Images of assimilation: photographs of Indian schools in Arizona

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the United States government established a network of boarding schools designed to assimilate Native American children into white American culture. In this article, Eric Margolis and Jeremy Rowe examine photographs from these Arizona schools to reveal how the visual record both documented and participated in the project of cultural erasure.

The photographs follow a striking pattern: “before and after” images show children transformed from their traditional appearance into uniformed students with cropped hair and Western clothing. Margolis and Rowe argue that these images were not neutral records but deliberate propaganda — produced to demonstrate the “success” of assimilation programs to government officials, philanthropic donors, and the general public.

Yet the same photographs, read against the grain, reveal what the original photographers did not intend to show: the resistance in children’s eyes, the persistence of cultural identity despite institutional pressure, and the physical conditions of schools that were often overcrowded, underfunded, and harsh. The article demonstrates how visual analysis can recover suppressed narratives from within the very images that were designed to erase them.

Published in History of Education, this article contributes to the growing body of scholarship that uses visual evidence to re-examine the history of Indigenous education in America.