Author： Strathman Nicole
Publisher： MDPI
E-ISSN： 2076-0787|4|4|726-747
ISSN： 2076-0787
Source： Humanities, Vol.4, Iss.4, 2015-10, pp. : 726-747
Disclaimer: Any content in publications that violate the sovereignty, the constitution or regulations of the PRC is not accepted or approved by CNPIEC.
Abstract
Photographs of American Indian boarding school students have often been used to illustrate the federal forced assimilation practices of the 1870s–1930s. Taken by official school photographers, these propagandistic images were produced to emphasize the “civilizing” benefits of the boarding school system. Although some Native students obtained cameras and recorded their own boarding school experiences, the visual history still relies on the institutionally-produced images. Using a collection of photographs created by Parker McKenzie (Kiowa) and his classmates while attending Rainy Mountain and Phoenix Indian Schools, this paper intends to rectify that exclusion through a reading of these snapshots as examples of visual sovereignty. The concept of visual sovereignty involves examining Native self-representations as the (re)claiming of indigenous identities in order to counter colonial imagery that has dominated the archives.
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