Blog post by Kate Wolford

Represent: Contemporary Native American Art is an exhibition at the New York State Museum featuring artwork by Native American artists in a wide variety of media and styles, all of which represent Native American heritage and culture. Exhibitor, Towanna Miller, of the Mohawk Bear Clan, is quoted, “Sometimes I feel like a storyteller because I spend much time sharing our Iroquois stories behind my work.” Nearby Miller’s 2013 painting Residential School depicts a narrative typical of many Native American children in the United States at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. In a small classroom, three nuns are beating Native American children and stripping them of their cultural identities and heritage. The classroom is stark and barren, the walls are painted a dusty cool blue, and the dark, swirling grain of the hard wood floors contrasts with the blandness of the rest of the painting. The only furniture in the room is the wooden desks where students presumably learn to read and write. A small oil lamp hangs from a beam in the ceiling. The chalkboards are blank, indicating that the lesson has not yet begun. The children must give up their cultural goods and garments before they can change into their new “white” clothes and begin the literal and metaphorical transformation into white society. In the foreground, one nun holds a child bend over her lap and is spanking him with a ruler. Two children watch frightfully in the background. Another student is leaning over her desk studiously reading and seemingly ignoring the events unfolding around her. On the left two nuns are forcefully yanking and chopping off the long black hair of a Native American girl. A younger figure dressed in bright yellow, possibly the student’s sister, peers cowering from behind her elbow. The nuns have collected the students’ cultural objects and adornments in a bag on the floor, symbolically stripping away their heritage. They are dressed in blue and white garments typical of American children at the time. In this painting Miller reveals the little-known story of Native American children sent to a residential school to be given an education and to be taught “white culture.” Residential School is a revealing and important example of American history from the perspective of the minority and the hardships faced by many Native Americans and their culture.