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Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France, by Emily C. Burns

At the meetings of the Western History Association, one can probably still start a conversation around the question of whether the American West is best seen as a region—a place, distinguished by various characteristics—or a frontier process, a repeating set of practices that unfolded in rough sequence as Europeans settled North America. That question animated the New Western History of the late 1980s and 1990s. Patricia Limerick rejected Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier as “the F-word,” William Cronon sought to retain some part of its environmentalism, and a group of traditionalists insisted on an old-school frontier that was increasingly understood to be a crusty piece of outdated ideology. For many Western historians, that debate has long been considered a bit sterile. At the meetings of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), however, the question of the frontier might still have a certain counterintuitive purchase. In its early moments, Native American studies was often organized around either federal policy or American cultural productions of “Indianness.” Francis Paul Prucha’s The Great Father synthesized Native history by largely ignoring Indian people in favor of Congress, courts, and administrative law; Robert F. Berkhofer Jr.’s The White Man’s Indian achieved something similar by looking at mass culture and popular culture. (Note: while the specific names of tribal nations are preferred, both “Native American” and “American Indian” are acceptable terms for generalization.) Beginning in the 1970s, New Indian History reversed the focus, emphasizing Native peoples, their experiences, and the meanings they may have taken from encounters with Europeans and, later, Americans. A tradition of innovative work, often community-centered, followed as scholars made initial efforts to develop new practices and standards for their work, and Native scholars entered the academy in greater numbers. By the 2000s, however, the field was caught up in uncertainty and identity politics; no new syntheses had emerged, local case studies were beginning to pile up on one another, and the “frontier energy” of innovation seemed on the decline. (At least) three factors intervened to revitalize the field. The first was the establishment of NAISA, which insisted on a big tent and a field welcome to all. Second, the character of NAISA—as signified through the addition of “indigenous” to its name—was explicitly international, with active participation from scholars in Australia, Aotearoa/ New Zealand, Canada, and a growing list of other indigenous locations in the Pacific, Taiwan, Japan, and Scandinavia. Third, the theoretical apparatus of settler colonialism