Abstract: 

Paintings and prints based around my digitized photographs from my grandfather's 1906 album  shot at the Mission school, Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans in Wisconsin: a site study on place and memory shared by my settler and indigenous ancestors at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Project Description / Artist Statement 

Paintings and photomontages drawn from a 1906 album shot at the Mission school, Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans in Wisconsin: a site study on the sense of place, home, erasure, education, religion, ghosts, more-than-human visitations, and especially,  survivance. The source photographs are like shadows and lights, illuminating and obscuring native and settler dynamics in at a mission school, at Red Springs, on the Stockbridge Munsee Band of Mohicans reservation in northeastern Wisconsin. The Band hired my grandfather to teach at their school. Grandpa, fresh from teachers college, youngest son of German Lutheran immigrant farmers in Nebraska, was twenty years old. He arrived with a new camera. He left just over a year later. While there, he met his future wife, a teenage daughter of the minister hired at the Mission. Grandpa's pocket sized album filled with tiny prints was left to me in 2020 by my late father. Ever since I have been obsessed with research and experimentation concerning these layered memories of place and home. My grandfather's photographs contain many accidental reveals, as much as mysteries, of a long-vanished moment in tribal and settler co-existence, conflict, and opacities. The album becomes a site, for me and the public, to try to understand, or glimpse ourselves within, a North American rural world of 120 years ago, at the cusp of the rise of the residential schools experiment. This school was probably not residential at the time, but after my family left, it became so. 
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Typical photo: log cabin school room, Christmastime interior, packed with kids, beneath a banner on the "young earth"  timeline: "4000 BC - Christ is Born - 1906." Here, in the temporal crosshairs between a creationist map and daily life on the hard road. Well before 1750, people had been forced to leave their aboriginal home, colonially known as the Hudson River valley. The European designation 'Hudson river' obscures its firstname, Mahicannituk, the river that flows both ways. 

First I assembled the found photos into a book, available here as an ePub. ​ "I wish we could know who the children are, know their names," Yvette Malone, librarian at the Miller Library and Museum, told me when she accepted a hardcover copy for the collection. Her observation gave me a prompt for painting. I'm very honored and grateful that the photo book is in the Miller Library and Museum. I agree that much more might be possible to explore the meanings of the photographic record, to interpret the sense of place, ritual, repression, education, weather, and so much more. This project is ongoing and seeks more dimensions of connection with interested publics, native and non-native alike. 

‘Shatter zone’ describes a dynamic canvas of adaptive change in the face of chaos. Children persist in the midst of the zone. They look at us from the shattered past. Confabulation enters the scene of making. Deer Lady meets Melusine. On a winter's night, place and time are in quantum transit. In and around the schoolhouse, the children keep watch.

Indian school legacies, forced migration, erasure and fragments of truth-- all these histories take part in oblique ratios to one another-- their relations embodied through line, wave forms, and dramatic color.

“The labor in interpretation fell on me...urgently implicated in the creations of looking that were established between us. By framing reconciliation as a way of seeing..." -- Naomi Angel


This body of work is in development (spring 2025). Updates frequently. An anticipated next phase will be analog prints in aquatint etching on copperplate with chine colle collage, TBA.