This page is referenced by:

• 1 2018-03-27T14:14:06-07:00 Representations of Captivity 40 plain 2018-04-27T22:39:43-07:00 By: Sheena Cox
  
  The photo, "German Sisters," is of two rescued Cheyenne captives. Their sufferings are clear from their pose and the expressions on their faces. Yet, despite their exposure to Native society, they still maintain their femininity, something he did not afford to Indian women who could not assimilate to American culture. The women are embracing each other in a similar way that white women captives were drawn in narratives from the 1830s. However, Germans in the mid to late nineteenth century were suspected of having established a "kinship" type bond with the Comanche people. Even though the German sisters are considered "Anglo," their nature was thought of as more aligned with Comanche lifestyles than Anglo Americans. This provides some context for why Soule would have bothered to photograph the German sisters. In the Anglo-American imagination, and his as well, German captives represented life on the Southwest frontier. ​
  
  According to Scott Zesch's popular The Captured: A True Story of Abduction by Indians on the Texas Frontier, the "peaceful co-existence" ceased to exist by the 1860s and German captivity were reported consistently. All reports indicate that the captives were ages eleven or twelve, lived among Indigenous societies, and later rescued. The reports are so similar that the historian must question their authenticity, Which Zesch does not do. The Anglos producing these reports were motivated by settler colonial agendas. Soul's photograph represents the depiction held by nineteenth century Americans about what was happening in Texas as they sought to migrate. Works like The Captured that still treat these narratives as accurate reports, and still circulate in history classrooms, contribute to the myth that defends the colonization of Texas. 
  
  Accounts of captivity circulated in the early American Republic and gained popularity in the early nineteenth-century. In 1838, the captivity narratives of Clarissa Plummer and Caroline Harris were published in New York by Perry and Cooke, an elusive publishing company. Little information exists on the publisher, and there does not appear to be any other publications beyond the two narratives under its name. The very purpose for its short life may have been to publish these stories, but why? The allure of a quick profit is something to consider, but why publish captivity narratives, based in Texas, in New York at this time? Popular fiction perhaps? Likely not. Rather, the narratives have a political and national agenda as they play on social fears and justify colonial violence just as Soul’s representations of captives did three decades later.
  
  The stories of Clarissa Plummer and Caroline Harris were dramatic retellings of the captivity accounts of Rachel Plummer and Cynthia Ann Parker. All the women in the narratives are Texas emigrants, captured by Comanche tribesman, and victimized on the brutal Texas frontier. These accounts also echo another tale, an Australian narrative written and published at the same time about a woman named Eliza Fraser. Fraser was captured by Australian Aboriginals in her emigration from Britain. The narratives mask colonial and imperial agendas through their emphasis on the “barbarous” other, Christian values, and white femininity.
  
  “Never, no never could a human being of my sex be reduced to a more wretched condition. The old savage (whose companion I was not by compulsion to become) was, in person as well as disposition, the most ugly and disgusting of the human race; a wretch whose heart was callous to every human feeling; nay, one who could coolly and deliberately dash out the brains of the harmless new-born babe, it could not be expected could be moved to pity, or in any way affected by the tears of its distracted mother.”
  
  Comparing images and narratives of captivity on a global scale helps us understand more about how and why this type of sensationalism was used, for what goals, and to what ends? Each woman is a white Christian mother who inevitably watches as her children and husband are either murdered or lost to treacherous conditions, and then falls into the sexual servitude of “savage,” Indigenous men. The women are eventually rescued from captivity and share their stories of terror. The stories highlight one of the great fears and threats to white manhood that existed at this time, sexual encounters between white women and non-white men. Much of the Southwest remained settled by non-Anglo men, and as economic and social upheaval created uncertainty for the male patriarchy, the image of the non-white other was continually reinforced.
  
  Although the accounts entertain the reader as a novel would, and are very obviously imagined, they nonetheless became firmly embedded in the American imagination and myth as it highlighted social anxieties during the time. They identified and reinforced categories of otherness in effort to define dominance and power as divinely Anglo. Historian Reginald Horseman argues that by the 1850s, an ideology of white superiority was firmly planted in the American mindset. In the wake of Jacksonian Indian Removal policies, captivity narratives, scientific journals, literary works, and art all helped reinforce racial and gendered stereotypes. The rhetoric also justified violence, dispossession, and displacement against non-white peoples as Anglo western migration increased.
  
   
• 1 2018-04-16T18:34:02-07:00 "Reading" A.B. Stephenson's Album 6 plain 2018-04-27T19:32:48-07:00 We don’t know that much about the forty photographs that compose what the Briscoe Center’s archival listing describes as “William S. Soule Indians Photograph Album, ca. 1869-1876,” beyond a few obvious observations we can make.  The listing, for instance, tells us that William S. Soule was “the photographer at Fort Sill, Indian Territory, from its founding in 1869 to the end of the Indian campaigns.”  This tells us when and where the photographs were taken, and by whom.  The listing goes on to tell us that, among other things, the “Original photograph album contains 40 images, primarily studio portraits of American Indians,” and that “The album is inscribed to A. B. Stephenson, San Antonio, Texas.  January 1st, 1876.”  Nothing further in the listing, or anything I saw in the related materials, tells us anything about A. B. Stephenson, how he came to apparently own the album, or how the album then eventually transferred into the custodianship of any archive, let alone the Briscoe.  
  
