Filling the Silence: Protecting the Names
Barbara Landis
It was when I first saw a photograph of Shan Goshorn’s Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School that I realized the thousands of names of the Carlisle Indian School students had become memorialized and protected in a profound medium—the interior of a basket (figs. 1, 2). For thirty years, I have been collecting, sorting, and editing those very names, organizing them by nation, weeding out the duplicates, and uncovering new names found in Carlisle Indian School documents. My intention has always been to make those names accessible to the nations, including them as lists with every Indian School descendant inquiry I have answered in my work as the Carlisle Indian Industrial School Archives Specialist for the Cumberland County Historical Society (CCHS) in Carlisle (fig. 3). I developed those lists as web pages ready to be distributed upon request by relatives. Whenever I answer inquiries from descendants, I always include their nation’s list(s), and oftentimes my correspondents make discoveries of additional
1. Shan Goshorn, Educational Genocide; The Legacy of the Carlisle Indian Boarding School, 2011. Woven basket: archival inks, acrylic paint on paper splints. Montclair Art Museum, Montclair, NJ. Museum purchase, acquisition fund; 2015.12.a, b. Photo: Peter Jacobs. 2. Artist working on Educational Genocide.
OPPOSITE
Shan Goshorn, Educational Genocide (detail), 2011, cat. 8. Photo: Peter Jacobs.
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