Effacement in Portrait Photography: Thomas Moore Keesick and the Indian Industrial and Residential Schools

Author Name: Ava Jane Szollosy, Concordia University

Editor: Rebecca Bennett

As a political tool, the medium of photography can be activated to document and share current events, marketing campaigns, and propaganda. However, since images are easily manipulated through editing —and more recently, artificial intelligence— the truth value of photography can come into question.[1] For instance, governments manipulate photographs to obscure reality, weaponizing a person’s image to further a political agenda. This can be observed in the Before (Fig.1) and After (Fig. 2) (1897) portraits of twelve-year-old Thomas Moore Keesick (Muscowpetung Saulteaux First Nation) which were published by Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs in their 1896 Annual Report. The years separating these two portraits illustrate the assimilation practices endured by Keesick during his time at the Regina Indian Industrial School. The Canadian government’s initiative has often been referenced using the popular phrase “Kill the Indian in the child” which encapsulates the ongoing attempts to erase Indigenous people. However, Canadian poet and journalist Mark Abley proposes a misquotation of a statement by Duncan Campbell Scott, the Deputy Superintendent of the Department of Indian Affairs between 1913 and 1932, who enforced and expanded residential schools. Scott did express a desire to “get rid of the Indian problem” in 1920 before the amendment to the Indian Act became law.[2] Nonetheless, both statements indicate an intention to eradicate Indigenous populations whether physically or culturally. For Thomas Moore Keesick and many other students who attended residential/industrial schools, photography became a means of erasure that stripped the sitters of their agency and reduced the complexities of their identity to mere objects for external narratives, thus denying self-determination and reinforcing harmful stereotypes. By analyzing the elements of portraiture harnessed in these images one can observe the inherent violence enacted by the residential and industrial school systems to remove Keesick’s agency through the propaganda apparatus of photography and the physical manipulation of his identity. Furthermore, addressing the dispersal of these portraits also illuminates the impacts of the reproducible photograph in advancing government propaganda and increasing anxieties over violence against Indigenous people.

In 1883, Canadian Prime Minister Sir. John A. Macdonald stated to the House of Commons, “When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages [...] Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible [...] put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of White men.”[3] This quote summarizes the political and social climate of Canada during the nineteenth century in which Indigenous people were viewed as violent savages who needed to adopt the ‘sophisticated lifestyle’ of the White man. According to the Union of Ontario Indians, approximately 150,000 First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children, between the ages of four and sixteen years old, attended residential or industrial schools in Canada between 1880 and 1996.[4] To grasp the long-term and generational traumas associated with these schools, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada documented the stories of nearly 6,500 witnesses between 2007 and 2015.[5]  Although the records are incomplete and ongoing, it is estimated that nearly six thousand children died while in school.[6] Furthermore, as unmarked mass graves were identified near the institutions in 2021 using ground-penetrating technologies, a renewed focus on the abuses and deaths at residential and industrial schools emerged.[7] The discovery of other burial sites is a sensitive process that can further damage the emotional wounds of survivors who experienced these losses firsthand.[8] Ultimately, these statistics highlight how the traumatic effects of the Canadian government's assimilation projects remain relevant in the twenty-first century. Decoloniality (a school of thought that seeks to expose coloniality by dismantling Eurocentric structures of knowledge and power) is harnessed to continue valuable research into silenced narratives and hidden histories while undoing and removing colonial elements.[9]

Art historian Gabrielle Moser argues that photography in the early twentieth century was used by the Canadian “government to promote, obscure, reveal, and conceal the violence directed at Indigenous children in state care.”[10] Meanwhile, Leah Simone-Bowen, playwright and podcaster, and Falen Johnson, Mohawk and Tuscarora playwright and broadcaster, discuss in their CBC original podcast “The Secret Life of Canada: The Boy in the Picture” how Keesick’s portraits can be observed in their contemporary context as “poster[s] for industrial and residential institutions” that visually represented the success of the curriculum and encouraged further funding for the colonial project.[11] By revisiting these images using a decolonial lens we can reframe them as documentation of a settler colonial past illustrating the abuses inflicted upon Indigenous children. Photography is revealed not only as a tool for documentation and dissemination but also as a weapon of cultural effacement.

