When I moved to Greenwich, Connecticut 5 years ago, a friend told me that when she grew up there, schools celebrated “Indian Day” every year. Students were brought into the forest and taught “how to walk in the woods without making a sound,” learning that to be indigenous is to be silent, invisible. 🤡 💩 With my kids in the Greenwich school system, this anecdote of concocted indigenous invisibility inspired me to look critically at what was being taught, and to photograph, and look around town, including in the expansive historical and photographic archives. I learned how the imagined silence of native people enabled immense concentration of wealth among descendants of settlers in Greenwich. And I started to see echoes of this strategy of constructed invisibility in debates about what should be taught in the schools. The “Greenwich Patriots” co-opted education to promote aggressive tactics to push an agenda of exclusion; so much so that teachers protested, begging to stop being harassed by so-called patriots saying “stop distorting history.” Meanwhile, I waded knee-deep into archives that taught me about Greenwich’s actual history of violence, slavery (on plantations near Cos Cob), white supremacism (including the 1928 KKK rally in Bruce Park), and violent oppression of native people (like in the Pound Ridge Massacre in 1624) and wondered if these histories were taught in school, and whether patriots considered them “distorted.” I recently left Greenwich, but this work is starting to take form in various ways (see the next two posts for examples).