By the mid-1960s doubt about the meaning of frontier history was evident in a flood of films that exploited the widening gap between old images and new ideas. Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars (1967)—Clint Eastwood’s first star vehicle and the first of dozens of Italian spaghetti westerns—along with Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969) gloried in the amorality of violence. Little Big Man (1970), Blazing Saddles (1974), and Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull’s History Lesson (1976) lampooned the genre, subjecting the ideology of westering to devastating criticism. But soon even these antiwesterns wore thin. By the mid-1970s Hollywood studios were producing only a handful of westerns.
. . .
The Civil Rights Movement, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, youth culture, and the conservative backlash against open sexuality, drug use, and racial and gender equality fractured the political and cultural consensus that flourished during the Cold War. Westerns joined the Democratic Party’s New Deal coalition (African Americans, working-class immigrants, and southern whites), urban downtowns, and high-wage manufacturing jobs on the scrap heap. The occasional postmodern western appeared from time to time but mainly called attention to its own rebooting. Clint Eastwood’s Oscar-winner Unforgiven (1992), for example, ruminated on the violence in his previous films as much as it commented on the West, the frontier, or the early 1990s political situation. The Ballad of Little Jo (1993), Dead Man (1995), Lone Star (1996), Smoke Signals (1998), Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Django Unchained (2012) took westerns into settings and subcultures never before seen on screen. These films took on the conventions of the genre—Smoke Signals, for instance, includes a devastating takedown of John Wayne—but they did more than counteract a master narrative. Some tried to wander free of gunslingers and righteous violence altogether and tell stories about western people rather than westering myths. Others kept the guns but transported their protagonists into geographies of weirdness. Quentin Tarantino’s bloody ode to the spaghetti westerns, Django Unchained, is a train wreck of landscapes and regions. The Deep South and the Rocky Mountains overlap, as if peaks and plantations resided a fade-cut away from one another. The movie poked fun at the idea of coherent American regions. Do regions matter in an age when linked references lead users down rabbit holes of information? When attentions skitter ever sideways, what good are fixed coordinates?
Tarantino’s hyperactive cutting and pasting was not the only reaction to the waning consensus. Other artists held onto place as the mainstream divided among countless channels. Regionalism staged something of an intellectual comeback. Native American writers like N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Louise Erdrich set novels in the postwar West that expressed their characters’ struggles to reconcile modern alienation and oppression with an enduring sense of tradition and connection to place. These writers often portrayed the bleakness of reservation life. They were realists with a political edge, not romantics looking for an escape in a mythic past. Still, the work of many native authors offered a spiritual understanding of the land as home, a source of sustenance and healing. Other regionalist writers followed this lead. Ivan Doig wrote about growing up in rural Montana, while Terry Tempest Williams chronicled her Mormon family’s relationship to the natural environment in Utah, including the high incidences of cancer among her relatives living downwind from the Nevada Test Site where the federal government exploded nuclear weapons in the 1950s and 1960s. Many other western writers shared this sense of place and history. Rudolfo Anaya, James Welch, E. Annie Proulx, John Nichols, Jane Smiley, and Barbara Kingsolver contributed works to the regional movement.
Regional art flourished amid the fragmentation of American culture. Yet the disintegration that ate at the frontier myth also gnawed at regions. The internet scattered users, friends, and followers across information networks. Choices piled upon choices. People could use the internet to root themselves in a region: they could shop for western real estate, purchase western art and jewelry, and converse with locals via email and Twitter. Or they could use the internet to stream anime cartoons and compile antique cocktail recipes. The West entered the new millennium one obsession among many.
. . .
