.

E X H I B I T I O N C ATA LO G U E

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Exhibition Checklist All dimensions are listed as height by width by depth.

Large Baskets

Medium Baskets

Two Views, 2018 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 14 ¼ x 13 ½ x 13 ½ (36.2 x 34.3 x 34.3 cm) The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA Purchased with funds from the Friends of The Trout Gallery, 2018.12

Red, White and Blue, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 15 x 8 ½ x 8 ½ in. (38.1 x 21.6 x 21.6 cm) Artist’s collection

Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Seven pairs of baskets; each: 21 ½ x 6 ½ x 6 ½ in. (54.6 x 16.5 x 16.5 cm) Artist’s collection The Fire Within, 2016 Archival inks, acrylic paint, and copper foil on paper, polyester sinew 19 ½ x 15 x 15 in. (49.5 x 38.1 x 38.1 cm) Artist’s collection Swept Away, 2016 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 15 x 30 x 11 in. (38.1 x 76.2 x 27.9 cm) Artist’s collection Prayers for Our Children, 2015 20 ½ x 11 ¼ x 11 ¼ in. (52.1 x 28.6 x 28.6 cm) Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew Sam Wertheimer and Pamela Rosenthal Collection Unexpected Gift, 2015 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 16 ½ x 10 x 10 in. (41.9 x 25.4 x 24.4 cm) Artist’s collection Unsolicited Gifts, or How to Eliminate a Culture, 2012 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 7 x 16 x 11 in. (17.8 x 40.1 x 27.9 cm) Lambert Wilson Collection Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, 2011 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 12 x 20 x 12 in. (30.0 x 50.8 x 30.0 cm) Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ Museum purchase, acquisition fund, 2015.12a, b

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Remaining a Child, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper 10 ½ x 11 x 7 ½ in. (26.7 x 27.9 x 19.1 cm) Artist’s collection Loss, 2016 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 11 ½ x 4 ½ x 4 ¼ in. (29.2 x 10.8 x 10.7 cm) Artist’s collection Roll Call, 2016 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 11 ½ x 4 x 4 in. (29.2 x 10.2 x 10.2 cm) Artist’s collection Red Flag, 2015 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper 8 x 7 ¼ x 7 ¼ in. (20.3 x 18.4 x 18.4 cm) Artist’s collection Shrouded in Grey, 2015 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 11 ¼ x 7 ¾ x 8 in. (28.6 x 19.7 x 20.3 cm) Artist’s collection Civilization, 2013 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper 10 x 9 ¼ x 9 ¼ in. (25.4 x 24.1 x 24.1 cm) Kim Niven Collection Despite (a.k.a. Three Sisters), 2012 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper Corn: 9 x 5 x 5 in. (22.9 x 12.7 x 12.7 cm) Beans: 7 x 7 x 7 in. (17.8 x 17.8 x 17.8 cm) Squash: 6 x 9 x 9 in. (15.3 x 22.3 x 22.3 cm) Brenda Toineeta and Wilson Pipestem Collection

Small Baskets

Direct Link, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 2 x 1 ½ x 1 ½ in. (5.1 x 3.8 x 3.8 cm) Artist’s collection Lure, 2017 Archival inks, acrylic paint, and silver leaf on paper, polyester sinew 4 ½ x 1 ¾ x 1 ¼ in. (11.4 x 4.4 x 3.2 cm) Artist’s collection Marketable, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 2 ¾ x 2 ½ x 2 ½ in. (7.0 x 6.4 x 6.4 cm) Artist’s collection Red to White, 2017 Archival inks, acrylic paint, on paper 3 x 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ in. (7.6 x 5.7 x 5.7 cm) Artist’s collection Valuable, 2017 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 3 x 2 x 2 in. (7.6 x 5.1 x 5.1 cm) Artist’s collection Decline, Challenged, 2014 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 6 x 3 x 3 in. (15.2 x 7.6 x 7.6 cm) David and Sue Halpern Collection On the Shoulders of a Child, 2013 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper 3 x 3 x 3 in. (7.6 x 7.6 x 7.6 cm) Artist’s collection Forever a Part of Us, 2012 Archival inks and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew 1 ½ x 2 ¾ x 1 ¾ in. (3.8 x 7 x 4.4 cm) Artist’s collection

