A Note on Archival Silences
In his classic work Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, the late Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot theorized that “Silences enter the process of historical production at four crucial moments,” and that “the moment of fact assembly (the making of archives)” is one of those moments. He went on to point out that “silencing . . . is due to uneven power in the production of sources, archives, and narratives.”[1] We would be wise to heed these warnings and consider what silences are inherent in the in the collection of photographs by William S. Soule housed at the Briscoe Center for American History.
My blogs on these photographs attempted to discern something about them working with what I argued was a dearth of information regarding their production, their life as historical artifacts, and their subsequent existence as archival material. For that, I focused on what evidence was available, which for me boiled down to, among other bits of information provide by their archival listing, the names of three men: the photographer, William S. Soule; the man to whom the album containing the photographs was inscribed, A. B. Stevenson; and the man whose commentary was added to prints of the photographs while they were in the custodianship of the archive, John Barman. Although we only know for certain about Soule, I would hazard to guess that Stephenson and Barman were both white men as well, and we are fairly sure that the former lived in San Antonio, Texas, in the late nineteenth century and the latter in Berkshire, England, in the second half of the twentieth century.
While I stand by the deductions I made in those blogs based on my readings of the photographs and Barman’s notes about them, it is interesting that each of these men found their way into the archive by the hand of another; not one of them so much as signed their own name to a historical artifact in the collection, yet they were all afforded a presence there, some connection to the historical knowledge that these photographs represent. This seems unremarkable, even natural, with the case of the photographer. I would argue that in the other two instances it should at least give us pause.
John Barman’s notes on the photographs, his seeming authoritative knowledge of their subjects, from tribal affiliations to familial relationships, are the closest the Native American subjects of these images come to having a voice in this archive, which is to say, they don’t at all. While I argued that the addition of his commentary makes the material richer, it should not be read uncritically, and it should be noted that the project of these photographs, to document the “vanishing” peoples and lifeways of the American Plains Indians was a process that all three men, Soule, Stephenson, and Barman had a hand in.
