George Kishketon was a survivor of the Carlisle Indian School, an infamous colonial residential institution in Pennsylvania that opened in 1879. Kishketon attended Carlisle between 1898 and 1903, and he lived through the brutality of the federally mandated institution, which had been intentionally designed by a colonial militarized regime to “kill the Indian and save the man.”¹ Very little information was recorded about this artist, perhaps due to the anti-Indigenous political climate throughout the U.S. during Kishketon’s lifetime, primarily stemming from the desire of federal and state governments to possess the lands of Native people.

The Flatstyle painting Man and Pipe portrays a man lounging at sunset and smoking his pipe. His hair is adorned with two hawk feathers attached at his scalp-lock braid. He is wrapped in a red and blue blanket and wears bright blue beaded cuffs. The layered halos of the setting sun rest upon a blue horizon line that is anchored to the foreground by two tuft-like clusters of bluegrass.

—Jordan Poorman Cocker, Henry Luce Foundation Curatorial Scholar for Indigenous Painting Collection Research, 2021

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¹ Bentley, “‘Kill the Indian, Save the Man.’”