School Days for Me and the Museum: Commentary on Remembering Our Indian School Days, a Landmark Exhibit at the Heard Museum

Abstract

30 J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 School Days for Me and the Museum: Commentary on Remembering Our Indian School Days, a Landmark Exhibit at the Heard Museum Rayna Green Imust confess to a brief hesitation when asked in 1997 to join the Heard Museum’s advisory council for the exhibition Remembering Our Indian School Days. I was not then, nor have I ever been, an expert on Indian education or boarding schools. I understood that my friends and colleagues at the Heard, Marty Sullivan, Director, and Margaret Archuleta , Fine Art Curator, recruited me for my experience in exhibitions on Native history, in producing a film, and advising the Heard for a history-­ heavy art show on the Fred Harvey Company and Native American art (Green, 1995 and 1996). I had one encounter with boarding school history in an exhibition specific to Hampton Institute (Green, 1989). That exhibit was very much about Hampton, its Indian history, and its museum and wonderful collections, not necessarily, I thought then, about Indian history or museums writ large. But I accepted the challenge , and as the Heard advisory team probed more deeply, I realized that most exhibitions on Native history and art had more to do with Indian education and Indian schools than I had ever imagined. However slowly, I began to understand the centrality of Indian school history to modern Native history, to modern studies of Native cultural history. I also began to understand just how important it was for a museum to tackle this subject. My retrospective comments here focus on both the personal and professional journey I made in working on the Heard show, on some of the scholarly and museum-­ related issues that went into it and emerged from it. I’ll talk about some of the issues and critical histories that bring us together—­ historians, museum professionals , educators (including museum educators), researchers, practitioners , and students—­ in these rare opportunities to educate ourselves J O U R N A L O F A M E R I C A N I N D I A N E D U C A T I O N — 5 7 , I S S U E 1 31 and the public. I will also speak to how I became better educated and a better educator in this particular exercise in lifelong learning. My dear friends and colleagues Tsianina Lomawaima and Brenda Child, historians whose broadly defined expertise on colonial Indian education prepared them to take the lead in this enterprise, then and now, have offered a deeper history of this project, focusing on the similarities between the history and development of the Heard and boarding school history, all in the larger context of Native dispossession. They have explained why this exhibition has been up for 18 years and why Native and non-­ Native people, local and national, are and should be attached to it. They explore the subtleties that should and do lead Indians , teachers, students, historians, and lunch ladies all to love this show. But their history also accounts for the need to speak to the necessity and significance of the current reinstallation. I had several compelling reasons and ulterior motives to join the original Heard advisory team. I wanted to take advantage of previous work with Heard staff to get this art museum to dive further into the historical pool we began to swim in for the Harvey show. I was also quite excited to work with the other advisers on the team, especially the historians Lomawaima and Child, two of the then youngest, newest, brightest lights in new Native scholarship, each of them with their own emergent distinction in boarding school history. I knew I had much to learn from them, and, I wanted to practice my museum missionary recruitment policies on historians whom I could draw into a love of exhibitions and material culture. Tsianina was already complicit in a passion for Native museum collections, being married to a pioneering Native museum professional and friend, Hartman...