*** I need two pages for the draft and 6 pages for the final

For Paper only: Showcase how the Humanities apply to everyday life. Choose a work of art and interpret what the artist is trying to convey in terms of human life/living. Be critical, and identify/apply key themes and characteristics learned from our course. Draw connections with your personal life. Write a 6-7-page paper using 2 or more sources. 1 outside source and 1 source from our class. Papers must be at least 6 total pages long and follow standard MLA formatting (typed, double-spaced, 12 pt. Times New Roman font, 1-inch margins). Please cite (using MLA) all of the required sources and have a Works Cited page.

Checklist for Draft Paper:

• 2 full pages or more; 1 minimum. Treat this as brainstorming, try to get some ideas out; write multiple versions if needed.
• Start your draft paper as if you are having a conversation with your friend, talk about life, and talk about your thoughts on the subject you are writing about.
• Do not include MLA heading, (my name, your name, class); only page numbers and title, please.
• Works cited should be at the very end.
• Your paper should include one in-class source and one source from your own research. So, one of the texts from class and the other is from your research from the library or a valid scholarly source. If you are unsure, ask me. NO WIKI.

Checklist for Final Paper:

• Check your page length and sources.
• If completing a project, submit the project separately. (Picture, video, or pdf; will be found in final module)
• Do not include MLA heading, (my name, your name, class); only page numbers and title, please.
• Works cited should be at the very end.
• Your paper should include one in-class source and one source from your own research. So, one of the texts from class and the other is from your research from the library or a valid scholarly source. If you are unsure, ask me. NO WIKI.
• Remember, this is a creative project, so be creative!
• For your paper, you are essentially doing what we have been doing in our discussion posts. Seeing how these methods of creative expression are relative to human life. Be that through any method of artistic expression.

Reading:

Boarding School Portraits of Tom Torlino

John Choate, Boarding School Portraits of Tom Torlino
by DR. HAYES PETER MAURO

John N. Choate, Tom Torlino [version 3], 1882 (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center); John N. Choate, Tom Torlino [version #2], 1885 (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)

In these two side-by-side photographs we are presented with two faces. At first glance, the faces seem to have different appearances and identities. The first portrait, made in 1882, depicts a man named Tom Torlino. Torlino, a Native American, was a member of the Navajo, an Indigenous people native to the southwestern United States. He was also a student at the famous Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. Carlisle was a federally funded boarding school dedicated to the assimilation of Native American youths in an effort to make them enculturated as Americanthat is, in accordance with cultural attributes common to middle-class Anglo-Americans of the time. With this mission in mind, Torlinos appearance in the first image reveals very specific information about his perceived identity. He wears Indigenous clothing, jewelry, a long shock of dark hair, and has bronzed skin. In contrast, the second photograph, made three years later following his matriculation at the school, we see a nearly unrecognizable Torlino. His appearance mimics that of the aforementioned middle-class Anglo-American man of the late 19th century: short-cropped hair, a respectable three-piece suit, no jewelry, and lighter skin. On closer inspection therefore, the two photographs represent the same individual, photographed before and after his arrival, matriculation, and Americanization at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Torlino was photographed in both instances by John Choate, a commercial studio photographer in Carlisle, who was hired by the Carlisle School administration to photograph some of its students.

Domestic science class at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, c. 1903 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)

Torlinos physical transformation was to be perceived by the contemporary viewer as the byproduct of Torlinos education at Carlisle, one of the earliest federally funded, off-reservation, Indigenous boarding schools. The curriculum sought to forcibly assimilate the students through religious evangelization, learning English, physical exercise, and acquiring a marketable skill that would serve them after leaving the school. In sum, Torlino and his classmates were seen as needing a sort of transfiguration from their perceived savage origins as Indigenous peoples into civilized, self-sufficient Americans, per common cultural definitions and norms of that time.

John N. Choate, Tom Torlino [version 3], 1882 (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)

Before-and-after portraiture

However, Choate was known to dress up the students and stage them for the before portrait, to make them look more savage. He had an array of props, costumes, and studio lighting tricks to darken the skin tone, which was intended to play to pre-existenting racial prejudices. Conversely, in the after portrait, he would commonly intensify the studio lighting to lighten skin tone. These studio pyrotechnics, as well as the photographic before-and-after formula itself, were commonplace in both Europe and the United States throughout the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries. Indigenous peoples around the colonized world were ritualistically photographed in these ways, which tended to reinforce pre-conceived racial and cultural stereotypes commonly held by European-American viewers. Taken together this photographic technique is called before-and-after portraiture. It is usually intended to display some sort of progress or evolution perceivable in the individual between the first and second photographs.