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Artist Biography

I have been a professional artist for over thirty years. Although I launched my career in the early 1980s, with my hand-colored black-and-white photographs, I don’t consider myself a photographer, nor a painter, a silversmith, a glass worker, nor a storyteller, even though I have proficiency within all these genres, and more. Rather, I consider myself an artist who chooses the medium that best expresses a statement, usually one that addresses human rights issues, especially those that affect Native people today. As a teenager, I worked for a summer at my tribe’s Qualla Arts and Crafts Cooperative in Cherokee, North Carolina, where I became familiar with the work of top Cherokee artists and traditional arts. That experience led to a job with the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, where I became involved with organizing exhibitions for Native artists and photo-documenting the gathering of raw materials and preparing them for Cherokee basketmaking, carving, and other crafts. After graduating from the Atlanta College of Art, I was commissioned by the Indian Arts and Crafts Board of the US Department of the Interior to illustrate in pen and ink twenty traditional Cherokee basket patterns. These drawings taught me the math and rhythm of basket weaving and convinced me that I could probably make a basket, but I never had a desire to try, until 2008. I became politically active with my art in the early 1990s, in response to the US quin-centennial (the country’s 500-year celebration of Columbus’s blundering onto our shores). Using a variety of multimedia techniques with photography, I created several bodies of work that addressed human rights issues unique to Native people. They include: Honest Injun: a series of hand-painted black-and-white photographs of commercial products that use Indian names or images to hawk their wares. Reclaiming Cultural Ownership; Challenging Indian Stereotypes: a body of thirty-six blackand-white documentary-style photographs that show Indian people as they really are, challenging the way they are portrayed every day. Kituwah Motherland: a double-exposed, hand-tinted black-and-white photograph that helped to raise awareness about the corporate giant Duke Power and its plans to build a power plant overlooking the place most sacred to the Cherokee, the Kituwah Mound in North Carolina. This work was used to raise money for grassroots efforts to investigate legal options for the Cherokee people, who felt this spiritual mecca was in danger. Vagina Monologues was created in support of the reading of the play by the same name to raise awareness of the incredibly high statistics of domestic violence and sexual abuse in Indian Country. High Stakes, Tribes’ Choice: two black-and-white photographs tinted with a high-grade glitter, to illustrate the tension between the glitz of casinos and traditional values.

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While these projects and the accompanying lectures I presented about stereotypes and racism expressed my Native point of view, they weren’t as successful in educating and encouraging dialogue as I’d hoped. Although I did find the occasional enlightened individual, the more common response by an audience was to retreat as soon as possible or, more unpleasantly, to engage in hostile finger-pointing. Fortunately, I had an idea in 2008 about creating a work that addressed sovereignty, and decided that a traditional single-weave basket shape would be an interesting way to present the friction between state and tribal governments. This paper basket was met with surprise and interest, which encouraged me to pursue this technique and tackle the more difficult double-weave. A double-weave basket is very tricky to produce as it starts on the interior bottom and is woven up the sides to the desired height. The splints are turned and woven back down the sides and finished on the bottom, with no obvious indication of beginning or end. I mention here that the usual way a Native person learns a traditional craft is by the repeated observation of someone creating these works from start to finish, usually a family member, thus passing tricks of the trade from one generation to another. Since I no longer live in North Carolina, but in Oklahoma, and no one in my family weaves baskets, I taught myself by carefully examining a finished basket. My first double-weave—Sealed Fate (2001)—took me over a year to figure out. When I showed it to friends at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, they identified me as the fourteenth living Eastern Cherokee who had mastered this technique. My next basket—Educational Genocide: The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School (2011)—was a lidded double-weave, created with a photograph woven into it, which won Best of Show at the Red Earth Indian Art Festival. To date, I have woven over 230 baskets. I have received numerous fellowships, including the United States Artists Distinguished Fellowship in Traditional Arts (2015), the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Traditional Arts Fellowship (2014), the Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship (2013), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2013), and the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Discovery Fellowship (2013). These grants enabled me to continue the research I started at the Smithsonian Institution, studying historical baskets, documents, letters, and treaties that I use as sources of inspiration to create my work. My intention is to present historical and contemporary issues that continue to be relevant to Indian people today, to a world that still relies on Hollywood as a reliable informant about Indian life. It was a thrilling accident to discover that the vessel shapes of baskets are a nonthreatening vehicle to educate audiences. But even more exciting, I am observing viewers literally leaning into my work, eager to learn more about the history of this country’s First People, which can lead to the next wonderful step of engaging in honest dialogue about the issues that still plague Indian people today. America has believed a one-sided history for too long. Acknowledging and addressing these past atrocities is movement toward true racial healing, which has always been the goal of my work as an artist. Shan Goshorn

