Vanished Growth, Anne Rogers

A fragment from the doorframe of a vernacular American home marks a threshold between two eras and frames of mind: Indigenous sovereignty and practices of reciprocity with the land and Euro-American settlers’ fixation on turning the Midwest into a forest to source wood and build houses. Like a parent recording the height of a growing child on the edge of a doorframe, Anne Rogers documents the height of “native prairie plants that would have been present on Mount Oread before white settlers drastically altered the landscape.” With new investigations into the traumatic and deadly experiences of Indigenous children forced into Native American boarding schools, these notations grow in meaning.