As an ally, friend, artist, I'm digging deep into an album of photos I've inherited. My recent German-immigrant ancestors were teachers at the Lutheran Mission School of the Stockbridge-Munsee Mohicans in 1906.

1906 becomes the stuff of shadows and light, illuminating and obscuring native and settler dynamics in at a mission school, at Red Springs, Wisconsin. The Band had just hired my grandfather to teach kids on and off the reservation, kids who appear multi-racial in the photos, and anywhere in age from three to fifteen. Grandpa, fresh from teachers college, youngest son of immigrant farmers, was twenty years old. His album, filled with battered, small prints was left to me in 2020. Accidental reveals around co-existence, conflict, and mutual opacities intensify the mysteries of this collection and its potential for abstractions. 120 years ago, at the cusp of the rise of the residential schools experiment, this school was probably not residential at the time, but became so within a decade. Typical photo: log cabin school room, Christmastime interior, packed with kids, beneath a banner on the "young earth" timeline: "4000 BC - Christ is Born - 1906." Here are the temporal crosshairs between a creationist map and daily life on hard roads of survival, after nineteenth century forced removals from the Hudson Valley and western New York State.

In 2020, I assembled the found photos into this album as a photo book. "I wish we could know who the children are, know their names," Yvette Malone, librarian at the Stockbridge-Munseel Miller Library and Museum, told me when she accepted a hardcover copy for the collection. Her question propels my research. Who are these children?
In and around the schoolhouse, the children keep watch. “The labor in interpretation fell on me...urgently implicated in the creations of looking that were established between us. By framing reconciliation as a way of seeing..." -- Naomi Angel, 2022