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• 1 2018-04-16T18:12:47-07:00 What do we have here? On the Archival Trail at the Briscoe Center 36 structured_gallery 2018-04-27T19:15:02-07:00           The Briscoe Center’s description of the photographs lists them as an album of William S. Soule’s “Indians Photograph Album, ca. 1869-1876,” although the photos come in two manila folders, twenty photos per folder, each photo individually cased in clear plastic.  If the album still exists, the photographs have been removed from its pages to preserve them, and so any clues the album might have provided are not readily available to us.  The description tells us that “William S. Soule (1836-1908) was the photographer at Fort Sill, Indian Territory, from its founding in 1869 to the end of the Indian campaigns 1874-1875.”  Along with some of Soule’s biographical information, the listing goes on to relate that “As the photographer for the U. S. Army at Fort Sill beginning in 1869, he photographed the construction of the fort as well as many of the persons and events associated with the Indian Wars in that area.”  The Briscoe’s listing goes on to state that among the photographs “There are numerous portraits of Comanche, Kiowa and Kiowa Apache chiefs,” and, towards the end, that “The album is inscribed to A. B. Stevenson.  San Antonio, Texas.  January 1st, 1876.”
  
            One of the photographs shows a young man leaning against a studio prop covered in some sort of animal hair, his right forearm resting on the prop just above his waist, his left arm cocked at a 90 degree angle with his fist planted on his left hip.  He wears a white cotton tab-collared shirt with long, voluminous sleeves, cuffs buttoned at the wrist, a dark vest, and a Native American breast piece.  His pants are dark, but just barely visible, as his lower body is covered by a light colored striped blanket, which, with the odd prop he leans against, serve to obscure the bottom portion of his standing pose.  His face gazes stoically just to the left of the photographer’s lens.  A large, circular earring hangs from his left earlobe, and his straight dark hair is pulled behind his ears beneath a gray felt western hat, the brim turned up in front, a long eagle’s feather trailing off behind his left shoulder.  The hat’s other accoutrement are just visible but difficult to make out. He is framed by a plain gray background whose rounded upper border cuts an arc against the upper right corner of the rectangular photograph. 
  
            The back of the photograph bears three different types of markings.  In the upper left corner there is a number “10,” written in a light red pencil, distinguishing it from the other thirty-nine photographs in the collection.  Centered, in two lines of black ink at the top of the card stock, in the looping cursive that we may suppose belonged to the photographer, William S. Soule, are the words “Quinine Celi” (top line), and “Quah-ah-da Comanche” (beneath).  Beneath these words is a long description of the photograph’s subject, printed in black ink and a small, unremarkable script.  Many of the collection bear these added notes, but few are as long or detailed as this one, which consumes virtually the entire back of the artifact.  The text reads:
  
  This is undoubtedly the earliest photo of the famous chief Quanah Parker (ca. 1845-1911) the half breed son of the Nokoni chief Peta and Cynthia Ann Parker a white captive.  Although born a Nokomi (sic) he frequented with the Quahada band and eventually obtained their leadership and was the most important man among the Comanche during the reservation period from 1875 until his death.  The name Quimine (sic) was that used by him as an adult man, but during the reservation period after visiting his mother’s family he always used (and was referred to) the name Quanah (Comanche ‘Kwaina’- Fragrant) the childhood name given by his mother for whom he always remembered a particular fondness.  Taken at Ft. Sill late 1869.  (John Barman, Berkshire, England)  
    
            We may imagine that John Barman owned these photographs sometime after A. B. Stephenson but before they came into the custodianship of the Briscoe Center, and from the amount of detail he provided on the photograph’s reverse, and the photo’s subject, that it was one of the most highly prized of his collection.  Or, perhaps Barman made the notes on the back of the photographs for A. B. Stephenson, one enthusiast of the American West sharing his knowledge of the subject with another.  But, as with the absent album, how Barman’s notes came to be on the back of the photographs remains, at least for now, a mystery.
  
            I returned to the Briscoe to view the photographs again with three questions for the archivists, although I wasn’t certain they would be able to answer any of them.  Does the album still exist?  Do they know anything about A. B. Stephenson, to whom the album was inscribed?  And, do they know anything about John Barman, and how (and when) his notes were added to the photographs?  I filled out my call slip with some help from the archivist and went to my table to wait for the folders.  When the materials came, I immediately knew something was different.  Rather than two manila folders, the assistant carried a small box, with a pair of the white handling gloves, trailed by one of the head archivists.  The archivist opened the box, revealing the answer to my first question.  As he removed the album, he reminded me that the album and photographs were from the 19th century and should be handled with great care.  I quickly told him that although I was happy to look at the album, and that it would answer some of the questions I had, on my previous visit I had seen the photos in two manila folders, and I had questions about those.  He relief was almost palpable.  He informed me that those were prints reproduced from the originals in the album, and that was actually the way the Briscoe preferred to let researchers view the photos, thus sparing wear and tear on the album.  He offered to send for them and allowed me to, carefully, peruse the album until he returned with the folders, which was fine with me.
  
