Looking at discipline, looking at labour: photographic representations of Indian boarding schools

Abstract

Native American children were subjected to a rigidly enforced regime of acculturation in a federally funded system of Indian boarding schools. This paper explores the peculiar iconography of photographs of these Indian schools, hundreds of which can now be found in Internet archives. The advent of searchable photograph archives on the Internet makes possible new forms of visual ethnography analogous to a kind of archeology. Photographs can be examined and meanings imputed based on documentary evidence and theoretical understandings. First, a brief introduction to Indian schools will be provided. Then I will examine four documentary projects, each of which had its own representational agenda: first, Richard Pratt's use of photographs as a propaganda-of-the-image to garner support for Carlisle and other Indian schools; second, Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) documentation efforts that included panorama photographs and a collection of shots from the Pacific Northwest by Ferdinand Brady that emphasize labour; third, Frances Benjamin Johnston's photographs representing Indian schooling as progressive education; and finally a recently discovered album of vernacular photographs from the Sacaton school in Arizona. The goal will be to describe the ‘circumstances and milieus' in which the photographs were made. In the conclusion I will turn to issues of sociological theory and meaning.

Notes

Eric Margolis is a sociologist in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Arizona State University. His article, ‘Class Pictures: Representations of Race, Gender and Ability in a Century of School Photography’ (Visual Sociology Vol. 14,1999) was reprinted in Education Policy Analysis Archives http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n31/. He has produced visual sociology projects including photography exhibitions, multimedia and video programmes.

¹For a more thorough discussion of these archives and school photographs see Margolis (1999).

²The captions provided with the photographs consist of the documentary material that accompanies the image in the archive. In some cases the caption was provided by the photographer, in others documentary text was added later by archivists or cataloguers.

³I am using the term ‘Anglo’ as it has commonly been used in the American Southwest. The population was historically characterized as Indian (Native American), Mexican (including Mexicano immigrants and Mexican Americans or Chicanos) and Anglo which included all sorts of English-speaking European Americans including recent immigrants and sometimes even Blacks.

⁴The word (com)posed is intended to convey the way that almost all of the photographs in this article were constructed. These are not candid shots, school personnel worked with photographers in the creation of tableaux intended to convey certain signs and significations. Students were dressed for the occasion, locations selected, groups and individuals posed. The photographer made additional technical decisions, camera angles, depth of field and so on, as well as perhaps manipulating the images in the darkroom. In some cases captions and titles were employed to further fix particular meanings. These compositions form the raw materials to examine the covert and overt institutional meanings of the project that Solomon-Godeau drew to our attention.

⁵There are two main sources on Indian school photography: Malmsheimer (1985) and the 1991 episode of the PBS series on the American Experience called In the White Man's Image. See also my article on school photography (Margolis and Rowe 2004).

⁶No doubt a Freudian would make much of the Anglo perception that Indians were dirty and disorderly, and the seemingly endless scrubbing and ordering of the children. It is as if they wanted to wash away the stain of their colour. It is also instructive that the girls were all trained in hygiene and often taught to be domestic servants where they could continue the scrubbing and whitening process.

⁷Photography simultaneously created a general iconography of Indian culture as dirty, ignorant and backward, or alternately, in the work of Edward Curtis for instance, as a noble state of nature. Today many tribes are resisting white photographers' representations of traditional culture either romantically or as ‘poverty’ while assimilated ‘good’ Indians are depicted in affirmative terms. Solomon-Godeau argued that ‘photography functions to ratify and affirm the complex ideological web that at any moment in historical time is perceived as tout court … photographs depicting the exotic native Other became fuel for the mission civilisatrice’ (Solomon-Godeau 1991: 171–172).

⁸I have written elsewhere on techniques for studying such images (Margolis 1988, also available online at http://courses.ed.asu.edu/margolis/mining/; Margolis and Rowe 2003).

⁹‘The Tulalip Mission School became the first contract Indian school, an arrangement whereby the government provided annual funds to maintain the buildings while the Church furnished books, clothing, housing and medical care. In 1896 Congress drastically reduced the funding for mission schools and eventually, in the winter of 1900–01, the Tulalip school became a federal facility’ (Marr n.d.).

¹⁰Johnston's work is unique and no comparable attempt to photograph educational processes has been undertaken to this very day.

¹¹Some of this section is drawn from a more finely detailed study of the Sacaton album (Margolis and Rowe 2004).

¹²According to Carol Carney (1974) upper-grade boys averaged 19 in age in 1921.

¹³Two of the best accounts of resistance written by teachers are Herbert Kohl's (1991) reflection ‘I Won't Learn From You’ and Harry Wolcott's (1974) account of being a white teacher in a Native village entitled ‘The Teacher is My Enemy’.

¹⁴In a provocative article on photographs of Canadian boarding schools, McMaster (1992) asked from a Native perspective ‘Can photographs answer elusive questions of a history that has been repeatedly suppressed?’ He identifies crossed arms and closed faces as images of resistance.

¹⁵It is interesting to consider as Trennert (1989: 596) noted: ‘Most Indian parents would have been horrified at the thought of striking their children’. The tolerant view of Native American parents once considered ‘indolent’ and ‘primitive’ is very much in keeping with modern views of child abuse. Laws even against spanking have been passed in several European countries. Simultaneously, students of all types, and students of colour in particular, have been subjects to technological regimes of policing in schools that dwarfs the surveillance of the boarding schools (cf. Devine 1995).

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Notes on contributors

Eric Margolis

Eric Margolis is a sociologist in the Division of Educational Leadership and Policy Studies at Arizona State University. His article, ‘Class Pictures: Representations of Race, Gender and Ability in a Century of School Photography’ (Visual Sociology Vol. 14,1999) was reprinted in Education Policy Analysis Archives http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n31/. He has produced visual sociology projects including photography exhibitions, multimedia and video programmes.