Yet the West didn’t disappear as much as hide in plain sight. Hollywood stopped making westerns, but filmmakers continued to use the West. The 2004 comedy Napoleon Dynamite—a huge underground hit which was made for a pittance but grossed forty-five million dollars—epitomized the West’s supporting role in post-internet cinema. Directed by Jared Hess, a Mormon from the Interior West, the film told the story of a goofy teenager who manages to overcome his misfit status, win the attention of a girl, and prove his worth with the cool kids. The plot resembled the hackneyed high school dramas made by director John Hughes in the 1980s, which take place in nondescript suburbs. Most viewers have no idea where Napoleon Dynamite is set, but location plays a central role in the picture.
Hess shot the film in his hometown of Preston, Idaho, a prosperous farming community in the Cache valley, north of the Utah border, where Mormon farmers grow sugar beets and potatoes in irrigated fields and Mexican American farmworkers harvest the crops. This social inequality is represented in the film by the character of Pedro Sanchez, Napoleon’s friend and an underdog candidate for student-body president. Once the movie went viral, “Vote for Pedro” T-shirts became hot merchandise, although few fans realized that the message was a comment on a real political situation. Voting for Pedro in Preston meant overturning the local power structure. The film is laced with dozens of similar inside jokes. Mormonism is never mentioned, but as historian Nicolaas Mink points out, the film refers to Mormon culture “through symbolism, cultural imagery, and some clever phrasing.” Napoleon feeds his pet llama a casserole; Mormons themselves joke about their fondness for casseroles. Hess applied Hughes’s formula to a small Mormon community in the Interior West, and the mixture ignited across the information networks, entering most users’ awareness as a weird assortment of fashion choices and left-field one-liners. “Vote for me,” says Pedro, “and all your wildest dreams will come true.”12
U.S. 91, approaching Preston, Idaho. Photograph by Ken Lund, 2007. Creative Commons.
Napoleon Dynamite demonstrated how the local might translate into the global in the internet age. Other artists used the universality of the high school drama to bring very different western settings to broader publics, as Sherman Alexie did in The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007). A writer, standup comic, movie producer, poet, and songwriter, Alexie wrote the young adult novel, illustrated with comic-book-style graphics, to reach a set of readers his previous work had not. He reintroduces Junior, a character who appears in many of his novels (and the film adaptation of one of them, Smoke Signals). Junior lives on the Spokane Indian Reservation. Small and weak, debilitated from a childhood bout with “water on the brain,” Junior doesn’t quite fit in on the reservation. He is friends with Rowdy, a strong and fearless athlete who protects him. Like American Indian authors of the 1970s, Alexie does not shrink from the problems of the reservation. Most of his characters are poor. They drink heavily, and prospects look dark for most everybody. In a desperate act of rebellion and self-preservation, Junior throws an outdated textbook at one of his teachers at the reservation high school. Instead of being angry, the white teacher interprets Junior’s defiance as hope. He advises the young man to leave the reservation school to attend the white school in the town of Reardon.13
Spokane Indian Reservation in eastern Washington State. Photograph by Greg Goebel, 2013. Creative Commons.
At Reardon, Junior drops into a plot setup redolent with John Hughes flourishes. A flagrant outsider, he eventually befriends the prettiest girl in school, becomes a star on the basketball team, and runs with the cool crowd. He finds his confidence, learns that rich white kids have problems too, and in a triumphant moment beats Rowdy and the reservation high school team in a basketball game. Junior’s victory, however, proves far more wrenching than anything exper
ienced by Molly Ringwald or Ferris Bueller. All teenagers have problems, but Alexie shows that Indian kids from poor reservations have tragically dire ones. Junior’s life is filled with death. His sister dies in a fire, too drunk to save herself or her husband; his beloved grandmother is killed by an intoxicated driver. The undertow of desperation prompts Junior’s flight to Reardon, but this decision, with all its wonderful consequences, exiles him from the reservation. To survive and thrive, Junior has to risk his friendship with Rowdy and his membership in the Indian community.
Sherman Alexie. Photograph by Larry D. Moore, 2007. Creative Commons.
