American Indian Boarding Schools: History and Legacy, Transition in American Indian Boarding Schools

FAIN: GE-230672-15

Heard Museum (Phoenix, AZ 85004-1323)
Janet Cantley (Project Director: January 2015 to February 2017)

Planning for the reinterpretation and expansion of a permanent exhibition, two traveling exhibitions, and a catalog that would examine the experience of Native American youth in boarding and tribal schools from the nineteenth century to the present.

In 2000 the Heard Museum opened what was supposed to have been a 3-year exhibition depicting the harrowing experiences American Indian children and their families faced as the children were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to Indian Boarding Schools. The exhibition has been the Museum's most visited and most thematically powerful exhibition in the last 15 years. The exhibit is being updated to show the slow process that took place by which Native Americans made the schools their own, turning the schools into tools for self-realization and self-preservation. The expansion project includes adding new information to the existing exhibition to bring the boarding school story into the 21st century; an oral history project - Voices Heard; creating an accompanying catalogue, and creating a Traveling Exhibition for venues nationwide & a Traveling Panels Exhibit for the Museum's education department.