Where is Home?

Have you ever felt suspended between two places, not sure where you belong? Kiowa schoolchildren at the Rainy Mountain Boarding School and Native children at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School might have felt that way after being forcibly removed from their families and sent to government-sponsored schools intended to “civilize” them. Kiowa students’ drawings, displayed here, show us one way that Native children coped with forced separation and allows us to see Native families, communities, and settler colonial violence through
their eyes. While the U.S. government displaced Native families in its pursuit of westward expansion, American missionaries were expanding the United States’ global influence in countries such as China. The four Chinese children photographed here were adopted by American missionaries or supported by charitable organizations and spent their childhoods traveling back and forth between China and the U.S. We know comparatively little about the “young Asian woman” seated with a white family for a family portrait, but wonder what her life might have been like after the passage of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act barring immigration from Asia to the United States.