Native American children were subjected to a rigidly enforced regime of acculturation in a federally funded system of Indian boarding schools. This paper explores the peculiar iconography of photographs of these Indian schools, hundreds of which can now be found in Internet archives. The advent of searchable photograph archives on the Internet makes possible new forms of visual ethnography analogous to a kind of archeology. Photographs can be examined and meanings imputed based on documentary evidence and theoretical understandings.
Source: Margolis, E. “Looking at discipline, looking at labour: photographic representations of Indian boarding schools.” Visual Studies, 19 no. (1), (2004). http://www.studythepast.com/378_spring11/materials/indian%20photograph%20essay.pdf
