Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience | Heard Museum

23.6.18

Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience | Heard Museum: The groundbreaking exhibition Remembering Our Indian School Days: The Boarding School Experience draws on first-person recollections, memorabilia and the writings and art of four generations of Indian school alumni to examine the commonality of the boarding school experience. A powerful display that explores an important era in American history, the exhibition incorporates historic images, music, sound, oral histories, memorabilia and video to immerse visitors in the story being told by the people who lived it.

Remembering Our Indian School Days celebrates the spirit of survival. Originally established to “civilize” American Indians into mainstream society, Indian boarding schools became a shaping force of a national American Indian identity. “This is not just a part of American Indian history; it is an important element of American history in its entirety,” says Margaret Archuleta, curator of the exhibition, which opened in 2000 and has become one of the museum’s most popular and moving presentations. “Indian or not, this exhibit is an important examination of our society both past and present.”