Fund publishing book on US Indian boarding school.

Dear donor, I am seeking your financial support for an important project: to publish a book on the architecture, interior spaces, and murals left behind at the largest of the United States off-reservation federal Indian boarding schools. I am a visual artist and teacher who has spent the past 25 years photographing and researching the former federal Indian boarding school in Brigham City, Utah. The school opened in 1950 and was housed in a set of military buildings left over from the former WWII hospital, Bushnell Military Hospital. The school was closed and boarded up in 1984. I gained permission to enter the buildings and begin photographing in 1996. I hold an extensive photographic archive of the architecture and what these empty buildings contained including photographs of the artwork of the former students drawn on the walls of their dormitories. I am in the very latter stages of this project which will be a book called ‘Eagle Village’’ My goal is to share the complex history of this school which opened as a school to assimilate Native American children and, by its closure, was a school the students fought to keep open when the Reagan administration suspended further funding for it. An important goal of this book is also to provide a means be for the artwork, through the images, to be repatriated back to the tribal communities from where the students came from. I have self-funded this project for decades but simply do not have the funds to pay for the printing of the book, and with recent interest rate hikes, borrowing will also be too costly. I plan to create a limited edition artist book of 400 copies printed at Anteism art book publishers in Montreal. With your help I hope to have the means to produce a beautiful book and to gift a copy to the over 100 tribal communities over the United States that students arrived from. This is an important story with photographic evidence that is now lost to the landfill as the network of military architecture was mostly demolished by 2013. I am in the final phase of the book design and the book intends to be a beautiful 400 page creative book with my original photographs, writing from a multitude of sources (interview, congressional records, my writing), and images of objects found in the school buildings and curtains from the dormitory buildings. I was awarded a Visiting Scholar fellowship for this project in 2021 from Brigham Young University’s Charles Redd Center for Western Studies and recently profiled in the September 2022 issue of Utah State Magazine (www.utahstatemagazine.usu.edu). The Utah State Magazine article gives a good summary and profile of my project. I received my MFA from Utah State University in 1996 and began this project soon after my graduation. I am a teacher of art in Montreal, mother, and a practicing artist. I have devoted my career to this project and am at the point where I need financial help to finish it so I can share this important story with the wider world at a time when we are learning about this important chapter in our collective history. There is a lot to learn from this place and the powerful self expression of the students left on the walls. Thank you for helping to make it happen. All funds will be used for the printing of this book.