Objects of survivance: a material history of the American Indian school experience
Frontier and pioneer life, Indigenous peoples, United States history
Human-narrated audio
Summary
Between 1893 and 1903, Jesse H. Bratley worked in Indian schools across five reservations in the American West. Bratley was charged with forcibly assimilating Native Americans through education. Although tasked with eradicating their culture, Bratley became entranced by it collecting… artifacts and taking glass plate photographs to document the Native America he encountered. Today, the Bratley Collection consists of nearly 500 photographs and 1,000 objects traced to the S'Klallam, Lakota Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Havasupai, Hopi, and Seminole peoples. Montgomery and Colwell posit that Bratley's collection constitutes "objects of survivance" things and images that testify not to destruction and loss but to resistance and survival. 2019