Alexie ends on a hopeful note. Junior seems to be headed toward a future where being Indian and being safe, happy, and successful are not mutually exclusive experiences. Still, unlike most high school dramas, Junior does not ride off into the sunset with his true love after vanquishing the cliques. Alexie uses the conventions of the genre to underscore the seriousness of American Indian poverty and racial exclusion, bringing the harsh reality of the Spokane Indian Reservation to the attention of young adult fiction devotees more accustomed to reading about boy wizards and human and vampire love affairs than chronic alcoholism and rural stagnation.
Junior and Napoleon are both unavoidably and unrecognizably western. The products of specific places—the Spokane reservation and Preston, Idaho—the characters’ localisms, the ways they talk and dress, and their family and community lives make them strange and endearing to movie and reading audiences. They could represent “the new kids,” the iconic protagonists in teenage high school dramas, because they parachute in from the rural West, the geographic and socioeconomic peripheries. Mainstream audiences no longer recognize Napoleon’s casseroles or Junior’s fry-bread as western, but they eat up the idiosyncrasies even if they haven’t a clue about the historical forces that hatched them—U.S. Indian policy, the Mormon exodus to Utah, and the politics of irrigation.
. . .
At 10:07 p.m. on Friday, January 24, 2014, sports reporter Mike Pesca tweeted: “I figured out Napoleon Dynamite. It was just a series of gifs, memes and image macros before those things existed.” Twelve of Pesca’s followers retweeted his assessment, hardly a landslide of attention but a testament nonetheless to Dynamite’s staying power and inscrutability. The film continues to deliver non sequiturs to those uninitiated in Mormon culture or western history. Viewers could deploy their search engines to find out more about Jared Hess and his pocket of the Interior West. Or they could revel in the outlandishness of Napoleon and his family and click on another link. Viewers like Pesca don’t need to solve the puzzle of Napoleon Dynamite. They can consume the movie’s delightfully off-kilter sensibility without questioning whether anyone actually considers dancing in moonboots to Jamiroquai kilter.14
Neither Junior nor Napoleon can ignore their marginality. They know where they stand in regard to the mainstream culture. They are fodder for the entertainment of others. Both Alexie and Hess push against this exploitation. Alexie includes a very funny scene in which a megarich, New Age “friend of the Indians” known as Billionaire Ted descends on the Spokanes during the funeral of Junior’s grandmother. He tries to return a powwow dance costume that he mistakenly thinks belonged to her. The dress is from another tribe, and it represents the earnest obliviousness of a man of privilege who used his wealth to gather Indian content—artifacts, archives, libraries—without bothering to get to know native people. He leaves the funeral in a huff after the mourners break into laughter.
The representative from the outside world who shows up in Napoleon Dynamite is LaFawnduh Lucas. An African American woman from Detroit, LaFawnduh befriends Napoleon’s brother Kip over the internet. They fall in love and marry near the end of the movie. LaFawnduh, says Nicolaas Mink, represents “the cultural gap between rural western life and mainstream America.” LaFawnduh wears stylish clothes, she listens to hip-hop, and she is urban. Kip and Napoleon catch glimpses of this mainstream over “cyberspace.” A digital conduit brings Detroit to them. Unlike Billionaire Ted, who dropped in uninvited on the Spokanes, LaFawnduh leaps from one periphery to another. A convergence of backwaters, her union with Kip suggests the merging of economic, racial, and geographic frontiers. Because their connection seems to empower both LaFawnduh and Kip, it plays much sweeter than Ted’s imposition.15
