Frontier Myth In American Culture

History is what we learn in school about the past, about people’s culture, their way of life, their beliefs, their fight and their dreams. However, history is not an absolute truth. In fact, every story has more than one version. The History of the native American in the United States still one of the most controversial subjects in history, not only because of all the ambiguity filled in the story, but also and more importantly because the it was written by only one side. Indeed, it was written by the winners, the invaders, and the dominants. In the prologue of his book, The Earth Shall Weep, James Wilson tries to inspect and explain the reality of Native American today by analyzing the stereotypes and the prejudice they faced through since the beginning in the United States.

The late 19th century was a time of exploration, innovation, and continued westward expansion. The West, however, was not as glorified as people today like to think it was. Westward expansion had many benefits, the main being lots of new land for both the Americans and immigrants, but many ideas of the West have been altered throughout the years. The West was romanticized in many ways, people moved to the West in the pursuit of happiness, but today many hardships of westward expansion have been ignored. Cowboys and homesteads are two major concepts that have been romanticized today about the West.

The usual Western way of coping with some concept or ritual that seems 'other' or strange, is to search for an equivalent that will familiarise and anaesthetise the shock that there are other ways to exist and interact. The myth of the “vanishing Indian” is thoroughly brought out in Source 2 of Morgan’s Ancient Society, where the author’s superior, keen tone to the description of Native Americans and how they were all “savages” and were incapable of adapting the concepts of modern American civilization. As a result, Morgan’s thoughts were that Americans would pervade Native American territories, expecting American Indians to fail to subside to their way of life and thus result in war between the two, eventually leading to the decimation of Native

During the “Gilded Age” period of American history, development of the Trans-Mississippi west was crucial to fulfilling the American dream of manifest destiny and creating an identity which was distinctly American. Since the west is often associated with rugged pioneers and frontiersmen, there is an overarching idea of hardy American individualism. However, although these settlers were brave and helped to make America into what it is today, they heavily relied on federal support. It would not have been possible for white Americans to settle the Trans-Mississippi west without the US government removing Native Americans from their lands and placing them on reservations, offering land grants and incentives for people to move out west, and the

Historians views the Native Americans as a civilization “crushed” and “scorned” by the march of European forces in the New World. The European pilgrims in North America regularly defended their extension of domain with the suspicion that they were sparing - as they saw - a savage, agnostic world by spreading Christian human advancement. In the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the strategy of Indian Reductions brought about the constrained transformations to Catholicism of the indigenous individuals. After that, they started to create treaties with other countries, lead business and follow peace.

Wilderness as a settler-colonial construct that embodies prejudice--racism and sexism--and that continues to shape and engrave settler-colonial ideologies in our society’s mindset, it should be questioned as to how it has been so powerful a cultural enterprise. Stories are what empower cultural persistence and cultural identity. In particular, the United States has implemented the use of story to shape and construct its cultural ideologies and to marginalize and disempower women and Indigenous people so that white men can assume a position of supremacy. Within these stories, the heroes are often depicted as innocent--similar to anti-conquest in which the colonizer naturalizes his own presence while establishing his power over native peoples

Once European men stepped foot onto what is now known as North America, the lives of the Native Americans were forever changed. The Indians suffered centuries of torment and ridicule from the settlers in America. Despite the reservations made for the Natives, there are still cultural issues occurring within America. In Sherman Alexie’s, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, the tragic lives of Native Americans in modern society are depicted in a collection of short stories taking place in the Spokane Reservation in Washington state. Throughout the collection, a prominent and reoccurring melancholic theme of racism against Native Americans and their struggle to cope with such behavior from their counterpart in this modern day and age is shown.

