Shan Goshorn’s Resisting the Mission and the origins of Before-and-After Photographs at the Carlisle Indian School 1
Phillip Earenfight
“A photograph is a meeting place where the interests of the photographer, the photographed, the viewer and those who are using the photograph are often contradictory. These contradictions both hide and increase then natural ambiguity of the photographic image.” 2
The compelling imagery that Shan Goshorn has woven into the pairs of baskets that comprise Resisting the Mission: Filling the Silence are enlarged versions of vintage before-and-after photographs made of students who attended the Carlisle Indian School (fig. 1).3 These photographs show selections of the Indian students—Alaskan, Apache, Navajo, Pueblo, Sioux—upon their arrival at the Carlisle Indian School (before) and several months later (after) (figs. 2, 3). They were made by John N. Choate, a prominent local photographer in the small town of Carlisle, Pennsylvania, during the last decades of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century.4 The before-and-after pairs of photographs were conceived and staged by the founding superintendent of the Carlisle Indian School, Richard Henry Pratt, who commissioned them, in part, to demonstrate what he regarded as the efficacy of assimilationist practices at the first and most
1. Shan Goshorn, Three Sioux Students from Mission Resisted: Filling the Silence, 2017. One of seven pairs of baskets: archival ink and acrylic paint on paper, polyester sinew. Artist’s collection.
2. John N. Choate, Wounded Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, Timber Yellow Robe; Upon Their Arrival in Carlisle, n. d., Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Carlisle Indian School, PC 2002.2, folder 6. 3. John N. Choate, Wounded Yellow Robe, Henry Standing Bear, Timber Yellow Robe; 6 Months after Entrance to the School, n. d., Special Collections, Dickinson College, Carlisle, Carlisle Indian School, PC 2002.2, folder 7.
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