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Learning to write, Indian Boarding School, early 1900’s Quanah Parker - Chief of the Kwahadi Comanches (ca. 1845 – 1911) Yuma Men Frances Densmore recording Blackfoot Mountain Chief on a cylinder phonograph for the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1916 The 1909 Chilocco Indian Agricultural School basketball team St. phillips Fort George QC, Girls brushing teeth. From the General Synod Archives Tourist photographing Indians, Crow Fair, Montana. Ca. 1991 Crow Tribe Playing pool 1950’s Dr. Charles A. Eastman, with Genevieve Irwin, “Miss Fort Dearborn,” holding a pipe. Photographed at the Birth of Chicago Pageant in 1933 Untitled Long distance runner and Olympic medal winner Lewis Tewanima (Hopi; 1879?-1969) after winning a marathon in New York City, May 6, 1911 The Dwight Anderson family trying on a Native American headdress at Ghost Town in Buena Park, California. Thomas Indian School Girls Basketball Team, 1931

Kill the Indian, Save the Man 


2017

This visual essay reflects on the forced assimilation of Native Americans and the dramatic changes to their traditional way of life. It is based on found archive photographs sourced from digitised public collections. Among other things, these images depict life at Native American Boarding Schools. The first boarding schools were proudly heralded in 1887 with the slogan "Kill the Indian, Save the man". By 1900 there were almost 150 boarding schools across the United States.
This work is part of a continued exploration of the nature of history. It seeks to explore the process of drawing as a metaphor for the distortion of memory and the biased nature of history. Each image has been drawn several times, responding to the previous drawing.

The final drawings are intended to be seen in two formats: as a limited-edition book, and as cutout objects, lifted off the page and installed in a space.

German-English Illustrator and Artist based in Brighton, UK

My work explores how illustration can be used as an active tool for understanding, interpreting and re-evaluating dominant narratives and discourse about historical events. How can illustration add to our understanding of history, how can it challenge it?

I am interested in exploring and highlighting the ways in which history is recorded, suppressed, remembered and distorted. I have become particularly interested in how meaning and underlying power structures contained within archival records can be interpreted through the act of drawing. Often working with archival artefacts and personal testimony, I create narrative sequences and visual essays that explore my own relationship to history.