LaFawnduh puts a bow on this book. LaFawndah and Kip represent the twin poles of American frontier history and hip-hop culture: the historical, social, and economic forces that root people in place and the transmittable ideas, values, and art forms that connect people across space. The rappers Eric B. & Rakim expressed this push and pull in a lyric from their 1987 song “I Know You Got Soul.” “It ain’t where you’re from,” growled Rakim, “it’s where you’re at.” Like regional artists, rappers in the 1980s and 1990s often proclaimed their allegiance to place. Where you were from—East Coast versus West Coast, Bronx versus Brooklyn, Compton versus Long Beach—meant a great deal. Region, city, and neighborhood separated friends from enemies; geographic coordinates underwrote an artist’s authenticity. Being from a rough place signaled your ability to speak the truth of the streets. But other ideas in hip-hop pulled against the notion that where you were from determined who you were and who you weren’t. Some of the earliest rappers, artists like Afrika Bambaataa, preached universal ideologies of “Zulu” religion, anti-racism, and free thought. For Bambaataa and the rappers of his generation, “at” outshone “from.” Hip-hop was not geographically fixed but open to anyone who believed.16
Hip-hop has wavered back and forth between the poles of at and from; so too the scholarship of the American West. The proponents of at and from, process and place, continue to argue and represent. The vitality of the debate seems to be tied to the inability of the participants to settle the question. The information revolution heightened the standoff by allowing imaginative acts like LaFawnduh Lucas. Both at and from, LaFawnduh offers hope that digital conduits linking disparate frontiers like Detroit and Preston, Idaho, might rearrange the places and processes that define and inspire us. Instead of eroding our common ground, the interwebs might bring peripheries and centers together in new configurations, breeding new frontiers, filled with magical absurdities, that tell us where we came from and help us better understand where we might end up at.
FURTHER READING
Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation (2005)
Annie Gilbert Coleman, Ski Style: Sport and Culture in the Rockies (2004)
Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (2004)
Matthew Klingle, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle (2007)
J. Fred MacDonald, Who Shot the Sheriff? The Rise and Fall of the Television Western (1987)
William Philpott, Vacationland: Tourism and Environment in the Colorado High Country (2013)
Daniel T. Rodgers, Age of Fracture (2011)
Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992)
Joseph E. Taylor III, Pilgrims of the Vertical: Yosemite Rock Climbers and Nature at Risk (2010)
Jon Tuska, The Filming of the West (1976)
Notes
Introduction
1. Woodrow Wilson, “The Proper Perspective of American History,” Forum 19 (July 1895): 544–59.
2. Loren Baritz, “The Idea of the West,” American Historical Review 66 (1961): 628; Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Columbus on Himself (Indianapolis, Ind., 2010), 32.
3. Baritz, “Idea of the West,” 621.
4. “Emergence Song,” in The Portable North American Indian Reader, ed. Frederick W. Turner III (New York, 1974), 239.
5. Carl Ortwin Sauer, Sixteenth Century North America: The Land and the People as Seen by the Europeans (Berkeley, Calif., 1971), 203.
6. James Axtell, After Columbus: Essays in the Ethnohistory of Colonial North America (New York, 1988), 142.
7. Genesis 1:28.
8. John Mack Faragher, ed., R
ereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (New Haven, 1999), 31–60.
9. Robert G. Athearn, The Mythic West in Twentieth-Century America (Lawrence, Kans., 1986), 15.
Chapter 1: A New World Begins
1. The Journal of Christopher Columbus, trans. Cecil Jane (London, 1950), 57, 101–2.
2. Ibid., 194; Crióbal Colón, Textos y documentos completos, ed. Consuelo Valera (Madrid, 1982), 302; Francisco López de Gómara, La conquista de Mexico, ed. José Luis Rojas (Madrid, 1987), 87.
3. Peter Martyr, De Orbe Novo, trans. F. A. MacNutt, 2 vols. (London, 1912), 1:400; Bernal Díaz, The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York, 1963), 33.
4. Miguel León-Portilla, ed., The Broken Spears: The Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico (Boston, 1962; rev. ed., 1992), 6; John Bierhorst, Four Masterworks of American Indian Literature (New York, 1974), 37.
5. León-Portilla, Broken Spears, 51.
6. Díaz, Conquest of New Spain, 87.
7. Hugh Thomas, Conquest: Moctezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico (New York, 1963), 301, 433.
The American West Page 51