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Selected Exhibitions and Honors Solo Exhibitions 2010 Reclaiming Cultural Ownership—Challenging Indian Stereotypes, Western Carolina University Fine Arts Museum, Cullowhee, NC 2004 Earth Renewal, Earth Return, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO 2002 Earth Renewal, Native Indian/Inuit Photographers’ Association (NIIPA) Gallery, Ontario, Canada All My Relations, Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Cherokee, NC 2000 Reclaiming Cultural Ownership; Challenging Indian Stereotypes, Native Indian/Inuit Photographers’ Association (NIIPA) Gallery, Ontario, Canada 1999 Shan Goshorn, Truman State University, Kirksville, MO 1995 Honest Injun: Unlearning Indian Stereotypes, Native Indian/Inuit Photographers’ Association (NIIPA) Gallery, Ontario, Canada Walks in Two Worlds, Northeast Missouri State University, Kirksville, MO 1994 Always Within the Sound of the Drum, Walters Art Gallery, Tulsa, OK 1992 Receiving Star Gift: The Work of Shan Goshorn, Ursuline College, Pepper Pike, OH 1991 Shan Goshorn, Cherokee Heritage Museum and Gallery, Cherokee, NC Taken to the Water, Native Indian/Inuit Photographer’s Association (NIIPA) Gallery, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

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1989 Birth & Rebirth, Ancestors & Descendants, Plains Indians & Pioneers Museum, Woodward, OK

Woven: The Art of Contemporary Native Basketry, Archer Gallery, Clark College, Vancouver, WA

1988 Embracing the Hoop, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM

2015 INTERTWINED. Stories of Splintered Pasts: Shan Goshorn & Sarah Sense, Arts & Humanities Council, Tulsa, OK

Honoring the Sacred Wheel, Pictures Gallery, Tulsa Photo Collective, Tulsa, OK Song of Honor, International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum, Oklahoma City, OK 1987 Coming into Power, Center for Exploratory Photographic Application Gallery, Buffalo, NY Moontime: The Cycles of Life, Southern Plains Indian Museum, Anadarko, OK 1980 Focals, Fetishes and Rituals, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA Merging Diversities, Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Cherokee, NC

Group Exhibitions 2018 Bring Her Home, All My Relations Arts, Minneapolis, MN The Condor and the Eagle, Elisabeth Jones Art Center, Portland, OR 2017 Beyond Pocahantas. We Are Native Women, Rainmaker Gallery, Bristol, England Rooted Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America, National Basketry Organization, University of Missouri Museum of Art and Archaeology, Columbia, MO (traveling exhibition) Wah.Shka, Isola della Certosa, 57th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy Without Boundaries: Visual Conversations, Anchorage Museum and IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM (traveling exhibition) 2016 From the Belly of Our Being; Art by and about Native Creation, Museum of Art, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, OK

Return from Exile, Lyndon House Arts Center, Athens, GA (traveling exhibition) SWAIA Indian Market, Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM Woven Together: Celebrating Grandmother Spider Woman in Contemporary Native Art, Orenburg Museum, Orenburg, Russia 2014 Beautiful Games: American Indian Sport and Art, Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Native Art Now—Contemporary Indigenous Art, Nordamerika Native Museum, Zurich, Switzerland Re-Riding History: From the Southern Plains to the Matanzas Bay, Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Flagler College, St. Augustine, FL (traveling exhibition) SWAIA Indian Market, Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM Twisted Path III: Questions of Balance, Abbe Museum, Bar Harbor, ME We Hold These Truths, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM 2013 Art from Indian Territory: Contemporary Native Art from Oklahoma, All My Relations Gallery, Minneapolis, MN Fiberworks, 108 Contemporary, Tulsa, OK Indian Fair & Market, Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ RED 2013: Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, Eiteljorg Museum, Indianapolis, IN SWAIA Indian Market, Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM Trail of Tears, Cherokee Heritage Center, Tahlequah, OK