Indigenous assimilation

Choates portraits of Torlino were taken at the behest of Richard Henry Pratt, an army officer and Carlisles first superintendent. Pratt advocated for Indigenous assimilation to resolve the so-called Indian Question, a political debate crystalized in Francis A. Walkers influential 1874 book The Indian Question. [1] This question had two parts, and considered the following:

What shall be done with the Indian as an obstacle to the national progress? What shall be done with him when, and so far as, he ceases to oppose or obstruct the extension of railways and settlements?[2]

John N. Choate, Tom Torlino [version #2], 1885 (Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center)

Like most European Americans at the time, Walkera former Commissioner of Indian Affairsviewed Indigenous Americans as savage and heathen peoples who were morally and spiritually unredeemable, and thus Pratts assimilation school had its skeptics. Photography provided documentary proof that Pratts studentsyoung people taken from reservations often thousands of miles away and transported to Carlislecould be reeducated and made into contributors to national progress. Prints of these photographic negatives appeared side-by-side in school publications such as newsletters, magazines, and yearbooks. All of this had a political end: to secure increased funding from the federal government for Pratts assimilation experiment.

Choates photographs of Torlino were intended to be both instructional and moralizing. They were instructional in the sense that they displayed correct evolution within the persons photographed. In other words, the person had successfully navigated the assimilation process and had acquired a new persona: the ideal middle-class American citizen. However, Pratt demanded more than just instruction with these photographs. He wanted Choate to convey to Pratts intended audiences that the person in each picture was fundamentally transformed morally. They have (seemingly) accepted Christ as their savior and had left behind heathen Indigenous spiritual practices. In short, they had been saved.

Manifest Destiny

In addition to these dynamics, a further examination of the broader social and political culture within the United States at the time is needed to fully place these images in proper historical context. Throughout the 19th centuryespecially in the decades following the Civil Warthe federal government sought to annex and incorporate the expanding nations vast physical frontier and to claim the land and resources it contained. This was codified in a doctrine called Manifest Destiny. Essentially, this doctrine underwrote the governments economic agenda of westward expansion by giving it a moral fervor. Expansion was often cast in moralizing terms and as a spiritual and moral clash between binary forces: savagery versus civilization. Importantly, Manifest Destiny ultimately had its justification in then-current interpretations of the Bible. Many Christian Americans of the 19th century perceived the relatively new nation as a New Jerusalem freed from the social and religious bonds of the captivity of Rome (a metaphor commonly used to describe Catholic Europe). Part of this destiny was the fulfillment of a perceived spiritual covenant with God, in which American Christians felt obligated to purify the frontier of heathen elements, notably uncivilized Indigenous Americans. The American historian Frederick Jackson Turner summed up this viewpoint succinctly in 1893:

In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wavethe meeting point between savagery and civilization the frontier is the line of most rapid and effective civilization.[3]

The taking over of the savage frontier and introducing civilization was positioned as both progressive and moral. The pair of photographs shows the improved and saved Torlino on the right, who is compared to his previous savage and heathen former self on the left. These seemingly didactic images have a deeply troubling history, steeped in racist ideologies that placed white, European-descended Christians above Indigenous cultures, as they contributed to the stereotyping and erasure of Indigenous identities and ways of life. [4]

[1] Francis A. Walker, The Indian Question (Boston: James R. Osgood & Co., 1874).

[2] Walker (1874), p. 17.

[3] Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History, Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner, edited by John Mack Faragher (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 3160.

[4] Elizabeth Edwards, Photography and Anthropological intention in Nineteenth Century Britain, Revista de Dialectologia y Tradiciones Populares, volume LIII, number 1 (1998), pp. 2348.

smarthistory.org

Get fast, custom help from our academic experts, any time of day.

Place your order now for a similar assignment and have exceptional work written by our team of experts.

Secure 100% Original On Time Delivery