Taləskánawe

Anthropologists often visited the Wabanaki communities during the period of “salvage research.” Seeing native people as a “vanishing race,” they sought to document our community and art forms because they saw them as a soon-to-be-fading memory.​

​The image of two Penobscot women making baskets on Indian Island in Maine in the early 1900s is overlaid with birchbark and double curve motifs, repurposing this photograph premised on extinction to celebrate and showcase the evolution and adaptability of Wabanaki art forms despite colonial efforts to lock us in time. ​​

​–Lokotah Sanborn

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Henry Davis Sleeper designed the interiors of Beauport, the Sleeper-McCann House (1907) in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with decorations on the theme of American patriotism and colonialism. Racist depictions of Indigenous, Black, and Asian Peoples are displayed in the form of caricatures and decontextualized historical artifacts.​

Due to a lack of documentation, the motivation behind Sleeper’s interior design choices is unknown. Regardless of intent, the individual items displayed depict Indigenous Peoples fixed in the time of contact and through the lens of manifest destiny, which connects to the anthropological notion of “the vanishing Indian.” ​

–Danikah Chartier 

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​Photomontage​

Inkjet on glossy paper, 13×19​

2024