2012 Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3 / Contemporary Native North American Art from the Northeast and Southeast, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (traveling exhibition)

2000 Altering the Discourse: Four Native American Women Photographers Facing the Year 2000, Joseph Gross Gallery, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ (traveling exhibition)

Cherokee Art Market, Tulsa, OK

Tulsa International Mayfest, Tulsa, OK

New Native Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM Red Earth Arts Festival, Oklahoma City, OK SWAIA Indian Market, Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM 2010 Earth Show, Ursuline College, Pepper Pike, OH Red Earth Arts Festival, Oklahoma City, OK The Sovereign Image, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM This Is Displacement, All My Relations Art Gallery, Minneapolis, MN (traveling exhibit) 2009 Urban Indian 5, University of South Dakota, Vermillion, SD 2008 From the Earth, Smoki Museum, Prescott, AZ Tulsa International MayFest, Tulsa, OK 2006 Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photography, C. N. Gorman Museum, University of California, Davis, CA 2005 About Face, Self-Portrait Invitational, Wheelwright Museum, Santa Fe, NM BIRD 2005 International, Beijing Jiayuan Art House, Beijing, China 2003 Ghost Dance, American Indian Community House Gallery, New York, NY

1999 Self Portrait: Expression of Individual Spirit, Women’s Center and Toucan Gallery, St. Vincent Hospital, Billings, MT 1998 Contemporary Native American Photography, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK 1997 Annual Oklahoma Indian Art Competition, Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK What We’ve Discovered: Images of Our Cultural Identity, International Quincentennial Response, Johannesburg, South Africa (traveling exhibit) 1996 Beyond the 95th Meridian: Indian Territory, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, OK I Stand in the Center of Good, American Indian Community House Gallery, New York, NY 1995 Dispelling the Myth; Controlling the Image, American Indian Community House Gallery, New York, NY Legacies: Contemporary Art by Native American Women, Castle Gallery, College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, NY Native American Invitational and Masters Exhibition, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK 1994 First Nations, Impressions Gallery, Bradford, England Go West, Fratelli Alinari Photo Archive, Florence, Italy (traveling exhibition)

2002 Native American Invitational, Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK

Urban Images, American Indian Contemporary Arts, San Francisco, CA

Where It All Began: Cherokee Creation Stories in Art, Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Cherokee, NC (traveling exhibition)

1993 Contemporary Native Photography, Harbourfront Centre, Toronto, Canada

Who Is the Virgin of Guadalupe? Women Artists Crossing Borders, Henry Street Settlement Gallery, New York, NY

Keepers of the Western Door, CEPA Gallery, Buffalo, NY

Through the Native Lens, Indian Market, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, NM 1992 Art of Indian Territory, Franco-American Institute, Rennes, France Recovery from Discovery, University of Maryland, College Park, MD (traveling exhibit) 1990 Different Drums: Contemporary Works by Native American Photographers, Pyramid Arts Center, Rochester, NY Personal Preferences, C. N. Gorman Museum, University of California, Davis, CA 1987 Coming into Power, Center for Exploratory Photographic Application Gallery, Buffalo, NY (traveling exhibition)

Honors 2016 United States Artists, Distinguished Fellow in Traditional Arts 2014 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, Traditional Arts Fellowship, Washington, DC 2013 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, Indianapolis, IN Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Washington, DC Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Discovery Fellowship, Santa Fe, NM 2001 Moscelyne Larkin Cultural Achievement Award, Mayor’s Commission on Indian Affairs, Tulsa, OK Recognized by the National Museum of the American Indian as an Indian scholar to do repatriation research in the archives, Washington, DC 1994 Jingle Feldman Award, Arts & Humanities Council, Tulsa, OK 1992 Tribal Council Award, Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians

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Selected Public Collections

Absentee Shawnee Tribe Little Axe Health Center, Norman, OK Gregory Allicar Museum of Art, Fort Collins, CO American Museum in Britain, Bath, England Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, NC Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles, CA Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL Block Museum of Art, Evanston, IL Briscoe Western Art Museum, San Antonio, TX Bureau of Indian Affairs, Washington, DC Cherokee Heritage Center, Cherokee, NC Cherokee Indian Hospital, Cherokee, NC Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, CA Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis, IN Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK C. N. Gorman Museum, Davis, CA Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Department of the Interior, Washington, DC Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Norman, OK Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ Muscarelle Museum of Art, Williamsburg, VA Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Cherokee, NC National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, MO Nordamerika Native Museum, Zurich, Switzerland Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK Roxtec International AB, Lyckeby, Sweden Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO Surgut Museum of Art, Surgut, Russia Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA Weltkuluren Museum, Frankfurt, Germany

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Bibliography Print Sources Agtuca, Jacqueline R. Safety for Native Women: VAWA and American Indian Tribe, cover and 173. Lame Deer, MT: National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, 2014. ahtone, heather. “Shan Goshorn.” In From the Belly of Our Being: Art by and about Native Creation, 28–31. Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Museum of Art, 2016. _____. Intertwined: Stories of Splintered Pasts; Shan Goshorn & Sarah Sense. Tulsa: Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, Hardesty Arts Center, 2015. _____. “Shan Goshorn’s Singing Baskets.” Dreamcatcher, July 2013, 14–17. Anderson, Rachel. “Story Weaver.” Tulsa People, December 2015, 32–33. Barbaro, Theresa. “Shan Goshorn: Re-Weaving History.” In National Museum of the American Indian 15, no. 2 (Summer/Fall 2014): 22–35. Blankenship, Mollie. “Merging Diversities: Shan Goshorn.” In Contemporary Artists and Craftsmen of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, 107–10. Cherokee, NC: Indian Arts and Crafts Board; Qualla Arts and Crafts Mutual, 1987. Clark, Todd J. “Shan Goshorn.” In Woven: The Art of Contemporary Native Basketry. Vancouver, WA: I.M.N.D.N. Native Art for the 21st Century and Archer Gallery, Clark College, 2016. Dowell, JoKay. “Eastern Band Cherokee Interdisciplinary Artist: Shan Goshorn.” First American Art Magazine: Art of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 22–27. Duncan, Barbara R., ed. The Origin of the Milky Way & Other Living Stories of the Cherokee, cover and interior illustrations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.

von Gliszczynski, Vanessa, Mona B. Suhrbrier, and Eva Ch. Raabe. “Material Poetry.” In The Common Thread: The Warp and Weft of Thinking, trans. Andrew Boreham, 166–79. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2016. Goshorn, Shan. “Reclaiming Our Power.” Journal of Cherokee Studies 33 (Winter 2016): 43. Harjo, Suzan Shown. “Foreword.” In Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States & American Indian Nations, x–xi. Washington, DC: National Museum of the American Indian in association with Smithsonian Books, 2014. Krol, Debra Utacia. “Stitch by Stitch: Contemporary Basket Artists Continue Tradition.” In “The Basketry Issue.” Native American Art, April/May 2018: 94–99. Löb, Heidrun. “Shan Goshorn.” In Native Art Now, 28–37. Zurich: Kanton Zürich Lotteriefonds, 2015. McNutt, Jennifer Complo, and Ashley Holland. “Leaning in to Shan Goshorn’s Baskets.” In RED: The Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, 2013, 80–95. Indianapolis: Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, 2013. Power, Susan C. “Artistic Visions and Emerging Forms.” In Art of the Cherokee: Prehistory to the Present, 219–21, 224, 247, 220, 221. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007. Reese, Laura. “Redefining Images: Indigenous Photographer.” Art Focus Oklahoma 29, no. 3 (May/June 2014): 16–17. Schwain, Kristin, and Josephine M. Stealey. “Baskets as Vessels.” In Rooted, Revived, Reinvented: Basketry in America, 27–28, 137, 138. Atglen, PA: Schiffer Publishing, 2017.