Early forms of photographic practice framed Indigenous people, many of them children, through the lens of specimenization. This occurs when an artist harnesses the scientific gaze to portray a specific message about the individual. It is difficult to summarize the complex history of erasure and presumed loss of Indigenous populations that led artists of the nineteenth century to campaign for the preservation and collection of Indigenous cultures. Nonetheless, historian Samuel J. Redman describes this sentiment as “a race against time” that worked to conceptualize the Indigenous body “as a limited and scientifically valuable resource.”[12] Redman’s statement can be associated with the settler colonial myth of the ‘Vanishing Indian.’ Patrick Batlinger, author and historian, describes this “extinction discourse” as a European imperialist method found in literature, art, advertising, and cinema that presumed the ‘inevitable’ disappearance of Indigenous people whether physically due to the spreading of disease or culturally from assimilation.[13] This mythology aimed to justify the decline of Indigenous populations from the methods of colonization used against them and appease Western consciousness.[14] Through photography, the body is thus stripped of its humanity and reduced to presumed stereotypes. In the case of Keesick’s images, the photographer's contrasting Before and After portraits highlight the progression of time and the effects of assimilation in a ‘scientific’ manner. Concurrently, the viewer is encouraged to utilize visual cues that construct Keesick’s identity to formulate a hypothesis about the success of residential and industrial schools. Therefore, Keesick’s portraits can also be understood as forms of ethnographic photography that aim to prove racial hierarchy by documenting racial differences and racial inferiority. The Department of Indian Affairs and the Government of Canada released these images to illustrate the ‘success’ of the residential school system in order to legitimize the program. In this case, ethnographic photography is concerned with the deliberate implication of the photographer and publisher. To illustrate the involvement of ethnography and specimenization in the manipulation of Keesick’s portraits we must look closer at the photographer’s use of clothing, props, and faciality.

In Before, Keesick is dressed in full regalia, clothing usually worn during ceremonies to represent one’s heritage and community ties. According to Shawkay Ottmann, a design historian, in Indigenous theory “clothing has its own energy and is a symbol of identity not only to people, but a symbol to the natural world.”[15] This means that regalia is not worn for the body but to symbolize a community’s relationship with its environment.[16] Although it cannot be confirmed, Keesick likely did not arrive at school wearing his regalia as the picture implies. Regalia is typically worn during ceremonies and special events such as marriages, funerals, or births.[17] Around the child’s neck, there are glimpses of a collared button-down shirt which Simone-Bowen and Johnson suggest were his real clothes.[18] This infers that the photographer deliberately manipulated the portrait to frame Keesick according to the stereotypical understanding of Indigenous cultures.

Props are another element of portrait photography that can affect the ways of seeing and understanding a person’s imagery. According to David Bate, photographer and author, props are “objects or other things that indicate the status or dignity of the sitter.”[19] Props can be added or subtracted to “alter the meaning given to the identity of the portrayed figure.”[20] For example, Keesicks regalia is likely to signify cultural practices found within his community but when juxtaposed with the pistol he is gripping, and the fur of a skinned animal, its meaning is altered.[21]  The pistol and fur props can be read as symbols of violence and death that attempt to frame Keesick as a feral, aggressive, and wild being to be compared with the clean, educated, and lawful White aesthetic. In essence, the pistol and fur are forms of performance catering to a White audience's perception of Indigenous people. Art Historian María Beatriz H. Carrión confirms this in her work analyzing similar images from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. Carrión suggests that Indigeneity is presented as “a primitive state of being that can be and must be overcome through education and assimilation.”[22] These assimilation practices can be observed more clearly in the After portrait.

