About the Photographer In the late 1960s, an anthropologist
friend took Esther Parada southwest of Chicago to visit a Native
American burial site. Dixon Mounds, which would become both a
state museum and a focus of controversy in the 1970s, had been
used by woodland tribes and dates back to the tenth century.
What Parada saw was a gymnasium-sized area where a layer of
earth had been removed to reveal an open field of exposed
graves. She photographed the site with scientific precision
using black-and-white film and a 35mm camera. At the time she
had no plans for the pictures, but later she grew interested in
making people aware of this civilization; compared to the native
peoples and traditions she had known in the two and a half years
she spent in Bolivia, the presence of Native American culture
and history in the United States seemed close to extinguished.
In 1976, Parada created the installation Site Unseen at the
artist space and dance center in Moming. It included a dozen
2-by-6 foot banners of anonymous