The late 19th century, a period including Reconstruction, the Industrial Era, and “manifest destiny,” was marked by the freeing of slaves, imperialism, immense economic growth, and the rise of big businesses. (pg. 579, pg. 619, pg. 625, pg. 630) This was an age of “prolonged peace,” where many Americans sought to change their lives and their country for the better. (pg. 579) Industrial growth resulting from the North’s need to “supply the massive Union armies” presented various opportunities to make enormous fortunes. (pg. 619-620) However, this period also involved a considerable amount of violence, ranging from racial and labor conflicts to brutal wars overseas. (pg. 646-654)

In 1893 Frederic Jackson Turner a historian, introduces the “Frontier Thesis” in Columbian Exposition, he explains from this thesis about the importance of American history. Frontier thesis remarks the end of a great historic society. Because Frederic Jackson argues that continuous western settlement had an extraordinary impact on American social, political and economic development throughout 20th

European adventurers who visited America faced little resistance from the local populations. This fact has been attributed to some vulnerabilities which made it difficult for Native Americans to wage a war against the European foreigners (Digital History, n.d). The wrangles among the local communities have been cited as among the factors that lowered the defense capacity of Native Americans. These communities fought over such resources as water and land for farming. For instance, the Hopi and Zuni communities had an uneasy relationship that was characterized by conflicts (Digital History, n.d). These conflicts made it easy for such European foreigners as the Spanish to conquer the local communities.

The topic of focus for my paper was the Long Walk of the Navajo and Navajo Wars during the Civil War period until 1868, as that period is remembered by the Navajo. I believe that a greater understanding of the history of the American Soutwest can be reached taking Navajoes’ memories and perspectives of these events into account. The Long Walk of the Navajo was migration of the tribe to a reservations across the Southwest, most prominently Bosque Redondo, wherein they suffered from a variety of degradations from violence and raids to starvation. This process of migration occurred in waves, and was triggered by warfare and violence at the hands of the Navajo’s enemies, including the United States (or Union), New Mexican citizens, and other tribes

Gary Clayton Anderson is an American historian who is currently a professor at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, OK. He is focused mainly on the history of native people in the Great Plains and southwest region of the United States. Anderson received his bachelor’s degree from Concordia College in Moorhead, MN, his master’s degree from the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, SD, and his Ph.D. from the University of Toledo in Toledo, OH. Along with the classes he teaches, Anderson travels around the country giving lectures about relations between Native Americans and white settlers and other related topics.

The attraction offered an aestheticized representation of Native Americans as savages and hired Native Americans to play “authentic” Indians. Although the Oconaluftee Indian Village and Historyland serve different interests, they have a similar effect on the tourist. Through representations of history in staged performances, a transmission of culture occurs between spectators and performers that creates “a cultural exchange where ‘otherness’ and ‘American-ness’ were negotiated.” American tourists gaze at the exoticized “other” in order to establish the “self” and produce an American identity that does not include the “other.” This construction and reaffirmation of the “self” occurs in both attractions despite the different interests because both attractions exoticize Native Americans. Native Americans are aware of this transmission and, to the extent that they can, control which aspects of their culture and religion to transmit and which to withhold from audiences. The cultural exchange can negatively impact Native Americans because they can be seen as so different that they are excluded from modern American society. At the same time, awareness of the gaze allows Native Americans to protect their religion and culture by selling tourists a

Program 5 describes the impact Cooper, Ridge, and Whitman made on America through their writing. Cooper, Ridge, and Whitman are well known for their portrayal of the developing America and what became known as the “western hero”. Cooper was the first to create the character of the western hero. His hero was characterized as a strong man who, unintentionally, led the expansion west through his desire to separate himself from the civilized world. Along the way, this man became best friends with a Native American because he could recognize the same manliness in this man as he saw in himself. This notion that American men could respect manly acts from any man, regardless of race, became a significant influence in American society.

By opening Virgin Land with de Crévecouer’s question, “What is an American?,” (3) Smith demonstrated that the primary ambition was to answer that very question. Smith uses the frontier myth as his starting point because the most persistent “generalizations concerning American life and character has been shaped by the pull of a continent drawing population westward.” (Virgin Land 3) Where Turner had argued that the frontier had shaped the American identity, Smith shifted the attention “away from what ‘actually happened’ in time past to what people though was happening.” (Marks, 71) Focusing instead on the mythic and symbolic aspects of the West, Smith demonstrated that the image of the West was considered to be a reflection of American nationality, identity, and culture. The American identity was, according to Smith, not the result of the actual experience of living on the frontier as Turner had argued but the result of the utopian ideas used to describe the West and the myths that followed in its