In the After portrait, Keesick’s agency has been stripped even further, a testament to the violent erasure enacted by the residential/industrial school system. A few years older and noticeably taller, Keesick is depicted with short buzzed hair, wearing a military-like, tapered grey uniform. According to Ottmann, uniforms convert individuals or groups to the governing body's authority.[23] Ottmann illustrates how the assimilative policies set by the Canadian government were hostile through her positioning of “dress as an embodied object.”[24] When the ability to self-fashion is removed, as observed in this portrait, it causes serious damage:

“Taking clothing, as was done to children entering residential schools, means taking connection to the land. Taking clothing means making connection to the balance that was being created. Replacing this with unfamiliar clothing (the uniform) is forcing a new way of life beyond body techniques, introducing a new worldview that is vastly contradictory to Indigenous ways of knowing, being, and doing.”[25]

In particular, clothing is the border between body, self, and society that identifies value systems, social codes, cultural standards, and one’s overall public persona. Thus clothing becomes an element in portraiture, which depicts much more about the sitter than what is plainly stated. Bate notes that “clothes signify something about a person’s identity, although the context in which they wear them – the location – also infers another meaning or message about the depicted person.”[26] The uniforms forced upon Indigenous children are forms of regimentation that symbolize the prosperity of assimilation and colonial control. Furthermore, Ottmann states, “Clothing changes how we think, rather than just being a reflection of what we think.”[27] Consequently, the Canadian government's disturbance in Keesick’s self-fashioning, whether he owned this regalia or it was placed on him, teaches him to view his culture and heritage as shameful, unnecessary, and distasteful. He is reminded to ‘fit in’ with the specified characterization of Western identity.

In After, the photographer once again uses props to portray a specific message about the sitter. Keesick is positioned leaning against an architectural prop that reflects the rigidity in his demeanor. The furnishings, reminiscent of European architecture, absorb Keesick into the dull background to further his erasure and assimilation into a ‘Western identity.’ The shriveling plant might be the sole source of life in this image as the boy experiences a cultural death and loss of personhood. The juxtaposition of furnishings and props with Keesick’s new identity communicates a story of colonial power and erasure practices.

Moreover, the frontality and faciality of the child illuminate a disturbing reality of assimilation practices. For reference, Bate states that “an expression can have a dramatic impact [...] Similarly, facial expressions signify a repertoire of “states,” indicating the potential mood of a person wearing them.”[28] In Before, Keesick is pictured with dirtied features and messy hair while in After his face is clean and he has received a short haircut. The child’s direct gaze in both portraits reflects a sense of agency yet his stoic, stiff, and neutral facial expressions connote the loss and lack of personality. This neutrality creates ambiguity. Although he is aware of the camera, the child clearly cannot choose how he is being rendered in these portraits. The neutrality of pose and facial expression can thus discourage the viewer’s emotional or empathetic response, reducing the sitter to a mere object of assimilation. This prevents viewers from recognizing the child as an individual victim of erasure and abuse.

Beyond the visual elements of portraiture, it is equally important to discuss these images' impact at the time they were published. As mentioned previously, Keesick’s portraits were released in the Department of Indian Affairs' 1896 Annual Report. Given this publication site, it can be argued that these portraits are propaganda. Photographic propaganda harnesses viewer’s sympathy to persuade and promote specific beliefs using a reconstructed reality.[29] In the case of Keesick’s portraits, photography legitimizes the data it is paired with, constructing a reality that supports the claims made by the report. For example, the annual report discusses the grounds, classroom work, grading, industrial work, the health of pupils, sanitary conditions of schools, and more.[30] When Keesicks images are joined with this data it invents a story that pictures Indigenous people as savages who need to learn civility. Coupled with data and reports praising the residential school system, the portraits ultimately serve an evidential purpose, visually expressing progress. When images are mass-produced, photography is further rendered as a weapon aiding in disseminating propaganda to advance government assimilation campaigns.

