Objects, Documentation, and Identification: Materiality and Memory of American Indian Boarding Schools at the Heard Museum

ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes the Heard Museum’s exhibition Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience, a site that documents student experiences at off-reservation boarding schools in the United States. The essay pursues questions of materiality and memory in the creation and disruption of public memory narratives. More specifically, this essay attends to the meaning-making of objects and analyzes their contributions to the exhibit’s documentation and identification work. I argue the successful use of objects in this site holds two key implications for the rhetoric of public memory scholarship: (1) that objects are a resource for the rhetorical invention of public memory, and (2) that additional possibilities for documentation and identification may rest in objects. In making this argument, I thus theorize the relationship among public memory, objects, and settler colonialism, and call for increased attention to objects in our rhetorical histories and theories.

KEYWORDS:

• Decoloniality
• materiality
• objects
• public memory
• settler colonialism

Acknowledgments

I thank Kathleen Lamp, Elenore Long, Jacob Greene, and the peer reviewers for their insightful feedback on this essay.

Notes

¹ A note of clarification: Remembering Our Indian School Days was so successful that the Heard Museum opened a renovated update entitled Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories in 2019 after the original exhibit closed in 2018. The 2019 update reflects more than 20 years of scholarship and includes additional archival materials, art, and oral histories (Heard Museum, Away from Home). While both iterations of the exhibit are rich sites of inquiry, I focus specifically on Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience because this version (1) was open to the public when I began this research trajectory and (2) has curatorial records available for researchers in the Heard Museum’s archive and library. Claims made about this exhibit, and the relationship between memory and materiality, pertain only to the Remembering Our Indian School Days version; future research may extend this project by attending to this relationship in Away from Home, or by comparing key similarities and differences in the public memory strategies used within each site.

² I draw on Blair et al.’s definition as those sites that “are more closely associated with public memory than others, for example, museums, preservation sites, battlefields, memorials, and so forth” (24).

³ Names and naming practices matter; throughout this essay I use the tribal affiliation when possible and “Native” and “Indigenous” when speaking about the many diverse cultures and tribes across the United States. When discussing source material, I try to keep my naming practices consistent with theirs to prevent confusion. Text within the exhibition, for example, uses the tribal affiliation, when known, and the term “American Indian.”

⁴ Here, “meaning-making” may be understood within a cultural rhetorics framework; I build on Powell et al.’s central commitment to recognize story-telling as a methodology; they argue that “cultural rhetorics scholars investigate and understand meaning-making as it is situated in specific cultural communities (Act 1, Scene 1). To do so, I focus on the storytelling enabled by—the meaning-making of—objects and attend to the ways that meaning-making negotiates its own story and place in history and public memory.

⁵ The Heard Museum was committed to expanding its collaborative efforts with Native and American Indian communities, as a Strategic Plan adopted in 1991 called for increased participation of American Indians in the museum’s work; to that end, one stated objective of the exhibit sought “to expand [the Heard Museum’s] exploration of the first-person, Native American voice in the planning and presentation of exhibits” (Archival Records RC125 (1): 1.1.1), as indicated in a document entitled “A Proposal to the Flinn Foundation.” The objective was achieved through the sustained consultation and collaboration with Native scholars and communities throughout the exhibition’s development and in its presentation of the history portrayed in the exhibit.

⁶ As one exhibit funding application states, the exhibit’s focus on individual voices is “central to the meaning of this exhibit” (Archival Records RC125 (1): 1.1.2). For scholars of public memory, that statement articulates a valuable claim: the methods of memory matter.

⁷ For an extensive discussion of the exhibit’s development, planning, and implementation, see Lomawaima and Cantley’s article “Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience: A Landmark Exhibit at the Heard Museum.”

⁸ From a draft of a grant application submitted to the NEH in 1994.

⁹ From a planning grant application submitted to the NEH in 1994.

¹⁰ From a 1994 draft of a grant application to be submitted to the NEH.<end>

¹¹ Examples of settler colonial countries include Australia, Canada, and the United States and while other instances may also be found in the remnants of former European colonies scattered across the rest of the globe, my project will focus specifically on the settler colonial practices of the United States.

¹² Here, I draw on Jacobs’s definition, which is informed by the previous work of Daiva Stasiulus and Nira Yuval-Davis (2–3).

¹³ Addressing absences in the historical record through sustained documentation efforts is one intention of the Heard Museum’s exhibit; the forthcoming section on documentation work at the exhibit discusses how research for the exhibit sought to address that very absence.

¹⁴ Ignorance is both “false belief and the absence of true belief” (Mills 16).

¹⁵ One mechanism for doing this needed responsible work is “unforgetting,” a term developed by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz that recognizes the epistemic acts of naming and rewriting absences within our collective and public memories of those colonial histories (qtd. in Shotwell 37). Importantly, “unforgetting” should involve coalition-building across the various groups who have, historically and presently, been implicated within and affected by colonial practices (42).

¹⁶ From a 2000 letter submitted with a grant application to the Arizona Community Foundation.

¹⁷ From the grant application submitted to the Arizona Community Foundation.

¹⁸ From the grant application submitted to the Arizona Community Foundation.

¹⁹ From a draft of the 1994 grant application submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

²⁰ From a document addressed to the W.K. Kellogg Foundation in 2000.

²¹ From a proposal application submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1998.

²² From a 1994 grant submitted to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

²³ Weiser argues that objects may function as “proofs,” where an artifact is used for forensic/epideictic evidence of the verisimilitude of the narrative of national identity advanced in a national museum space (67–69); my attention to how objects may be used to document differs from Weiser’s analysis in one key way. I attend to documentation efforts because of their recognized significance in decolonial work; as Andrea Smith explains, “Although there is disagreement in Native communities about how to approach the past, most would agree that the first step is documentation” (qtd. in Shotwell 52). My attention to how objects may document, rather than act as “proofs,” does not suggest that documentation does not require “proof” or that “proof” cannot document, but rather to suggest that the naming difference here may be reflective of a different commitment when it comes to positioning knowledge claims; to document implies the creation of a new record, one that will be referred to, built on, and grown, while “proof” suggests the use of a piece of evidence in a singular argument.

²⁴ This naming practice can be seen in RC125 (1): 3.1.1, “Conceptual Planning and Design Materials.”

²⁵ A clarification on the timeline: the “Arrival” section focuses on experiences common during the nineteenth century, but students did arrive at and attend the boarding schools throughout the twentieth century after those practices were reportedly stopped following reform efforts. For more information about the reform efforts, see the 1928 report The Problem of Indian Administration (also known as the Meriam Report), which criticizes and challenges the schools’ cultural assimilation-oriented practices (Meriam et al.).

²⁶ My understanding of identification draws from Kenneth Burke’s seminal work; he argues “to identify A with B is to make A ‘consubstantial’ with B” (“A Rhetoric of Motives” 20–21); I differ from Weiser in my uptake of Burkean identification in that I am not committed to theorizing how objects may be inflected specifically within a Burkean theoretical frame, or how Burkean theories may be revised to better account for objects and materiality. Rather that I seek to descriptively consider how the use of objects—on the exhibit’s own terms as described in the section discussing intentions—may be read for their engagement with that goal of creating those “feelings of recognition and identification in visitors” (RC125 (1): 1.1.3).