Colonized through Art provides a thorough historical account of how white, Euro-American superintendents, curriculum writers, and teachers implemented cultural assimilation, which was manifested in public displays through nineteenth- and early twentieth-century boarding schools. Marinella Lentis traces numerous sites affiliated with the arts across several notable institutions, including the Albuquerque Indian School and the Sherman Institute, in addition to arts and crafts exhibits at Indian schools, fairs, and expositions from Boston to Los Angeles. Lentis's work significantly adds to our understanding of the intersection of “colonialism, American Indian education, critical theory, and market capitalism” (p. xxi). Particularly illuminating is that Lentis's historical account looks at cultural assimilation through the lens of Antonio Gramsci's idea of “cultural hegemony,” which posits that “a group's power over subordinate populations [is] … asserted through control of social institutions, rather than by coercion and physical force” (p. xxii). Lentis traces these institutional structures across numerous locations to argue that “the government tried to maintain a political, social, economic, and racial hierarchy” (p. xxii) over Indigenous peoples.

Lentis's archival work is extensive and detailed, providing a wealth of contextual information in carefully researched footnotes that explain legal decisions behind mechanisms of assimilation and that map assimilationist practices on to broader historical events. For example, she explains how the Dawes Act of 1887 attacked tribal institutions, such as forms of government and kinship systems, by imposing Euro-American concepts of individualism and personal responsibility, the nuclear family, and a political and societal structure based on private land ownership (p. 32).

For purposes of context, Lentis devotes the opening chapter to the emergent field of nineteenth-century art education. “Art,” she notes, “was taught in private academies for elite and middle-class children as early as the 1820s,” though “lower-class citizens and immigrants … did not have access to this training until midcentury” when John Gadsby Chapman, Rembrandt Peale, and Benjamin Coe advocated the arts as cultural refinement, and Horace Mann “emphasized the influence of drawing on the improvement of … industrial skills” (p. 3). By the late nineteenth century, art education became more institutionalized in schooling. Walter Smith's American Text Books of Art Education (1873), for instance, developed a pedagogical arc for arts education, “progressive stages of learning that moved from the foundational level of drawing to pre-professional training” (p. 12). The popularity of the Arts and Crafts movement, Langdon Thompson's speech in support of art education at the 1877 National Education Association annual meeting, Arthur Dow’s text Composition (1899), and Henry Turner Bailey's text School Sanitation and Decoration (1899) also significantly contributed to cementing the place of art education in schools.

“The place of art in Indian schools,” Lentis argues in the second chapter, was to “civilize,” or culturally assimilate Indigenous communities for the expansion of Manifest Destiny. Lentis names the various, ever-changing administrative personnel presiding over each boarding school, and explains how their decisions shaped the collective experience of Indigenous children. For example, she compares early drawing activities of boarding school students at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, where the curriculum focused on white, Western art concepts, to those at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, where students were encouraged to make drawings of home and tribal life that were sold for profit to visitors. Alternatively, at the Albuquerque Indian School, students were frequently taught with objects. Ultimately, “[Indigenous] students were taught a disposition of the mind that was necessary to obtain the eradication of the savage culture and facilitate total assimilation and acceptance of American values” (p. 43, emphasis added). This statement captures the degree to which education was used for “deculturation,” described by Joel Spring in The American School: From the Puritans to No Child Left Behind (2008) as “an educational process that aims to destroy a people's culture and replace it with a new culture.”Footnote ¹

In “Art Education at the Albuquerque Indian School” (chapter 4), Lentis recounts the historical establishment of the boarding school, citing dates and networks behind decisions made as well as key figures, including religious organizations, the Department of the Interior, and the Commissioner of Indian Affairs. She explains how schools were first run by the Presbyterian Church and then fully taken over by the government in 1886. Superintendent J. S. Shearer wrote an annual report and explained that Native parents were suspicious, becoming reluctant to allow their children to attend since they understood that the goal was to destroy their Indigenous cultures. It was difficult for the school administration to gain parental consent, yet Shearer claimed that this attitude became positive as parents changed their position and desired education for their children.

Art education at the Sherman Institute, the focus of chapter 5, was predicated upon the influential Perris Indian School curriculum. Lentis traces the unevenness of the curricular content across the changing administration during the late nineteenth century and notes that drawing was scarce. Several notable examples of drawing appear in the weekly Sherman Bulletin, first published in 1907, including Mrs. Benavidez's fourth grade classroom that “incorporated the use of drawing, an activity that was well received … by Hopi students and by one Crow boy” (p. 170). While this suggests a utilitarian engagement, Lentis claims that drawing was most likely encouraged to represent home life among other culturally significant practices, as the “visionary administrator,” Superintendent Harwood Hall, valued “Native cultures” by “allowing the performance of Hopi traditional songs and dances” (pp. 173–74). Nevertheless, this gave way to the more systematic curriculum of mechanical drawing, which Lentis argues Indigenous students resisted, voicing “their discontent” (p. 188). Hall's superintendency was followed by Frank Conser in 1909, who “did not favorably consider instruction in the Indian arts and crafts and worked toward the suppression of this kind of training” (p. 212). Art instruction didn't have a resurgence at the Sherman Institute until the 1920s.

In “Exhibits from Indian Schools at Fairs and Expositions” (chapter 6), Lentis highlights the ways anthropologists acted as curators of American Indian cultural production, which frames their work within particular racial discourses that position them within a white-centric hierarchy. Lentis thoroughly presents information across numerous exhibitions that occurred throughout the country: Philadelphia (1876), New Orleans (1884), Chicago (1893), Atlanta (1895), Nashville (1897), Omaha (1898), Buffalo (1901), St. Louis (1904), Portland, Oregon (1905), Jamestown, Virginia (1907), Seattle (1909), and San Francisco (1915). Similarly, in “Art Training on Display at Educational Conventions” (chapter 7), Lentis discusses Superintendent of Indian Schools Estelle Reel's control over such exhibits and the role artist Angel DeCora had over the arts and crafts content (p. 295).

One minor issue resides in Lentis's language; she occasionally slips between a critique of the established nineteenth- to twentieth-century hegemonic ideology and a passive use of language without clarification, as noted above in chapter two with respect to the term savage (note my added emphasis). Passive explanation of cultural hegemony reoccurs in the statement, “They [Indigenous students] were forbidden to speak their Native language” (p. 34). These examples gloss over the means by which Indigenous languages were denied through corporeal punishment and the degree to which they manifested in children's accounts of their boarding school experiences, as documented by Chip Richie's 2008 film, Our Spirits Don't Speak English.

Overall, Colonized through Art is an extremely detailed account of the dominant ideology defined by the educational and economic desires that sought to assimilate American Indian peoples and their cultures in order to subjugate them. The salient contribution of Lentis's text is that she threads these desires through arts and crafts education in specific Indian boarding schools and students’ resistance to this education while broadly aligning contemporaneous development of arts education in the United States.