By Hand Through Memory Notes

BOARDING SCHOOLS

By Hand Through Memory does not adequately address the painful history of boarding schools or the ongoing intergenerational trauma caused by the boarding school experience.

As the United States government sought to force Native people onto reservations and take over Native people’s land for white settlers, it also attempted to assimilate American Indian children to white culture through boarding schools. Starting in the 1870s, government officials took children from their families and communities and placed them in government- or church-run boarding schools, where school officials forbade students from speaking their language and practicing cultural traditions. This resulted in the loss of language and culture, which Native communities are actively seeking to recover through cultural revitalization efforts.

Despite violent and brutal efforts to assimilate Native students, some forged deep bonds and found ways to make the most of the education they received. Some developed a pan-tribal identity and built networks that grew into organizations that fought for sovereignty and civil rights, such as the American Indian Movement.

The boarding school experience is painful and complicated, and the healing and revitalization of Native language and culture is ongoing.

To learn more:

• The National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition. You might consider starting with Healing Voices Volume 1: A Primer on American Indian and Alaska Native Boarding Schools in the U.S.
• Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories, an exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona.
• Cultural Assimilation and Indian Boarding Schools, an Oregon Department of Education Tribal History/Shared History lesson plan.
• Brenda Child’s Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940 (1998), which draws on letters written by parents, children and school officials to highlight the emotional effects of boarding schools on entire families.
• Rabbit-Proof Fence, a 2002 movie about Australian Residential schools, which tells the story of three girls taken from their Aboriginal mother to be trained as domestic workers and the girls’ determination to return home.

STEREOTYPES

One section of the exhibit sought to highlight stereotypes of Native people that have long circulated and continue to circulate in the United States as the result of colonization and racism. Stereotypes, which are broad generalizations about a group of people, are dehumanizing. They cause significant pain to individuals and serve as a justification for ongoing racist policies and practices.

In calling out specific stereotypes, the exhibit asks visitors to recognize and address their own biases. The danger in bringing attention to these stereotypes is that highlighting them may unintentionally reinforce these stereotypes.

To learn more:

• Reclaiming Native Truth is a project that brings light to toxic misconceptions about Native people and offers pathways forward. You can learn more about Reclaiming Native Truth and initiatives to bring about systemic change on the IllumiNative website.
• Cultural Bias, Stereotypes, and the Effects of Boarding Schools, an Oregon Department of Education Tribal History/Shared History lesson plan.
• Philip Deloria’s Playing Indian (1998) traces how white Americans have used their ideas of American Indians to shape a national identity, and how Native people responded to this cooptation of their culture. In Indians in Unexpected Places (2004), Deloria offers case studies from the late 19th and early 20th centuries that readers might find “unexpected,” and in so doing brings to the surface persistent stereotypes of Native people.

RETHINKING COLLECTIONS

As we work on the new exhibition, we are having many discussions about the origins of museum collections, which must be understood within the broader context of colonialism and racism. To give just a few examples, some Native people strategically made goods intended for the marketplace. Other times, Native people made the difficult decision to sell a family heirloom for economic reasons.

We are partnering with Native knowledge holders to shift how the Museum approaches objects in our care. This process includes moving from a focus on the individuals who collected items to the meanings that the objects held to the people who made, used and cared for them—and continue to hold for Native communities today. In looking at a dress, for example, you might ask: Where can you see marks a Plateau artist made during the tanning process? What is the significance of the design? What does it tell us about the person who made the dress, or the person they made it for? How does the dress feel and move when it is worn?

These items are beautiful, but they are so much more than that – many Plateau people see them as living beings that carry on a piece of those who made, used and loved them.

“Many Indigenous communities have a certain connection with different objects that come from their cultures. And there’s a relationship that is not just, ‘Yes I made that, that’s something that we use.’ It’s more of a spiritual connection because we almost think of these things as a person.”

— Tisa Matheson, Nimipuu tribe

To learn more:

• ʔimemú·pelixnin’ wé·teski ka· há·ykatinki (Dressed in Earth and Sky). Phillip Cash Cash, Ph.D., (Weyíiletpuu and Niimíipuu) and Tisa Matheson (Nimipuu) share about a few of the items on display in the By Hand Through Memory exhibition, highlighting the perspectives of the Plateau people who made, used, and cared for these items.
• Amy Lonetree’s Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (2012) considers how museums can be sites of healing for centuries of trauma by honoring Indigenous ways of knowing, addressing colonization and challenging harmful stereotypes.
• To learn more about ongoing decolonizing work in museums, see the Museum of Anthropology, Museum of Us and Abbe Museum.

• Blanket Stories
• Spirit of the West
• Exhibits
• Request for Collections
• Collections