This curatorial project retraces the history of seventy-two American Indian peoples from the Cheyenne, Kiowa, Comanche, Arapaho, and Caddo Nations who were forcibly taken from their homes in Salt Fork, OK, and transported by train to St. Augustine, Florida by the United States war department. This action was completed under the direction of Lieutenant Richard Henry Pratt from 1875-1878, who is perhaps most well known for his role as the architect of the U.S. Indian boarding school policy. It was at Fort Marion that Pratt developed the assimilation methods that he would implement at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and other similar institutions.
In this project, seventy-two artists respond to the experience of imprisonment by creating an individual work on paper in the same dimensions as the historic ledger drawings made at Fort Marion from 1875-1878. As the site says, “the exhibition is a contemporary response to a historical experience held intact within American Indian communities through oral history and art.”
You can access the project here.
Arthur, Emily, Marwin Begaye, and John Hitchcock. “Re-Riding History: From the Southern Plains to Matanzas Bay,” https://www.reridinghistory.org/.