            In the meantime, I could see (with some trouble, the ink was fairly faded) that the album was inscribed to A. B. Stevenson, just as the archive’s listing had said.  The looping cursive descriptions on the back of the prints that I had attributed to the photographer had most likely been penned by an archivist, who I could now see had copied them from the photographs’ titles in the album.  The photographs were the same, albeit more faded, than the prints I had seen.  When the prints came (and the archivist reclaimed the album), there were now three manila folders rather than two.  The third contained the dust jacket of a book on William Soule’s photographs, several documents concerning the Briscoe’s acquisition of the Soule materials from their previous repository, and documents charting descriptions of the photographs.  My examination of them turned up no information on A. B. Stephenson or John Barman, although, after seeing the album and its inscription, I was now less interested in Stephenson than in the Barman notes.  I turned my attention to the prints, took my photos, and prepared to return the materials. 
  
            When I returned to the circulation counter, I asked the archivist about the Barman notes, showing her a few examples on the backs of the prints.  She also found them a curiosity.  After a moment she told me there was another file on the Soule photographs that she would pull, which might have some information on the added commentary.  I went back to my table and waited for the file to be pulled.  When the archivist brought the file, she seemed almost embarrassed, and she explained that it looked like John Barman had written a letter, and well, it was 1979, she shrugged with a bemused smirk on her face, saying that she guessed archival practices were different then.  I interrupted her, asking “So you’re pretty sure he wrote a letter?”  She said she’d let me draw my own conclusions, but pointed me to a document in the file, several stapled pages of handwritten notes in blue ink.  Each note had a number in the left-hand margin and a title, both of which corresponded to the Soule prints that bore Barman’s commentary.  I found the note for print 10, the photo of Quanah Parker.  It was the same as on the print.  The archivist then pointed me to the last page of the stapled document.  There at the bottom of the page, in the same black ink and unassuming print as the Barman notes on the back of the photographs, someone had penned “from a letter from John Barman (his address in Berkshire, England, below his name, and) Aug 19, 1979.”  Although it didn’t tell us much more about Barman, it did solve the mystery of how and when his notes had been added to the prints.
  
     
          Reflecting on the Barman notes after my visit, I found that I had mixed feelings about them, perhaps similar to the archivist’s uneasiness.  What type of authority was he, if at all?  On the back of one of the prints titled “Arapahoe Squaw,” his commentary tells us that the subject is “almost certainly not Arapaho but Cheyenne,” and provides ethnographic evidence (similar hair braiding and “dress and ornaments”) in referencing another picture that is indeed labeled as Cheyenne.  He seems to have intimate knowledge of the subjects, often identifying them as well as their familial relations. 
  
           But, even as we now know how and when his notes were added to the prints, they open up larger questions about the life of the album before it arrived at the Briscoe.  For instance, under what circumstances did Barman see the photographs to have gained such familiarity with them?  Was his expertise solicited?  Since his commentary comes in a letter, sent from England, we may suppose that he was not viewing them in the archive.  Had the album been in England before arriving at the Briscoe? How did he know where it ended up so as to write his letter?  And again, what type of authority was he?   Who was John Barman?   
  
           Without going into deeper research, I’ll be left with these questions to gnaw at me.  But for now, I come away with a few thoughts about the Barman notes beyond their mystery.  One, that I would rather the prints have them than not; that is, rather than see them as an example of archival worst practices (which they probably are), I found the photographs richer with their (albeit problematic) addition.  Second, and most significantly, they hint at a life and significance of the Soule album otherwise hidden from us.  Penned a little over 100 years after the photographs were taken, Barman’s notes help to prove the enduring fascination non-Indians had for these images of a “vanishing race,” and the cultural work that trope continued to do in shaping memories of western expansion well into the latter half of the twentieth century.
   
• 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.   
   
   
   
• 1 2018-03-27T14:14:58-07:00 Lesson Plan: High School History 6 gallery 2018-04-27T22:57:01-07:00 Lesson Plan for High School History Class.
  How Native American Representations Have Changed over Time. 
  
  Begin Class by asking students to draw a picture of an American Indian. Ask for examples and descriptions of drawings. 
  
  Discussion:
  How did we come to see American Indians as they have been drawn?
  What contemporary examples of Indians can we think of that frame the way we imagine Indians?
  
  Lecture:
  Colonial Representations-Christianity and the American Indian. Fears of "Savagery." 
  Revolutionary Rhetoric-Fraternal Organizations and the "Noble Savage."
  Print Culture-Sensational Stories, Science, Expansion. "Ignoble Savage"
  
  Image Analysis:
  
  
  
  Group Work:
  In an envelope you have three different primary sources describing Indigenous people in the nineteenth century. Each source is from a different region of the world. How are they similar to each other? How are they different? What connections can we draw from our research? Conclusions? What other kinds of sources might be helpful to examine? Each group will present the class with their analysis.