Chilocco Indian Agricultural School opened in Oklahoma in 1884 as part of the federal Indian boarding-school system. Native American children from tribes across the country were separated from their families and pressured to abandon their languages, religions, clothing and cultural traditions in favor of white American customs and Christianity. Nearly 18,000 students from 126 tribes attended before Chilocco closed in 1980. Its abandoned campus remains one of the largest surviving examples of the boarding-school system.

I photographed Chilocco in 2024 after my work had increasingly led me toward places where official American institutions had controlled who belonged and on what terms. Walking through a largely abandoned school built to separate Native children from their families made that history physical in a way a description of federal policy cannot.