Review: Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell

Abstract

Anthropologists Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell collaborated to reframe the Jesse H. Bratley Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, which led them on a journey to trace hundreds of pieces and glass-plate photographs and determine how Bratley gathered them from diverse Native American communities. According to the co-authors, the collection embodies “objects of survivance,” especially as “material memories” for Native American communities from which the objects originated, such as those of S’Klallam, Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Havasupai, Hopi, and Seminole peoples (30–31). While Montgomery and Colwell aim to align with Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s tenets of survivance in which “Native actors become the protagonists” (31) that not only survive but thrive, their book presents several missed opportunities.1The “protagonist” of the book predominately remains Bratley, the white assimilationist instructor, rather than the Native American progenitors of the objects. Instead of focusing more on the relationships between Bratley and diverse Native Americans, the book relies heavily on sources created by Bratley and other white settlers that constantly imposed their understandings and interpretations on Indigenous peoples. This work could have benefited from greater shared authority with the descendants of American Indian boarding school survivors and the communities from which Bratley collected.2Bratley serves as a white tour guide, walking through his own experiences in American Indian schools. The authors recognize that they use Bratley as the main lens to look into “objects of survivance” that he amassed. As they write, “through Bratley, we remember the vanished who endured” (210). They complicate Bratley’s character and life story, which helps readers to resist dichotomizing histories of the colonizer and colonized. At the same time, Bratley was a collector and loyal to the government that sought to terminate Indigenous sovereignty and identity. As the authors also note, his collections fit the “salvage paradigm,” since he viewed Native Americans as a “vanishing race” and their cultural objects and images as static relics of the past (43–44).As the co-authors illustrate, Bratley learned from diverse Indigenous peoples through his interactions with them, but he consciously upheld American assimilationist tactics that targeted them. The white tour guide gives the reader the vantage point of the “frontier,” with white American settlers facing west rather than Native Americans facing American conquest and colonialism from their homelands. Although the book applies Gerald Vizenor’s key conceptualization of “survivance” as a main thread, it wanes throughout most of the book because Bratley consumes more of the interpretative text than the “objects of survivance” and the respective Indigenous communities. The section dedicated to “objects of survivance” appears at the end of the book and does not offer as much detail as other chapters. Most of the book delves into contextualizing Bratley, yet his experiences among Native Americans allows it to introduce many different Indigenous peoples and their stories and struggles with the onslaught of assimilation and boarding schools between 1893 and 1903.The strengths of the book stem from the objects and images (photographs often taken by Bratley) themselves that provide windows into the lives of Native Americans from the different Indigenous homelands where Bratley lived and worked. Several photos included the names of the individuals pictured, which is often rare information. In some cases, the authors feature their interviews with descendants and community members from the respective tribal nations of the photos and pieces. Their interviews and various stories from Indigenous communities reveal how these “objects of survivance” represent living, not dying peoples with deep intergenerational ties and meanings. It is unclear, however, how the interviews were conducted and to what extent they represented oral histories in their methodology and approach. The authors could have addressed the consideration of repatriation of the objects found in the collection, and how Indigenous communities and families can better access the photographs and creations of their ancestors and people that Bratley and his family and different museums have preserved. The captions of the photos and images contain significant details of myriad Native Americans from distinct cultures and peoples, but the main text sometimes does not expand on the analyses that the captions highlight.The authors reveal that some Indigenous community members considered Bratley as a friend and remained in contact with him such as the Hopi musicians that visited him in Florida (120). In a story about Elk Teeth, one of Bratley’s former students, who reconnected with him at the Chicago World’s Fair and called him by his “Lakota nickname ‘Siokmi’” (65), readers receive a rare glimpse into how Indigenous school students named their white teachers in their language instead of only being named by them. The authors share stories and images that identify Native Americans who worked with Bratley and the US government themselves, for instance as employees of federal Indian schools and police. Each image and object opens countless possibilities of understanding Indigenous experiences at the turn of the century. For example, what is the story of Short Woman who posed for a portrait for one of Bratley’s photographs and “who fought American colonialism” (83)?The authors interweave sources from Bratley’s collection, their research, and interpretation closely in some parts of the book such as the anecdote about Anna, a S’Klallam elder who helped Bratley to communicate with the schoolchildren (129–30). The authors insert a block quote from Bratley about this relationship in which he uses some racist and disparaging language in reference to Native Americans including the elder that aided him. These sources require further analysis on racism and gender in such settings of settler colonialism. This book addresses some of the challenges that Indigenous peoples faced in boarding schools but needs more contextualization, especially of the featured tribal nations.Montgomery and Colwell’s work makes this priceless collection more accessible to Indigenous peoples, communities, and boarding school descendants as well as introduces harsh truths of the assimilation and destructive processes of Indian boarding schools that the general public needs to know and confront. These “objects of survivance” belong not only in this “collection” but have living and ongoing meanings and purposes to Indigenous peoples and communities that are continuing to fight for their recognition and presence.