E. A. Burbank Timeline Image - Leaving Home for the Carlisle Indian School
Leaving Home for the Carlisle Indian School

original oil:
Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site

Original text from label on reverse

LEAVING HOME FOR THE CARLISLE INDIAN SCHOOL

The original of this reproduction was painted by E. A. BURBANK,
who for the past fifteen years has lived among 125 different
tribes of North American Indians, painting their pictures and
studying them at close range. He calls the picture " Leaving
Home for the Carlisle Indian School," for it is when the Indian
boy tosses aside his soft moccasins, his Indian clothes and his
earrings, and dresses himself in the cheap new suit and stiff
shoes purchased at the nearest reservation store, and goes out
to learn the ways of the world that the first real break comes in
the Indian home. The picture was posed by Navajo Indians in
a typical Navajo home at Ganado, Arizona. The Indians' stolid
acceptance of the new order which is to snatch from them their
son and brother is written on the faces and in the attitudes of
elders and children, alike. The interior is faithful in its representation.
The papoose sleeps on the floor in its wrappings of buckskin.
Everything is kept in one room. The loom of the weaver of blankets
is hung at one end; there are the saddles and the guns of the hunters,
the strips of meat from the chase, a shank hangs from a supporting
post - even the color of the walls of dried mud and clay is representative.

Print
Private Collection
Harvard, IL
Copyright 1911, E. A. Burbank