Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Stillwater Public Library | 770.89 HOE | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Today a tourist mecca, the area now known as the Wisconsin Dells was once wilderness--and a gathering place for the region's Native peoples, the Ho-Chunk, who for centuries migrated to this part of the Wisconsin River for both sustenance and spiritual renewal. By the late 1800s their numbers had dwindled through displacement or forcible removal, and it was this smaller band that caught the attention of photographer Henry Hamilton Bennett. Having built his reputation on his photographs of the Dells' steep gorges and fantastic rock formations, H. H. Bennett now turned his camera upon the Ho-Chunk themselves, and thus began the many-layered relationship unfolded by Steven D. Hoelscher in Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H. H. Bennett's Wisconsin Dells . The interactions between Indian and white man, photographer and photographed, suggested a relationship in which commercial motives and friendly feelings mixed, though not necessarily in equal measure. The Ho-Chunk resourcefully sought new ways to survive in the increasingly tourist-driven economy of the Dells. Bennett, struggling to keep his photography business alive, capitalized on America's comfortably nostalgic image of Native peoples as a vanishing race, no longer threatening and now safe for white consumption. Hoelscher traces these developments through letters, diaries, financial records, guidebooks, and periodicals of the day. He places Bennett within the context of contemporary artists and photographers of American Indians and examines the receptions of this legacy by the Ho-Chunk today. In the final chapter, he juxtaposes Bennett's depictions of Native Americans with the work of present-day Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones, who documents the lives of his own people with a subtlety and depth foreshadowed, a century ago, in the flickers of irony, injury, humor, and pride conveyed by his Ho-Chunk ancestors as they posed before the lens of a white photographer.
Winner, Book Award of Merit, Wisconsin Historical Society, Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for Regional Interests, selected by the Public Library Association
Author Notes
Steven D. Hoelscher is associate professor of American studies and geography at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Heritage on Stage: The Invention of Ethnic Place in America's Little Switzerland , also published by the University of Wisconsin Press.
Reviews (1)
Choice Review
Hoelscher (American studies and geography, Univ. of Texas, Austin) uses a rich cache of letters, diaries, financial records, guidebooks, and periodicals to piece together a complex story of a key transitional period in US history. He effectively places his limited subject squarely within the broader context of its time and reinterprets it in terms of contemporary cultural studies. Within the limited confines of the Wisconsin Dells between the 1880s and the first decade of the 20th century, the author focuses on the life and career of longtime resident photographer H. H. Bennett and his interaction with the Ho-Chunk peoples and the dynamics of an economy dependent upon tourism and a romantic interest in traditional Native American culture. The author combines Bennett's relatively few photographs of Ho-Chunk people with a balanced sensitivity to their art, their place in commerce, and viewpoints of contemporary Ho-Chunk people to present a localized case study of the confluence of cultural interaction in the context of commercialization and survival. The highly readable and authoritative text, illustrated with 86 good-quality black-and-white figures, plus maps and charts, should be acquired by all libraries with an emphasis on American Indian studies. Especially useful to libraries in the Midwest. Summing Up: Highly recommended. All levels/libraries. J. A. Day University of South Dakota
Table of Contents
| Contents |
| List of Illustrations |
| Foreword |
| Acknowledgments |
| Prologue: Photographic Encounters |
| 1 Contact Zones: American Indians, Tourism, and Photography |
| 2 "Viewing" Indians and Landscape in Nineteenth-Century Wisconsin |
| 3 Ho-Chunk Removals, Returns, and Survivance |
| 4 Visual Dimensions of Bennett's Ho-Chunk Photographs |
| 5 Photographic Practices as Profit-Driven Exchanges |
| 6 The Changing Political Economy of Indian Photography and Art |
| Epilogue: Picturing Ho-Chunk Today |
| Notes |
| Selected Bibliography |
| Index |