Thomas Moore Keesick’s personal history provides further proof that these images were utilized for government propaganda. Filmmaker Louise BigEagle completed further research into Keesick’s story with her 2015 documentary I Am A Boy.[31] BigEagle discovered that Keesick was eight years old when he was enrolled at the Regina Indian Industrial School on August 26th, 1891.[32] Keesick was considerably older compared to other students because he previously attended the Saskatchewan Lakes End Residential School. The Regina Indian Industrial School was part of a larger colonial project that enforced religious agendas and assimilation practices while using the children as laborers on school grounds.[33] BigEagle also found that at twelve years old Keesick was sent home, where he died of tuberculosis between 1893 and 1895.[34] Since the annual report was published in 1897, Keesick had already passed by the time Canada’s Department of Indian Affairs began using his image to promote the industrial and residential school system. This information contextualizes the portraits as forms of photographic propaganda. They create a false reality that negates the fatality of Keesick’s experience while promoting the benefits of these schools to Canadian society.

Keesick’s portraits also reinforce the violence continually enacted by the Canadian government and society against Indigenous people, serving as constant reminders of generational and ongoing trauma. According to Statistics Canada, “From 2015 to 2020, the rate of homicides involving an Indigenous victim was six times higher compared to the rate of homicides involving non-Indigenous victims (8.64 victims per 100,000 Indigenous people compared with 1.39 per 100,000 non-Indigenous people).”[35] Furthermore, between August 29th and September 9th, 2024 Canadian police killed six Indigenous people.[36] Violence is also apparent in the never-ending trend of missing and murdered Indigenous women and Two-Spirit people, creating an environment of fear and despair.

The historic and ongoing violence against Indigenous people is enacted partly by photography when it is mobilized to document, objectify, and dehumanize its subject. As previously described, Keesick’s portraits reduce him to a scientific object, promoting assimilation and the erasure of Indigenous cultures and traditions. Today, there is widespread recognition that the traumas inflicted by residential and industrial schools are deeply ingrained in generations of Indigenous communities. For Indigenous viewers, these photographs may sharpen this pain. The Before and After portraits are evidence of the ways Indigenous people were systematically marginalized unless they adopted a civilized appearance and mannerisms. Keesick is but one reminder of the Canadian government’s failure to care for its Indigenous citizens.

The Before and After portraits of Thomas Moore Keesick have become politically and socially valuable as they clearly document the attempted erasure of Indigenous cultures and the propaganda disseminated by the Government of Canada to legitimize residential and industrial schools. The use of various props, faces, and clothing illustrates how the photographer can harness elements of portraiture to objectify the sitter through a scientific gaze and strip him of his agency. These images thus visually represent the dark underbelly of residential and industrial schools which enabled violence and perpetuated fear. Despite the attempted erasure of Keesick’s agency through the manipulation of his physical features when these images were first published, a critical examination of Keesick’s story provides a more complete perspective. In analyzing these portraits through a decolonial lens we can begin to illuminate the inherent violence of ethnographic photography. As stated by Simone-Bowen and Johnson, we “need to look at historical images as we look at Instagram.”[37] Indeed, just as we challenge and criticize the evidence of photoshopped features, targeted algorithms, or the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the media we consume online, we must apply critical thinking toward historical photographs to put an end to harmful stereotypes that continuously frame Indigenous people as savages.

Appendix

Figure 1: Department of Indian Affairs Canada, Before, Photograph of ‘Thomas Moore’ as he appeared when admitted to the Regina Indian Industrial School. Published in the Dominion of Canada Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, Library and Archives Canada. Submitted by Clifford Sifton, Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 31 January 1897.

Figure 2: Department of Indian Affairs Canada, After, Photograph of ‘Thomas Moore’ after Tuition at the Regina Indian Industrial School. Published in the Dominion of Canada Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs, Library and Archives Canada. Submitted by Clifford Sifton, Superintendent General of Indian Affairs, 31 January 1897.

Footnotes

[1] Costanza Caraffa. “Photographic Itineraries in Time and Space: Photographs as Material Objects,” in The

Handbook of Photography Studies, ed. Gil Pasternak (Routledge, 2020): 83.

[2] Robert L. McDougall, “Duncan Campbell Scott,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, Historica Canada, January 18, 2018.

[3] Jocelyn Wattam, “Letter: Macdonald made policy to assimilate Indigenous peoples,” Picton Gazette, 30 July 2020.

[4] Union of Ontario Indians, An Overview of the Indian Residential School System, (Anishinabek, 2013): 4.

