Leave it to public art of the semi-conceptual sort to create stunning cultural texts. Canadian artist Thom Sokolowski has installed 100 nineteenth century tents on New York's Roosevelt Island to commemorate the many populations who were institutionalized there in the 19th century--orphans, smallpox victims, people with mental illness. Residents of homes that house similar contemporary populations collaborated with the artist to construct the encampment, and inside each tent, viewers find artworks by these volunteers and other residents of New York institutions. The New York Times has a slide-show of the temporary encampment. (Photo by Rob Bennett for the New York Times.)

Anyway, this would be fun to talk about in relation to any conversation about forgotten histories or the critique of history-writing (or map-making...thinking of Devil's Highway....which is clearly related). Here is the NYT slide show:

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2007/10/05/arts/20071005_TENT_SLIDESHOW...

Related: As part of the "historical approaches" section of my E314L, we've been reading some works that do similar historical critique. Most successful was reading Susan Howe's "Thorow." This is a stunning, difficult, disjunctive, long poem that worked surprisingly well with my undergrads. The formal aspects of the piece (including sections of words on top of words, scattered all over the page) made issues of historical palimpsest/encroachment very concrete for students. The poem deals with European colonization of the Americas, and particularly with issues of naming, covering over, loss, etc. I highly recommend this poem for use in Ethnic-American lit/Native American Lit/E3W type classes. I think the poem--and poetry in general--is particularly important because it presents an alternative to narrative, and even suggests that narrative approaches are implicated in the historical violence.

The entire poem is in her book Singularities (1990), which is available as an electronic text through the library catalog.