What Silence Means

Two Saturdays ago now, I took the step towards TLAM, or Tribal Libraries, Archives, and Museums. We visited the Wisconsin Dells to see H.H. Bennett’s studio, who is possibly one of the first modern “photojournalists.” After lunch, we took a boat tour to the Upper Dells.

The reasons were going were, of course, tied to tribal communities. Bennett, for example, took many photographs (probably embellished though) of Native Americans, specifically the Ho-Chunk tribe. Most of his studio, and our tour guide, did not focus on this relationship. It was actually the very first thing to see in the exhibit, but after that it became a history of Bennett’s photography and inventions. Fair enough, right? Because it’s a museum of his studio, and one can presume that he did not spend his entire life photographing Native Americans. And he didn’t spend most of his life doing that — most of his life was taken by the landscape of the Dells and actually inventing new camera technology.

Our tour guide barely knew anything about the Ho-Chunk or his relationship. The tour guide was a nice man and interested in Dells history, in the past 100 years, at least. The museum was nicely done and also interested in history, but mainly the past 100 years.

When the tour guide and the museum got to the Ho-Chunk, there were pictures from Bennett, a tale of how the Dells were created (a serpent winding its way through the land to create the unique landscape) and not much else. The tour guide barely knew anything — but he also humbly stated that we did probably know a lot more, and warmly welcomed us to share what we knew. One member’s girlfriend who came along for the day told us a lot about the reciprocal relationship between Bennett taking photos of the Ho-Chunk for his own fame and the Ho-Chunk letting him for their own advocacy. Meanwhile, the guide to the museum says they lived in the Dells for a very long time, hunting and gathering. This is history to many people: a vague concept of hunting and gathering until, at last, civilization with its records arrives.

The Upper Dells boat tour was extremely pretty — the perfect time to take it was now, right as autumn is settling in, and the leaves were still turning. It was not too cold and not too hot. The boat tour, of course, grabs hold of the beauty and makes it accessible with a lovely $25 fee. We walked through an extremely interesting set of — caves? I am not sure what it was! They called it the Witches’ Gulf. We wound through the features on a wooden walkway, and oddly passed by people with loads of popcorn and nachos. Oh, right, … there’s an entire concession stand in the middle of this landscape, complete with something probably called blue razzmatazz.

The tour guide on the boat was a sweet kid named Madison (and the captain was named Dane — coincidence? [FYI to non-Madisonians: Madison the city is in Dane the county]) who was fed his script. The only times Native Americans were mentioned was when he pointed out a rock that looks like a generic Indian Chief and generalized folklore about natives stealing something or other. Native Americans, in this tour, did not even exist as hunters and gatherers — they only existed in their relationship to the white folk.

Is the history of a tribe inherently silent to what we conceptualize as our modern society? One member of TLAM, after seeing the exhibit and then the tour, was exceptionally cheerful and optimistic, and did not walk away complaining and huffing about the injustice of the representation. She smiled and said, “Well, now we know what we need to do! We just have to let more people know about the history.”

The archives can seem like a majestic place where scholars can come to find the secrets of every society to ultimately expose. In the stacks of boxes upon boxes, you must be able to find anything. To many, the archives can be a place of power — the information is sitting there, waiting to be found, for justice to be complete. But, just as much as there are letters revealing the true plan of the president, there can be silence. The power is in the information that is not sitting there, waiting to be found. In our archives, the history of a people passed down through speech, not records, can sometimes be the same as silence.

 

The posed image we took for Dells Boat Tour. And then bought. :)

Part of the H.H. Bennett Exhibit

Part of the H.H. Bennett exhibit: the Ho-Chunk Story of the Dells.

Posing in Bennett’s very own studio, the students of TLAM.

The Dells is full of interesting, strange formations!

The part of the Dells I can’t describe very well.

One of Bennett’s inventions was the “snapper,” which could take photos of one moment. He proved it by having his son jump across that gap. Now the boat tour has a cute dog do it.