Introduction With power, poignancy, and undeniable historicity, Resisting the Mission and the art of Shan Goshorn address perhaps the most shameful chapter in the long and often tragic deculturalization of Native peoples pursuant to nineteenth-century Federal Indian policy. This exhibit spotlights that disastrous and misguided chapter and its most notorious symbol and emblem— the Carlisle Indian School and Superintendent Richard Henry Pratt’s infamous and ultimately unsuccessful cultural mantra to “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man.” I see this subject through more than the eyes of a museum director—it also has a deeply personal meaning and import to me. My Southern Cheyenne great-grandmother, Rena Flying Coyote, daughter of a chief, Thunder Bull, matriculated—if it can be called that—at Carlisle from 1896 to 1904. She was the mother of my father, Walter Richard West Sr., whose name in Cheyenne was Wah-Pah-Nah-Yah or Light Foot. Like his mother, my father spent over a decade attending Indian boarding schools in Concho, Oklahoma, and then Haskell Institute in Kansas, where he was trained as a carpenter and bricklayer. He ultimately became one of the leading artists in the Oklahoma Native fine arts movement that grew and flowered beginning in the mid-twentieth century. I applaud and honor all that Shan Goshorn, a brilliant and insightful artist and a profoundly empathetic humanist, has accomplished for Native peoples and communities—and for all of non-Native America, for that matter—in this exhibit. For the millennia, artists have been and continue to be Native culture bearers, and often, as well, the “canaries in the mine” for Native communities. Their role and responsibility through time, in addition to the creation of compelling art, inevitably encompasses a cultural underbelly, a dimension that is more communal than individual in nature and charts Native collective continuance, including its many challenges. In Resisting the Mission Goshorn touches all these elements. Her creativity was motivated by very extensive research she conducted personally concerning Carlisle, which some of her own relations had attended. Through that process she learned much that pained and moved her about the catastrophic impact institutions like Carlisle had on Native family and community. She openly mourned the students who were involuntarily separated from their parents and sent away to Carlisle, and who never returned home and are now still resting in a cemetery far from their Native community’s homelands. But in the end, as Goshorn states in her essay here, the endpoint of Resisting the Mission is not tragedy and truth, although the understanding and acceptance of that midpoint is essential. It is, instead, the potentiality of ultimate healing, resolution, and redemption—the liberation of silenced Native voices, the understanding of a legacy of wrong that besmirched the history of a great nation, and the profound and abiding mutual cultural reconciliation that could follow: There is healing that desperately needs to happen. Giving Native people an opportunity to add their voices to this work feels like a small step toward helping us reclaim our stolen voices. It is my prayer that these baskets will help inspire a new dialogue to spark and generate such changes.
W. Richard West Jr. President and CEO, Autry Museum of the American West Founding Director and Director Emeritus, National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution
OPPOSITE
Shan Goshorn, Two Views (detail), 2018, cat. 1.
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