Away For A While

Director Statement

Before the ugly truth of Native American Boarding schools was widely known, my uncle asked me to repatriate Native American artifacts amassed by my great-great aunt. "She was a schoolteacher in Arizona," was his only guidance. He was the last of our family to have known Mary Rodger.She left no trace besides the objects, burning her journals and letters shortly before her death.

When a curator I hired to identify the communities from which objects might have come pointed out they originated from all over the US--not just Arizona--the hunt was on for the solution to this puzzle. How did a single woman who leftCanada in 1891 amass Native American artifacts from far-flung reservations?Armed with that information--that took work to digest-- and a roadmap for contactingNative American communities, I offered to return the objects.