Taubman, Ellen, and David Revere McFadden. “Shan Goshorn.” In Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation; 3, Contemporary Native North American Art from the Northeast and Southeast, 100–101. New York: Museum of Arts and Design, 2012. Tiger, Tony A., Bobby C. Martin, and Jace Weaver. “Shan Goshorn.” In Return from Exile: Contemporary Southeastern Indian Art, 30–31. Tahlequah, OK: Southeastern Indian Artists Association, 2015. Tsinhnahjinnie, Hulleah J., and Veronica Passalacqua. “Shan Goshorn.” In Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photographers, 28–30. Davis: C.N. Gorman Museum, University of California, Davis; Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2006. York, Karen. “Selections from the Exhibition.” In Ancient Ways: Modern Forms. Tulsa: Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art, 2015.

Online Resources All sites were active at the time of publication. ahtone, heather. Intertwined: Stories of Splintered Pasts; Shan Goshorn & Sarah Sense. Tulsa: Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, Hardesty Arts Center, 2015. https://issuu.com/ahhatulsa/docs/int_cat_issuu “Cherokee Mixed Media Artist Shan Goshorn.” https://vimeo.com/153974233 “Native American Artist Shan Goshorn Creates Baskets.” https://vimeo.com/59179348 “Shan Goshorn (2015).” https://vimeo. com/161277145 “Shan Goshorn—Nordamerika Native Museum https://vimeo.com/117424566

“Shan Goshorn.” This Land 105 (Summer 2016): 128–30. Siddons, Louise. “INTERTWINED: Stories of Splintered Pasts; Shan Goshorn & Sarah Sense.” Art Focus Oklahoma 30, no. 3 (May/June 2015): 8–9.

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Contributors

Phillip Earenfight is Director and Chief curator of The Trout Gallery—the Art Museum of Dickinson College. He holds a BA from the University of Washington and a PhD in art history from Rutgers University, the State University of New Jersey. He has organized more than a hundred exhibitions, including solo projects on the work of Lalla Essaydi, Sue Coe, Grace Hartigan, and Joyce Kozloff. His scholarly research considers Native American ledger drawings and photographs associated with Fort Marion and the Carlisle Indian School. His catalogue A Kiowa’s Odyssey: A Sketchbook from Fort Marion received the College Arts Association’s Alfred H. Barr Jr. Book Award (2009). He is also a specialist in Gothic Italian art and architecture and was a fellow at the executive leadership programs at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2011) and the Association of Academic Museums and Galleries/Kellogg School of Business (2012). Jacqueline Fear-Segal is Professor of American and Indigenous Histories at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, England, where she co-founded and co-directs the Native Studies Research Network. As an undergraduate, Fear-Segal studied at the University of East Anglia and as a postgraduate at University College London and Harvard University. Her recent book, White Man’s Club: Schools, Race, and the Struggle for Indian Acculturation, was awarded the American Studies Best Book (2008). She writes extensively on Indian education in the nineteenth century and has published essays in a variety of books, including Indigenous Bodies: Reviewing, Relocating, Reclaiming (2013), and Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (2016); as well as articles in American Studies International, History of Education Quarterly, Museum Anthropology, The American Historical Review, The Western Historical Quarterly, American Studies, and Great Plains Quarterly. Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne and Muscogee) is a writer, curator, and policy advocate who has helped Native peoples recover more than one million acres of land and protect Native nations, sovereignty, children, arts, cultures, lands, languages, religious freedom, repatriation, sacred places, and water. Harjo was editor and guest curator of Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations (National Museum of the American Indian), which won the Overall Award—Excellence in Exhibition from the Alliance of American Museums (2016). She is a National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) Founding Trustee, and began coalition work in 1967 that led to establishment of the NMAI as well as laws reforming nationwide museum policies. Among her many awards, she has received the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2014), the Native Leadership Award (2015), and two Sovereignty Symposium medals from the Oklahoma Supreme Court (2015 and 2016). Harjo is president of the Morning Star Institute in Washington, DC, and served as executive director to the National Congress for American Indians (1984–89). She is an award-winning columnist for Indian Country Today; lead plaintiff in Harjo et al. v. Pro Football, Inc.; a member of the advisory and campaign strategy committees for Reclaiming Native Truth; and a senior policy advisor to the Multicultural Initiative for Community Advancement Group.

