An Art of Survivance: Angel DeCora at Carlisle

In an autobiography published in a 1911 issue of the Red Man, a newspaper produced at Carlisle Indian School, Winnebago teacher Angel DeCora wrote: "There is no doubt that the young Indian has a talent for the pictorial art, and the Indian's artistic conception is well worth recognition, and the school-trained Indians of Carlisle are developing it into possible use that it may become his contribution to American art."¹ Throughout her nine years at Carlisle (1906–15), DeCora repeated versions of this statement in speeches to the National Education Association, the Society of American Indians, the Lake Mohonk Conference of the Friends of the Indian, and Quebec's International Congress of Americanists.² She also published a similar statement in at least one other Indian school publication.³

DeCora's three points about Indians' inherent artistic talent, the value of Indian art, and its place in American art summarize the strategic and important alternatives she offered to then current perceptions and enactments of Indian art through her own artistic productions and her teaching at Carlisle. Operating from a constrained racial and gendered position, this artist-teacher engaged with white-dominated approaches to Indian art to transform them for her own and future generations. DeCora's alternatives helped enable American Indian survivance and led to a reshaping of the cultural category of American art. "Survivance," a term used by Gerald Vizenor to describe American Indian capacity to combine survival with resistance, was aided at that time—DeCora wrote two decades after the massacre at Wounded Knee and when Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show (1883–1913) was still a fixture in American entertainment—by the seemingly peaceful, non-warlike, qualities of art. American art, still struggling to overcome European dominance, would, by seeing Indian art in aesthetic rather than ethnographic terms, enhance its own independence.

When DeCora began teaching at Carlisle, she was already an established artist. She had studios in New York and Boston and had published illustrations in Harper's. Her friends included Cecelia Beaux, who had recently been elected to the National Academy of Design and regularly received both academic honors and high prices for her work. The conventionally professional National Academy, which controlled much of aesthetic discourse and many of art's material resources, was centered around "The Ten," artists who represented several conservative styles of painting and who served as the National Academy's arbiters of taste.⁴ Two members of this prominent inner circle, Edmund G. Tarbell and Frank W. Benson, were DeCora's teachers. Outside the National Academy the modernist interest in things "primitive," the British-inspired Arts and Crafts movement, and new attention to the aesthetics of East Asian art created a desire for what influential teacher and artist Arthur Wesley Dow described as "creation of new types of design, decoration and craft work." Indian art answered to that description.⁵ DeCora, who undoubtedly knew Dow's work, shared and acted upon many of his views. In sum, DeCora's association with the Academy, other women artists, the Arts and Crafts movement, and East Asian art positioned her at the intersections of several movements within American art as she took up teaching Indian art at Carlisle.

DeCora is one of many American Indian teachers who have been largely overlooked in received narratives of the Indian boarding school era. Historians like Hoxie, Trennert, and Adams have recounted the politics that created and energized federal schools, showing how educational assimilation replaced battlefield genocide as a strategy for dealing with "the Indian problem" beginning in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and how this policy shaped the material conditions and curricula at schools operated by the Indian School Service.⁶ Others, like Coleman, Lomawaima, Child, Riney, and Cobb, have focused more directly on the experiences of families and their children who were students in Indian schools, showing the physical and psychological deprivations imposed by these schools...