This collage-narrative generates relationships among complex issues of intercultural engagements in several contexts: boarding school era, Catlin’s ethno-tourism art, usufructuary rights guaranteed through treaties, resistance performance demonstrated on Lake Bemidji, and the multitudinous influences of Christianity. Themes of deculturalization, assimilation, essentilization, eradication, and survivance. Each signification is a metonym that suggests partial access as a means of “coming to know.”