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Such writers, she shows, offer the possibility of healing. They develop an ethic of compassion and humility toward others and the land, draw strength from these relationships, and open possibilities for collective action to overcome the legacy of dispossession. These writers know that storytelling has always been crucial to the survival of indigenous communities and remains so now. Finnegan’s use of them suggests that it may be possible for outsiders to listen to these stories on their own terrain without subsuming them within a western narrative.
Although the alternative stories Finnegan asks us to consider might lead in the direction of a holistic and static vision of culture, community, and land, she shows how these stories are aware of the complexities of identity, the limits to the recovery of knowledge, and the historic and present realities of mobility. To highlight these dimensions, Finnegan proposes two metaphors-the palimpsest and the rebozo. Stories that bring into relief traces of earlier histories, like those erased but still present within a palimpsest, cannot fully recover a single truth, but in their partial recovery of layers, they allow for the creation of new forms of historical memory that more accurately reflect the histories of what is now the American West than narratives with universalist pretensions. In a similar way, stories that carry the logic of rebozos, with their multiple, sometimes clashing and incompletely woven strands, reveal how truth is created not by a single, linear narrative, but through multiple accounts, some “fictional,” some “historical,” all collectively negotiated.
As a historian of the American West, I welcome Jordana Finnegan’s Narrating the American West as an important contribution to the rewriting of the region’s history. Over the past two decades, new western narratives, including those of the “new western history,” have introduced strong revisionist currents into writing about the American West. The new narratives are more aware of the diversity of peoples in the western past and are more critical of western development than older narratives.