Review: Objects of Survivance: A Material History of the American Indian School Experience, by Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell

Anthropologists Lindsay M. Montgomery and Chip Colwell collaborated to reframe the Jesse H. Bratley Collection at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science, which led them on a journey to trace hundreds of pieces and glass-plate photographs and determine how Bratley gathered them from diverse Native American communities. According to the co-authors, the collection embodies “objects of survivance,” especially as “material memories” for Native American communities from which the objects originated, such as those of S’Klallam, Lakota, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Havasupai, Hopi, and Seminole peoples (30–31). While Montgomery and Colwell aim to align with Anishinaabe scholar Gerald Vizenor’s tenets of survivance in which “Native actors become the protagonists” (31) that not only survive but thrive, their book presents several missed opportunities.¹

The “protagonist” of the book predominately remains Bratley, the white assimilationist instructor, rather than the Native American progenitors of the objects. Instead of focusing more on the relationships between...