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Barbara Landis is the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Archives and Library Research Specialist for the Cumberland County Historical Society in Carlisle, PA, where she has been on staff since 1986. Her published works include essays in Boarding School Blues: Revisiting American Indian Educational Experiences (2006); Carlisle Indian Industrial School: Indigenous Histories, Memories, and Reclamations (2016); and The Oneida Indians in the Age of Allotment, 1860–1920 (2006). Her tour of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School grounds was filmed for the Pennsylvania Cable Network in October 2003, and airs on PCN as part of a continuing television series. A similar audio tour was broadcast live on WITF-FM in May 2000. Landis was interviewed for the popular Radiolab program on National Public Radio broadcast in January 2015, for a discussion of the origins of football in the United States. Landis also appears in the documentary films Our Spirits Don’t Speak English (2008); The Lost Ones: The Long Journey Home (2009); and Jim Thorpe: The World’s Greatest Athlete (2009). Landis is a consultant for the Dickinson College Carlisle Indian School Digitization Project and has traveled extensively lecturing and presenting Carlisle Indian School programming at universities, conferences, and tribal gatherings. Gina Rappaport is the Archivist for Photograph Collections and Head Archivist at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Anthropological Archives. Before joining the Smithsonian in 2009, Rappaport was a project archivist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Pribilof Project Office, where she co-authored The Pribilof Islands, Alaska: Guide to Photographs and Illustrations, a publication on historical visual resources relating to the history of the Pribilof Islands and the Aleutian people who live there. Previously she worked as a project archivist for a variety of individuals and institutions, including the University of Washington, the National Park Service, and the Winthrop Group. She received a BA in history from the University of Washington and an MA in history and archives management from Western Washington University. Her research interests focus on the integration of archival theory into practice, especially with respect to the management of photographic collections; she explored some of these concerns in her master’s thesis, “Limitations and Improvements in the Archival Management of Photographs.” Another area of equal interest is in working with Native communities to develop protocols for the respectful care of Native cultural heritage held in non-native institutions. Heather A. Shannon was the Photograph Archivist at the National Museum of the American Indian from 2012 to 2015. She is now the Associate Curator of Nineteenth-Century Photography at the George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. Shannon is currently directing an Institute of Museum and Library Service–funded project to catalog and digitize the Gabriel Cromer Collection, one of the museum’s foundational collections and one of the most important gatherings of early French photographic materials outside France. In addition, she is preparing an exhibition of and editing a volume dedicated to the Cromer collection. Specializing in the photography of the American West, Shannon holds a PhD in art history from Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

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Acknowledgments

Resisting the Mission represents a collaborative effort by a great number of people. On behalf of all who made this exhibition, publication, and coordinating events a reality, I extend my sincere gratitude. Foremost, I thank Shan Goshorn, for her art and activism, which has a profound impact on all who experience it. I admire her imagery and message, clear vision, and insight. Members of the The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College, and the broader Carlisle community thank Shan Goshorn for sharing her work with us, particularly during this important milestone in the history of the Carlisle Indian School. I am deeply indebted to Shan’s studio assistants, Rose McCracken and LoRae Davis, for helping with countless details regarding the exhibition and catalogue preparation. I am most grateful to the private collectors who lent works to this important exhibition. Without their visionary approach to acquisitions and generosity, such a show would not be possible. They are David Halpern and Sue Halpern, Kim Niven, Pamela Rosenthal and Sam Wertheimer, Wilson Pipestem and Brenda Toineeta, and Lambert Wilson, I thank as well a number of individuals at the Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey, for making its material available for the exhibition: Kim Kruse, Kimberly Siino, Gail Stavitski, Lora Urbanelli, Osanna Urbay, Alison Van Denend, and Frank Walker. Among the many pleasures associated with hosting an exhibition is the opportunity to work with inspiring colleagues from other institutions. In this regard, I thank those who prepared essays for this catalogue, brining insight and context to Goshorn’s work: Brenda Landis, Suzan Shown Harjo, Heather A. Shannon, Gina Rappaport, W. Richard West Jr., and Jacqueline Fear-Segal. Resisting the Mission opened at The Trout Gallery as part an extensive series of events associated with the centennial commemoration of the closing of the Carlisle Indian School. I thank my colleagues who joined me in making this program successful: Barbara Landis, from the Cumberland County Historical Society; and Maria Bruno, Nikki Dragone, Amy Farrell, James Gerencser, Susan Rose, and Malinda Triller, from Dickinson College. Preparing this book required a wide range of assistance and support. The manuscript proofs were expertly copy edited by Mary Cason. Michael Marconi and Peter Philbin at Brilliant Graphics, Exton, Pennsylvania made the publishing process a pleasure. The handsome graphic design for this book was created by Phillip Unetic of Unetic Design, Lawrenceville, NJ. At Dickinson College, I thank President Margee Ensign and the faculty, staff, and students for engendering a scholarly environment that values the central role of the visual arts in an undergraduate academic experience. I thank members of the college’s senior administration: Brenda Bretz, Brontè Burleigh-Jones, Catherine McDonald Davenport, Karen Neely Faryniak, Connie McNamara, Robert Renaud, George Stroud, Kirk Swenson, and Neil Weissman for their on-going support of The Trout Gallery and its mission as an all-campus academic resource. Related promotional and curatorial materials was provided by Amanda DeLorenzo and Neil Mills of Design Services at Dickinson College, and Ken Ball, Kurt Smith, and Krista Hanley

