Volume analyzes aethestics of Americanization

THE Art OF AMERICANIZATION AT THE CARLISLE INDIAN Schoolhouse
By Hayes Peter Mauro
Published past University of New United mexican states Press, $45

The body is the temple of the spirit. Clothes make the homo. A picture is worth a chiliad words. Present these old axioms might elicit a groan. Not so, yet, in the American Gilded Age, when each of these aphorisms represented unquestioned truth distilled down to exact snapshots. This was when our state was structured upon a conventionalities in the accented truth that the peak of civilized order was Anglo-American white Protestant capitalism.

At this fourth dimension, the Western borderland was mostly tamed and the United States was moving toward becoming a modernistic industrial ability. There was a minor trouble, though, with those troublesome Native Americans who, with their attachment to the land, their superstitious behavior and their primitive cultures, still impeded America's march to modernization.

Gen. Philip Sheridan expressed one solution to the problem in 1869, and his stance became the source of a long-lived trope: "The only good Indian is a expressionless Indian." However, past the 1870s, it became articulate that although a skillful effort had been made to practice then, slaughtering all of America'south indigenous population was not a viable choice.

Given this context, a solution proposed past Gen. Richard Henry Pratt seemed much more humane. Pratt said the answer to the "Indian question" was to "kill the Indian, save the man." To do this, Pratt founded the Carlisle Indian Industrial Schoolhouse in Pennsylvania in 1879, to train Native American youth in the skills and community of modern society. The school's apparent success led to the establishment of authorities-sponsored Indian schools beyond the United States.

In The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School, fine art historian Hayes Peter Mauro analyzes "before and after" photographs that Pratt deputed to prove how well his educational techniques worked. Much has been written about Carlisle, Indian schools in general, and even the photographs related to these schools, but Mauro takes a unique approach and analyzes how these photographs evidence the overall aesthetics of Americanization at work.

Pratt brought children, voluntarily and involuntarily, from their families, reservations and tribal back up systems to his paramilitary residential boarding school to be transformed into American citizens who would, every bit Mauro puts it, "value Christianity over spiritualism, competition over tribalism, and physical hygiene and mental discipline over the alleged dirt and sloth of reservation life."

Mauro sometimes falls into the jargon of art history, or spends a bit too much time on the historical context of phrenology and the prevailing racism of the fourth dimension. He is at his all-time when he goes beyond the standard historical assay and discusses what the manipulation of these young students' bodies actually meant. Pratt sought to change the clothes, hygiene, posture and worldviews of these students. Information technology is not also far of a stretch to conclude that Pratt believed the physical trappings of Anglo-American civilization could purify the very soul of a "barbarous."

Mauro takes a scholarly and counterbalanced arroyo, but it is tempting to expect for a villain in this book and the tiptop contender for this role is Pratt, who so effectively convinced Washington bureaucrats that the best affair for these children was to rip them from their homes. However, considering the then prevailing "better dead than red" context information technology is too like shooting fish in a barrel to condemn Pratt, or the teachers who worked to "impale the Indian, save the human" or the photographers who provided the "proof" of the school's success in doing so.

Mauro notes that the photographs, done mostly past John N. Choate and Frances Benjamin Johnston, were used every bit propaganda to maintain Carlisle'southward popularity and funding. Did the photographers just work for the money? Were they entranced, as many photographers have been, past the beauty of Native Americans and their culture? Did they, similar Pratt, call back they were saving young lives by helping these children to assimilate into the superior Anglo-American civilization?

Sadly, Pratt's "transformations" were only posed images. Mauro writes that many of these children died of illness, accident or violence, and those who survived rarely managed to fit into either white gild or back into their tribal communities.

This book succeeds in revealing the real truth shown by these photos -- that these children were violated, torso and soul, by a conquering regime that wanted to eradicate every vestige of the Native American in the Us. Mauro demonstrates that a moving-picture show, properly seen, is certainly worth a 1000 words.

[Melissa Jones, an editor in Rancho Santa Margarita, Calif., is a erstwhile photojournalist who worked many years with the Yavapai of Fort McDowell, Ariz., and for NCR.]

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