A Mirror with a Memory

Menominee Historic Preservation Cultural and Logging Museum

The photo accompanying this column came with a story. Menominee tribal researcher and cultural planner Becky Alegria gifted both to me when I asked her about her nation’s recent history with the game of lacrosse. “Jerome Davis was a blind man who made lacrosse sticks,” Alegria shared. After I complimented Davis’s ability to be valued in the sports world despite his handicap, Alegria dropped another bombshell about Davis’s athleticism. “He used to run down the road from Keshena to Shawano,” she said. When I expressed amazement that a blind man would run anywhere, let alone the seven miles to a neighboring town, Alegria added depth to my astonishment. “At that time, there wasn’t even pavement, so Jerome was running on an uneven dirt trail.” The photo of Davis shows a middle-aged man with cloudy eyes holding lacrosse sticks, but it’s Alegria’s knowledge that is helping to keep his inspiring story alive. It has been said that photos are “a mirror with a memory,” but discovering the stories behind images captured at a particular moment in time can reveal layers of meaning.

In her book, Flashes of Brilliance: The Genuis of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History, Anika Burgess explores developments in the medium from 1839 to 1910. Burgess details how early photographers captured images shot from hot air balloons, while underwater, in a national park, and at the moment lightning strikes. Photography allowed for scientific breakthroughs in microscopes, x-ray machines, and an understanding of how horses gallop at high speeds. Yet, what the book most reveals are the tenacious undertakings of the photographers themselves who aimed to innovate in a medium that allowed them to share a singular vision with the world. Burgess captures the people who mixed chemicals, exposed treated glass, and snapped shutters for a variety of reasons, ultimately developing an engaging portrait of the artform at its genesis.  

Part of my responsibilities as a professor at College of Menominee Nation is to emphasize the role photographs play in the study of the past. Examining Native American history means seeing the image of buffalo bones piled alongside some of the non-Native hunters who sought to decimate the food source of Indigenous people. It includes witnessing the before and after photos of Native children who were forced to surrender their long hair and ancestral clothing for a cropped cut and boarding school uniform. It means seeing the newsreel snapshots of the Alcatraz Island sign christened with “Indians Welcome…Indian Land.” It shows the calls for justice captured in a red handprint, signaling that missing and murdered people are not forgotten and demanding that their assailants are found, prosecuted, and convicted. These images have power, but it’s the context for their stories that makes them resonate.

Martha A. Sandweiss’s book The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West uses a single image to show the complexity of America’s westward expansion. Sandweiss’s text runs down the stories behind an image of six white men in a row, with a young Oglala Lakota standing upon a box in the center. Taken by famed Civil War photographer Alexander Gardner at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, in 1868, the image captures soldiers and businessmen turned peace commissioners at the time when Native people signed the famed treaty that shrunk the Lakota land base. Sandweiss weaves together newspaper accounts, trial transcripts, government records, and biographical narratives to show how the subjects came to pose as a single collective. Yet it’s the knowledge of “the girl in the middle,” who is revealed to be Sophie Mousseau, that “changes everything.” A compelling testament to the necessity of historical recovery, Sandweiss’s work is exemplary.

A photo without a story is like a memory without context—it seems familiar and yet it lacks the details that ground it. The same is true of a story without a photo, as seeing an ancestor’s image offers a face but still needs a narrative to give the moment its significance. One of the best ways to flesh out any nation’s story is to ask tribal college and university students to record the stories and photos of those who inspire them. This assignment is required in all of my courses, as I believe that every student enrolled is a historian-in-training. Modern technological advances make it possible that nearly every person has a phone with apps to record interviews and a camera to immortalize their subjects. The work my students submit spans a gamut of emotions, but the upshot is that they have added to the collective record of their nations.

A photo may be “a mirror with a memory,” but it’s the story behind the photo that helps us remember what the past reflects. That includes the image of a blind man who happened to make lacrosse sticks when he was not running miles down a dirt trail to the neighboring town.

Ryan Winn, PhD teaches in the Liberal Studies Department at College of Menominee Nation.  

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in the Inquisitive Academic or any other opinion columns published by the Tribal College Journal (TCJ) do not necessarily reflect the opinions of TCJ or the American Indian Higher Education Consortium. 

References

Burgess, A. (2025). The Genuis of Early Photography and How It Transformed Art, Science, and History. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.

Sandweiss, M.A. (2025). The Girl in the Middle: A Recovered History of the American West. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.