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at the Print Center. Marketing and Communications was provided by Christine Dugan and MaryAlice Bitts. At The Trout Gallery I am grateful for the support of the museum’s Advisory Committee and The Friends of the Trout Gallery. At the museum I thank James Bowman, Heather Flaherty, Stephanie Keifer, Rosalie Lehman, Susan Russell, Catherine Sacco, and Lyndsay Tingler. On this project, they were supported by two student assistants: Abaigeal Cottle and Natura Sant Foster. Shan Goshorn: Resising the Mission was produced in part through the generous support of the Helen Trout Memorial Fund and the Ruth Trout Endowment at Dickinson College. Educational programming supported in part by the Trout Gallery Mumper-Stuart Educational Center. Given the nature of exhibitions and related publications, many individuals will provide invaluable assistance to this project who are yet unknown to me. I regret that I am unable to recognize your efforts here by name, but let me take this opportunity to thank you for your timely and much appreciated efforts. Phillip Earenfight Director, The Trout Gallery

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Shan Goshorn: Resisting the Mission September 7, 2018–February 2, 2019 The Trout Gallery, Dickinson College Carlisle, Pennsylvania Published by The Trout Gallery The Art Museum of Dickinson College Carlisle, Pennsylvania 17013 Copyright © 2018 The Trout Gallery. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from The Trout Gallery. This publication was produced in part through the generous support of the Helen Trout Memorial Fund and the Ruth Trout Endowment at Dickinson College. First Published 2018 by The Trout Gallery, Carlisle, Pennsylvania www.troutgallery.org Editor Phillip Earenfight Design Phil Unetic, Unetic Design, Lawrenceville, NJ Photography Peter Philbin unless otherwise noted Printing Brilliant Printing, Exton, Pennsylvania Typography: Gibson ISBN 978-0-9861263-5-2 Printed in the United States Cover Shan Goshorn, Alaskan Children (after), from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence (detail), (cat. 2.1). Frontispiece Four Peublo Children (before), from Resisting the Mission; Filling the Silence (detail), (cat. 2.4). Dedication (in background) John N. Choate, Wounded Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, Timber Yellow Robe; Upon Their Arrival in Carlisle, n. d., Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Carlisle Indian School, PC 2002.2, folder 6.

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SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

RESISTING THE MISSION

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THE TROUT GALLERY The Art Museum of Dickinson College

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SHAN GOSHORN: RESISTING THE MISSION

Shan Goshorn Resisting the Mission

Articles inside

Contributors

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

Selected Public Collections

Selected Exhibitions and Honors

Artist Biography

Exhibition Catalogue

Exhibition Checklist

Two-Faced Photographs Regenerated in Warp and Weft: Shan Goshorn’s Carlisle Baskets

Shan Goshorn’s Resisting the Mission and the Origins of Before-and-After Photographs at the Carlisle Indian School

Weaving History, Lives, Justice, and Beauty into Art with Something to Say

Filling the Silence: Protecting the Names

In the Archives with Shan Goshorn

Resisting the Mission

Director's Foreword

Introduction