The Art of Americanization at the Carlisle Indian School (Hayes Peter Mauro, 2011)

Abstract

Set in the context of America's "Gilded Age," Mauro's visual culture history centers on the trope of the "before and after" portraits used to mark the progress and practice of assimilating Indians into Americans at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. His aim is to show how Richard Pratt, the school's administrator, used photographs to argue that "by means of aesthetic transformation, these groups were to be converted from an assumed state of degenerate Otherness into model 'American' citizens."