TodayExhibit shows Carlisle Indian School prequel
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Article RatingThe first drawing depicts a circle of Midwestern American Indians in counsel.
A few pages later, another drawing shows many of those same Indians now imprisoned, waiting for a train to take them to a fort in Florida.
The final pages -- focusing on those same American Indians -- show them dressed as U.S. soldiers and sitting in a church listening to a sermon.
The drawings, which go on display at Dickinson College this week, might look like a child's doodles at first, but they tell an important part of the country's, and Carlisle's, past. The Trout Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday.
The images are the work of Etahdleuh Doanmoe, an American Indian who more than 125 years ago was taken from his home in Oklahoma and imprisoned in an Army fort in Florida along with 71 other Indians. The Army removed them because it said they were raiding nearby settlements.
Getting civilized
Outlined with pens and pencils and shaded with colored pencils, his drawings depict the transformation of 72 Kiowa American Indians from their "uncivilized" life on the Great Plains to their "civilized" life in Florida.
Philip Earenfight, the director of the Trout Gallery at Dickinson, re-united these drawings -- once part of a sketchbook, with pages split between Dickinson and Yale University. The exhibit is called "A Kiowa's Odyssey: A sketchbook from Fort Marion," and it will run until early next year.
Although the story of Indians taken to Florida might seem disconnected from Carlisle, it played an important role in Carlisle's history, too, according to Earenfight.
The man charged with the transfer and ultimate assimilation of the Indians was Lt. Richard Henry Pratt, the founder of the Carlisle Indian School -- the prototype facility for "Westernizing" American Indians. Many of the techniques Pratt used at the Carlisle school, Earenfight said, he learned in his "test" run in Florida.
"It's the chapter before the first chapter," Earenfight said. "Chapter one is here in Carlisle."
Star pupil
Earenfight said Doanmoe was perhaps Pratt's star pupil. In fact, the two were so close Doanmoe named his second child after Pratt. He said their closeness might explain why the drawings depict mostly optimistic scenes despite the fact that two of the Indians tried to commit suicide rather than be imprisoned in Florida.
The way the pictures were drawn, Earenfight said, offers as much evidence that Doanmoe and some of the other Indians were becoming assimilated into Western culture.
American Indians had a long tradition of drawing, Earenfight said, but often drew without any sense of perspective. He said Doanmoe's drawings make great use of perspective, whether by showing a train running through the middle of town or a line of Indians standing behind an Army officer.
Doanmoe's drawings show a lot of sophistication, he said, despite what people might think at first glance.
The exhibition will run parallel to two other exhibits in town that will also try to tell parts of the same story.
The U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center will present an exhibit on the Army's efforts to incarcerate the Indians in the West from Sept. 20 to Jan. 27. The Cumberland County Historical Society's next exhibit from Sept. 14 to Feb. 16 will detail the Carlisle Indian School.
