JUNE 2022
Issue #25
ART INSPIRING ACTION FOR MORE JUSTICE & STRONGER ALLIANCES!
“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.” MLK Jr. in 1967
“Whites, it must frankly be said, are not putting in a similar mass effort to reeducate themselves out of their racial ignorance. It is an aspect of their sense of superiority that the white people of America believe they have so little to learn.” MLK Jr. in 1967
“Kill the Indian and save the man” - Richard H. Pratt, founder, Carlisle Indian Industrial School, 1892.
Photograph by Tania Love Abramson
From the moment of European contact on North American soil, Indians were as good as dead. European invaders killed the buffalo, massacred innocent men, women, and children, and forced the survivors onto the worst lands possible. On top of that, they took much of those lands back, when oil and minerals were later discovered. In a calculated attempt to destroy their Native culture, children of all ages were forcibly removed from their families and sent to Indian boarding schools, where their hair was cut (at great spiritual loss), their home clothes taken away, and they were assigned Christian names. They were even punished for speaking their native languages. Every part of this was genocide.
Before and after photographs were used as evidence to demonstrate how Indian schools effectively “civilized” the Indian. These two striking photographs are of Tom Torlino (Navajo). They were displayed at the Heard Museum’s exhibit, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories. The photo on the left was taken in 1882 when he had just entered the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. The photo on the right was taken three years later in 1885. This unsettling transformation was then touted as a triumph. Richard H. Pratt had killed yet another Indian, but the real question is what did he save in his place?
Tania Love Abramson, MFA, is a visual/conceptual artist, performer, videographer and writer/poet, as well as a Lecturer in the Honors Collegium at UCLA. She is the author of three art books, Shame and the Eternal Abyss, Concern, and Truth Lies, as well as the co-creator and co-instructor of the UCLA Art & Trauma class. More of her work can be found at tanialoveabramson.com.
By Joe Musso
every mass shooting is prophecy for the next one
there is always a next one
bright yellow ribbons up and down my street
wrapped around telephone poles
hugging trees
one spiraling free in the breeze over the Bay
and silence, nothing but silence