[5] Truth and Reconciliation Commission, “About the Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” Government of Canada, 28 May 2024.

[6] J.R. Miller, “Residential Schools in Canada,” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 11 January 2024.

[7] J.R. Miller, “Residential Schools in Canada.”

[8] J.R. Miller, “Residential Schools in Canada.”

[9] Dr. Robin Attas, “What is Decolonization? What is Indigenization?” Queens University, 2025

[10] Gabrielle Moser, “When Photographs Fail, When Monuments Fall: Photography and Reparations in Canada,” Photography and Culture 15, no.1 (2022): 1.

[11] Leah Simone-Bowen and Falen Johnson, “The Boy in the Picture,” February 3, 2022, in The Secret Life of Canada, published by CBC Radio, Podcast, MP3 audio, 5:10-5:20.

[12] Samuel J. Redman, Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums, (Harvard University Press, 2016) quoted in Allison C Meier, “Native Americans and the Dehumanising Force of the Photograph,” Welcome Collection, 29 March 2018.

[13] Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings: Discourse on the Extinction of Primitive Races, 1830–1900, ( Cornell University Press, 2003): 5.

[14] Patrick Brantlinger, Dark Vanishings, 5.

[15] Shawkay Ottmann, “Indigenous Dress Theory and Dress in Canadian Residential Schools,” Fashion Studies 3, no. 1 (2020): 7.

[16] Shawkay Ottmann, “Indigenous Dress Theory,” 7

[17] Amanda Robinson, “Indigenous Regalia in Canada,” Encyclopedia Canada, 25 June 2018.

[18] Simone-Bowen and Johnson, “The Boy in the Picture,” 28:50-30:30.

[19] David Bate, “Seeing Portraits,” in Photography: The Key Concepts (Bloomsbury, 2016): 89.

[20] David Bate, “Seeing Portraits,” in Photography: The Key Concepts, 97.

[21] Simone-Bowen and Johnson, “The Boy in the Picture,” 28:50-30:30..

[22] María Beatriz H. Carrión, “Before-and-After Portraiture: Photography and Time at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,” Rutgers Art Review: The Graduate Journal of Research in Art History 39, no. 1 (2023): 2.

[23] Shawkay Ottmann, “Indigenous Dress Theory,” 4.

[24] Shawkay Ottmann, “Indigenous Dress Theory,” 2.

[25] Shawkay Ottmann, “Indigenous Dress Theory,” 8.

[26] David Bate, “Seeing Portraiture,” 96.

[27] Shawkay Ottmann, “Indigenous Dress Theory,” 3.

[28] David Bate, “Seeing Portraits,” 90-91.

[29] Basri Gençcelep, “The Relationship Between Photography and Propaganda: The Case of Lisa Kristine,” ConICom: Contemporary Issues of Communication 2, no. 2 (2023): 43-44.

[30] Government of Canada, “Dominion of Canada Annual Report of the Department of Indian Affairs for the Year Ended 30th June 1896,” Department of Indian Affairs, no. 14 (1897): 388.

[31] Louise BigEagle, director, I Am A Boy. RIIS Media Project, Youtube, 2015, 11 min., 53 sec.

[32] Louise BigEagle, “The Boy in the Picture,” in The Secret Life of Canada, hosted by Leah Simone-Bowen and Falen Johnson, February 3, 2022,  published by CBC Radio, Podcast, MP3 audio, 16:33-16:53.

[33] Simone-Bowen and Johnson, “The Boy in the Picture,” 9:30-10:25.

[34] Louise BigEagle, “The Boy in the Picture,” 18:50-19:10.

[35] Statistics Canada, “Criminal victimization of First Nations, Métis and Inuit people in Canada, 2018 to 2020,” released in The Daily, 19 July 2022.

[36] Michaela McGuire and Jaad Gudgihljiwa, “Two Weeks, Six Dead: Police Violence, Indigenous Dehumanization & Canadian Indifference,” Yellowhead Institute, 24 September 2024.

[37] Leah Simone-Bowen and Falen Johnson, “The Boy in the Picture,” 35:42-35:48.