Manufacturing Assimilation: Photographs of Indian Schools in Arizona.

[from the INTRODUCTION ]

This paper examines some recently discovered photographs of Arizona Indian schools. The amateur snapshots were drawn from a personal album of about one hundred and fifty photographs made or collected by a woman who apparently taught at the Pima Indian school in Sacaton. Arizona schools identified in the photo captions also include the Blackwater day school Sacaton, Keams Canyon, and Rice Station boarding school. During the period when these images were made each of these functioned as feeder schools, funneling students to the off-reservation boarding school in Phoenix which was the second largest in the country. We do not know the name of the woman who made the album and the sketchy captions, hand written on the front or back of the photographs, provide scant documentation. The images date from ca. 1917 and provide tantalizing bits of information about the structure of an Indian school, its environment in the desert South of Phoenix, and the daily lives of the students and teachers. The images may have been made by an acquaintance of one of the teachers at the school who captioned the images and compiled the album. The album and brief captions provide fascinating clues and a foundation for inferences and interpretations.