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ABSTRACT
Steele Indian School Park (2001), a city park in Phoenix, Arizona, serves as the memory site for the Phoenix Indian School (1891–1990), an off-reservation boarding school that was part of the federal program of forced assimilation. In this essay, we perform an analysis of the park’s 24 interpretive columns, which serve as an educational display. We argue that the park’s recreational use dominates its role as a historic site. To begin we consider how the history of place shapes memory. We argue that, like museums, parks have a colonial past by addressing their historic relationship to assimilation. Next, we establish that the school served as a recreational destination for Phoenicians. We theorize that both these general and specific histories of place influence the site’s public memory narrative by bifurcating the intended audience and privileging a recreational user. To theorize the relationship between recreation and memory, we build on geographer Kenneth Foote’s term “rectification,” which describes how signs of violent or tragic events are removed so that a site can be returned, in this case, to recreational use. To facilitate the process of rectification, we argue the interpretive columns use four interdependent rhetorical strategies—decontextualization, erasure, appropriation, and paternalism—to elide the racist history of forced assimilation. Our findings indicate the colonial history of place, if unexamined, may continue to influence public memory narratives.
Acknowledgments
The authors thank Joseph Buenker at ASU Library for research assistance.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Correction Statement
This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.
Notes
1 In this essay we have generally followed Gregory Younging’s Elements of Indigenous Style.
2 The US Government frankly acknowledges the abuse that occurred at boarding schools in the United States in the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative Investigative Report (Newland 56, 89).
3 A plaque in the East Ramada credits Thinking Caps as “Graphics/Signage Consultants.”
4 While some of the images featured on the columns are of PI and its students, others are from the Carlisle Indian School. An unfamiliar viewer may incorrectly attribute these images’ origins to PI. While these images are important, we have focused on the text here because of spatial limitations.
5 The concept of the “Circle of Life” is discussed on the first page of the appendices in the Master Plan (n. pag.). We are sensitive to ascribing a concept to Indigenous Peoples generally as the Master Plan does at times. The plan includes interpretations of the concept from a Navajo and Hopi perspective as well as more general references to a Medicine Wheel in the both the Master Plan and the included “Conceptual Plan D” authored by the Navajo Nation Design and Engineering Services and the Phoenix Indian School Preservation Coalition led by Jean Chaudhuri, a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation.
6 We have used the terms “Indigenous” and “non-Indigenous” to characterize the visitors to the park based on King’s scholarship about how sites on boarding school history function differently for these two audiences and because it is the only demographic breakdown in Dandekar’s survey of visitors.
7 We have been unable to independently identify or verify this award.
8 The president of the Inter-Tribal Council of Arizona, John Lewis, was listed as a member of the Phoenix Indian School Task Force responsible for the creation of the Master Plan (i).
9 Here we draw on Michael Calvin McGee’s concept of “fragmentation” both methodologically in examining the relationship among the source material, the interpretive columns, and culture (doxa), as well as how fragmentation puts the onus on the audience to create meaning (279–80). Darrel Allan Wanzer has critiqued McGee’s concept of fragmentation as colonial.
10 We acknowledge the terms “traditional” and “progressive” are often value laden in relation to assimilation.
11 For a more detailed history of Carlisle’s origins and connections with the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute see Fears-Segal (103–35).
12 For an example of recognizing Indigenous military service that emphasizes Indigenous values, see King (78).
13 The column briefly mentions that Native Americans were granted US citizenship in 1924, in part because of their contributions to the war effort. For more on this complex issue, see Deloria; Smith; Stein.
14 There is a documented case of sexual assault occurring under Amanda Chingren, who supervised the outing program from 1906 to 1930, in a primary source, although she sometimes oversaw employment of Indigenous people who were not students and the context is unclear. This account is not discussed in the secondary histories of the school from which the columns are drawn (Pierson 122).
15 Patty Talahongva has made recent calls that a front parcel of the park be searched for the remains of children who died at the school as part of the larger truth-finding efforts by the BIA (Johnson). For an overview of boarding school policies in the United States and Canada from an Indigenous news source, see Pember and her subsequent coverage of graves at individual schools. The recent government report on boarding schools in the United States reports 53 burial sites associated with boarding schools (Newland 85–86).
16 An updated article from 2021 put the total number of deaths at 227 (Rickert).
17 Here our understanding of the colonial perspective builds on Tuck and Yang’s argument that “[i]n order for the settlers to make a place their home, they must destroy and disappear the Indigenous peoples that live there” (6). For definitions of the types of colonialism, see Tuck and Yang (4–5).
18 We thank the anonymous reviewer who suggested the term “memorial sovereignty.”