![]() ![]() Shan Goshorn, “10 Little Indians” (2013), archival paper, mixed media (courtesy the Heard Museum) Quilted imagery honoring family and close friends who attended the Toadlena Boarding School in New Mexico highlights practices such as assigning new names and punishing Native youth for speaking their own languages. ![]() Hudson’s “The Beginning of the End” (2019) quilt hangs near the exit to the exhibition by a display listing Indian boarding schools grouped by state, which indicates that they were most prevalent in Oklahoma, Arizona, Alaska, New Mexico, and South Dakota. Here, the sound of scissors serves as a haunting reminder that haircuts were intended to destroy Native identity. Installation view, Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, Heard Museum (photo by Craig Smith, courtesy the Heard Museum)Įntering the exhibition, visitors see a digital collage with rotating portraits of Native youth who attended Indian boarding schools, and hear the sounds of trains while traversing a curved corridor that leads to a turquoise-colored barber chair surrounded by locks of dark hair. “The exhibit makes boarding school stories more accessible to the public.” “Not everyone will read government reports,” said Brenda Child (Ojibwe), a University of Minnesota professor and one of many Indigenous advisors for Away From Home. ![]() A touring version launched in 2020 is being shown around the country through 2025, and an audio tour is available online. Hudson is one of several artists with work in Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, the ongoing, signature exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. “A quilt can be the beginning of a conversation about boarding schools,” Hudson told Hyperallergic. Susan Hudson (Diné), a New Mexico artist whose body of work includes over 40 quilts conveying stories of Indian boarding school experiences, has spent decades exploring related issues such as colonization, genocide, and intergenerational trauma. Installation view, Susan Hudson, “The Beginning of the End” (2019), cotton, polyester (photo Lynn Trimble/Hyperallergic) Recently, Secretary Haaland launched a year-long initiative called The Road to Healing, which will include gatherings with Indian boarding school survivors and their descendants across the US. A future report will further elucidate marked and unmarked burial sites, boarding school impacts, and strategies for healing. In May 2022, the agency released a 106-page investigative report addressing 408 federal schools in 37 states, including burial sites at over 50 of those institutions. “It is a history that we must learn from if our country is to heal from this tragic era.” ![]() “Many Americans may be alarmed to learn that the United States also has a history of taking Native children from their families in an effort to eradicate our culture and erase us as a people,” Haaland wrote in a Jop-ed for the Washington Post. The school’s founder coined the phrase “ Kill the Indian, save the man,” reflecting the common belief among the US government at the time that Indigenous children were “savages” who needed to be “civilized.” The agency is headed by Secretary Deb Haaland (Laguna), whose grandfather was taken as a child to the Carlisle boarding school in Pennsylvania. Randy Kemp, “54th United States Secretary of the Interior, Deb Haaland” (2021), acrylic paint on canvas, decorative paper embossing, and Buffalo nickel, 40 x 30 inches (courtesy the artist) Now it’s one of the hundreds of Indian boarding schools being addressed through the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative launched by the US Department of the Interior in June 2021, following the discovery of an unmarked mass grave containing the remains of 215 children, some as young as 3 years old, at a residential school in Canada, where the Pope recently undertook an apology tour underscoring the role of religion in boarding school atrocities. Phoenix Indian School closed in 1990, following decades of evolving policies and educational practices. “Art has a place in helping people begin to understand the layers of this history,” reflected Kemp. Kemp is an artist based in Arizona whose body of work includes a mural inside the Phoenix Indian School Visitor Center where people can explore artifacts and ephemera related to the school’s past. “Today, you don’t read about these schools in history books,” said Randy Kemp (Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, Euchee) during an interview with Hyperallergic. Shizu Saldamando, “Grace and Ira, Golden Hour At and Despite Steele Indian School Park” (2019), oil, mixed media on wood panel, 48 x 72 x 1 inches (courtesy Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art) ![]()
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