Finding Indian Hannah or Hannah Freeman, 2023

Hannah Freeman’s story in life and in death is a testament to the enduring legacy of colonization. Born in 1731 on the Webb Farmhouse, now part of Longwood Gardens property in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. Hannah was raised by her mother and grandmother in a quaker colonist model. She spent most of her life along the Brandywine River, weaving baskets, and practicing healing.

In a treaty between her tribe and William Penn, the Delaware Indians’ land was to belong to them as long as one of their people lived on it. However, a fabricated story about Hannah as the last of her tribe led to a land grab upon her death.

I used local quakers’ letters that mentioned Hannah to train a text to image generator to find her. I assumed the colonists’ stereotypes of American Indians would be similar to AI generators. I trained the AI for a couple of weeks. Initially, she was shown with feathers and braids. I had gathered that she was trying to integrate into society, so I described her with a more quaker-like appearance. That’s when several ears and eyes started to populate on her head. What seemed to help the most, was adding ‘Chester County, Pennsylvania’ to the prompt, not just ‘Pennsylvania.’ Interestingly enough she was living with data colonized from her hometown.

The animation of Hannah was fed into an Augmented Reality Application that would generate the portrait on the user’s device when hovered over her believed to be headstone.

Research notes can be found at whitewashedtomb.hotglue.me or below.