Student Snapshots: An Alternative Approach to the Visual History of American Indian Boarding Schools

Humanities

Nicole Strathman¹ 

[1] Department of World Arts and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA; E-Mail

关键词: American Indian;    Native American;    indigenous;    boarding school;    photography;    visual culture;    visual sovereignty;    self-representation;   

DOI  :  10.3390/h4040726

来源: mdpi

【 摘 要 】

Photographs of American Indian boarding school students have often been used to illustrate the federal forced assimilation practices of the 1870s–1930s. Taken by official school photographers, these propagandistic images were produced to emphasize the “civilizing” benefits of the boarding school system. Although some Native students obtained cameras and recorded their own boarding school experiences, the visual history still relies on the institutionally-produced images. Using a collection of photographs created by Parker McKenzie (Kiowa) and his classmates while attending Rainy Mountain and Phoenix Indian Schools, this paper intends to rectify that exclusion through a reading of these snapshots as examples of visual sovereignty. The concept of visual sovereignty involves examining Native self-representations as the (re)claiming of indigenous identities in order to counter colonial imagery that has dominated the archives.

【 授权许可】

CC BY   
© 2015 by the authors; licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.