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

In probing the implications of new western narratives and alternatives to them, Finnegan wants to recover stories that are true. Many new western narratives celebrate solitude and the autonomous self and look to the supposedly open space of the West for personal and social redemption. Finnegan is troubled by these stories, and rightly so. The issue is not whether the quest for personal redemption and self-fulfillment frustrates the seekers. Rather, it is the broader consequences that are disturbing. When authors with shallow historical roots in the region create themselves as “westerners,” and, in so doing, claim an indigenous identity, they damage the truth by willfully forgetting Native people or consigning them to the past with gestures of imperial nostalgia. These moves naturalize indigenous dispossession and render still colonized Indian nations invisible. Finnegan finds more truth in the work of new western authors with deeper connections to the region who reveal the destructive consequences of possessive individualism, but she is also aware of their blind spots, their self-absorption, and their consequent inability to replace the old myths with truer stories while desperately recognizing the need for them. Finnegan reaches the challenging, yet clear-eyed, conclusion that such narratives, preoccupied as they are with personal suffering, ignore the deeper violence of the taking of Indian lands and obscure the ongoing legacy of the West’s violent history.

Finnegan finds that the truest stories about what is now the American West are often told by writers who do not think of themselves primarily-or at all-as “westerners.” Against narratives that too easily celebrate solitude, open space, and a movement from east to west, she argues that it is important to attend to stories that lament isolation as a consequence of the wrenching deracinations suffered by Indian people, that take place within the confined spaces of colonial institutions like Indian mission schools, and that reveal the dislocations underlying north-south Chicana/o migrations and border crossings. These stories, from the other side of the West’s history, release suppressed historical realities. Stories told by the colonized also suggest truer and more helpful ways of thinking about the self. Instead of finding inspiration through authors who propose landscapes of personal freedom in which autonomous individuals find regeneration and self-fulfillment, Finnegan looks to those who situate themselves in communities with deep attachments to the land.