  This is unfortunate, because the album itself, as an historical artifact, is perhaps more interesting than the photographs collected in it, although the two are most certainly intimately connected.  Why, for example, was the photographer for the U. S. Army during the founding and construction of Fort Sill in what is today the western part of state of Oklahoma “primarily” interested in taking studio photographs of American Indians instead of, say, operations and activities of the troops at the fort and the fort itself?  Why was a popular audience, here represented by A. B. Stephenson, also so interested in photographs of American Indians, rather than, again, the founding, construction, and operations of a frontier fort?  If it was as simple as a photographer correctly assuming a public interest in these subjects and producing an album that would meet that consumer need, what lies at the root of this public interest, at a time when the “Indian campaigns” were attempting to militarily subdue the Plains Indians tribes, alienate them from their traditional homelands, and constrain them onto reservations that essentially severed their long-standing cultural practices tied to place and communal land-use?          
  
              As it turns out, Fort Sill itself doesn’t figure in to the album very prominently.  Of the forty photographs in the collection, only four are of the buildings at Fort Sill (two of officers quarters, one of the fort’s hospital, and one of “Post Traders at Fort Sill”), and four are landscapes of the area around Fort Sill (three of “Medicine Bluffs Pathway” and “Medicine Bluffs Fort Sill in the Distance,” and one of “Mt. Sheridan”).  The remaining 32 photographs are of Indian-related subjects, with 22 studio portraits of Indian or groups of Indian subjects.  The Indian subjects are variously described as Comanche, Apache, Cheyenne, Arapahoe, Kiowa, and Wichita.  The studio portraits depict mostly single subjects, and more male subjects than females, although 3 feature the daughters of “Chiefs” deemed to be important, and six portraits carry “Squaw” in their titles (one photo combines these two categories, titled “Cheyenne Squaw Black Kettle’s Daughter”).
              Historian Jean M. O’Brien, in her book Firsting and Lasting: Writing Indians out of Existence in New England, describes the “emergent national literature and other cultural productions of the nineteenth century that ‘vanished’ Indians,” and argues that “(such) narratives performed the cultural and political work of purifying the landscape of Indians, using a degeneracy narrative that foreclosed Indian futures” (142-143).  Looking at local histories, O’Brien ties the processes she sees in her New England evidence to a much broader phenomenon, noting that:
  These texts coalesced into a master narrative that insisted on Indian extinction and that argued that Indians can never be modern.  This narrative was pervasive and persuasive to non-Indians: it argued that racial mixture and culture “loss” diluted the Indianness of New England Indians to the vanishing point (202).
  
  Soule’s portraits, I argue, aim to add to this “master narrative” of the vanishing Indian, by capturing and cataloging pseudo-ethnographic images of his Plains Indians subjects that depict them in such a way that highlights their vanishing cultures or “Indianness” while downplaying or obscuring aspects of their dress that would hint at modern adaptation.
  
              His photo titled “Quinine Celi Quah-ah-da Comanche,” for instance, is believed to be the first photographic image of Quanah Parker.  The image, described at length in my other blog on these photos, “What do we have here?  On the Archival Trail at the Briscoe Center,” [insert hyperlink] shows a young man dressed in western hat, shirt, and vest, and what we may assume to be western pants.  We cannot be sure, because the photographer has taken pains to cover the lower part of his subject’s body with an oddly draped striped blanket.  The only reason I can imagine for doing so (the same blanket appears in others of his portraits—as does the strange, animal-fur covered prop the young man leans against), would be to make him appear more “Indian.”  The photographer may have seen his subject’s western hat, shirt, vest, and pants, his relaxed and confident pose, and decided he needed to “dress up” the image in a way that would more strongly signify Indian culture. 
              Another photograph titled “Comanche Brave,” by contrast, shows a seated young man dressed head-to-toe in buckskin garments, from his decoratively beaded moccasins, to his long leather pants with fringe and ornamental stitching on their outside seams, to his long-sleeved buckskin jacket, decorative stitching at its cuffs and fringe around its collar.  His stoic face, gazing about a full 45 degrees left of the photographer’s lens, is framed by a large headdress from which all sorts of feathers and other accoutrements fan out at all angles and trail down his lapel and back. 
  
  Two large buffalo horns ascend from the headdress at his temples, the headdress’s adornment serving to hide the fact that they don’t actually grow out of his head, as it was made to appear.  His right hand rests on his right thigh and on a long leather strap, perhaps attached to something nestled in his lap.  His left hand, closer to the camera as he sits in partial profile, holds a bow and several arrows perched across his left thigh, visually bisecting his seated pose at an angle that compliments the photograph’s composition.  This is intended to be read as an image of a war-like, premodern person, whose one-time existence is to be wondered at, pondered, even celebrated, while at the same time lamented, as modernity and “progress” were in the process of rendering him extinct. 
              By the first decades of the twentieth century Fort Sill itself would become a symbol of disappearing Native American lifeways and peoples.  It was often referenced as the place where Quanah Parker led his band of Quahada Comanche in to surrender, marking for many Americans the end of the trail for the Plains Indians.  Soule’s photographs of the Native Americans there, along with similar images produced by Edward S. Curtis and others, helped provide a visual record of the supposedly vanishing Indian, seamlessly dovetailing with an array of degeneracy narratives that “foreclosed Indian futures” in the face of American modernity, progress, and the advance of civilization.  We may not know very much about A. B. Stephenson, but we may suppose that he, like many Americans, would have used William Soule’s Indian photographs to fashion a story about themselves.