Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory By Jo ...

The Danns’ political struggle with colonial power provides a material foundation for the western narratives that this book explores, all of which draw upon and challenge autobiographical conventions in order to revise mythologizing histories of the American West. These mythologizing narratives, referred to here as “old” histories in order to draw a contrast with revisionist counterdiscourses, obscure the colonial and patriarchal dimensions of U.S. expansion and settlement in the West (particularly in relation to the conquest of indigenous peoples).⁴ This book examines the work of “old” histories that repress the reality of violent conquest through literary tropes such as open space, freedom, and progress. A comparative analysis of a number of memoirs and multiform narratives by writers of Euroamerican, Native American, and Chicana backgrounds reveals that while these narratives aim to contest colonial images of race, gender, and/or landscape, they articulate contradictory and often competing historical visions through widely different formal strategies that more broadly reflect the disparate social positions and political concerns of these writers.⁵

I argue that as the autobiographical genre’s boundaries are expanded, new and politically relevant narrative forms can emerge. Texts that ex-amine the autobiographical self in relation to particular communities emphasize the communal formation of identity and the importance of social influences on personal development. By integrating multiple narrative forms into their texts to reflect these influences, revisionist writers push the boundaries of the autobiographical genre and open up new possibilities for the expression of western identity.

These narrative forms and histories are circumscribed by an institutional relationship between Native people and the U.S. government that is structured by uneven power dynamics. Operating within this hierarchical relationship, the BLM perpetuates the dominant culture’s historical suppression of indigenous histories in its treatment of the Shoshone.