Speculative Indigenous Archives: A Dual-Site, Cross-Temporal Historical Study of Native American Art Education Institutions in the Southwest and Familial Chinese Immigration Trial Records

Abstract

This study investigates the legacy of trauma in Native American arts education and examines the author’s positionality through his mixed race, Chinese and Alaska Native grandfather’s immigration trial records. There are two archives examined within the study a) The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), historical records on the founding of the institution b) The National Archives at San Francisco immigration file of the author’s grandfather, Hong On. The first section poses genealogy as a method for uncovering Indigenous counter-narratives and challenges to hegemonic settler colonial understands of history. A review of literature on Indigenous art education and the history of the field of Art & Visual Culture Education reveals major gaps in the study of historical experiences of Native American art students. Critical Archival Methodology was employed to analyze the settler colonial violence within the two archives and to use speculation as a method for imagining the personhood of Indigenous subjects. For the first archive, the study analyzed archival materials at IAIA, focusing on the correspondence between Lloyd Kiva New and the Rockefeller Foundation. The findings for the first archive critique the ideological imperatives for Native art students to modernize and speculate on the life stories of Native student based on the teaching observations of Lloyd Kiva New from the Southwestern Indian Art Project in the early 1960s. The materials from the second archive document the author’s grandfather’s 1912 immigration trial while he was detained for suspicion of violating the Chinese Exclusion Act. The finding for the second archive center on the anti-Indigenous violence within the trial records and the attempts of the immigration officials to erase the identity of the author’s great-grandmother Hong Mon See Shee.