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Introduction: The significance of the
frontier in an age of transnational
history
Erik Altenbernd
a
& Alex Trimble Young
b
a
Department of History, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA
b
Department of English, University of Southern California, Los
Angeles, CA, USA
Published online: 19 Dec 2013.
To cite this article: Erik Altenbernd & Alex Trimble Young , Settler Colonial Studies (2013):
Introduction: The significance of the frontier in an age of transnational history, Settler Colonial
Studies, DOI: 10.1080/ 2201473X.2013.846385
To link to this article: http:/ / dx.doi.org/ 10.1080/ 2201473X.2013.846385
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2. INTRODUCTION
The significance of the frontier in an age of transnational history
Erik Altenbernda
and Alex Trimble Youngb*
a
Department of History, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA; b
Department of English, University of
Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
The concept of the frontier has been central to many recent studies of settler colonialism. In
Patrick Wolfe’s work, the frontier constitutes the “primal” settler/indigenous binary that
structures and belies the ostensible commitment of settler societies to multicultural
pluralism. While Wolfe thus calls attention to the role the “frontier binary” plays in the
“logic of elimination,” he has also criticized the frontier as a representational trope that
works to memorialize and whitewash settler invasion. In contemporary historiographic
debates in the fields of western and borderlands history within the USA, the concept of the
frontier has fared much differently. For US scholars, the very word frontier is irrevocably
linked to the legacy of historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932), who, in his 1893
essay “The Significance of The Frontier in American History,” cast the frontier as both a
moving line of settlement and the well-spring of American individualism and democracy.
Today, US scholars reject Turner’s “frontier thesis” as inherently ethnocentric and
nationalistic and have largely backed away from the idea that the frontier is the locus of US
history and culture. This introductory essay puts the critiques of Turnerian historiography
articulated by scholars of the US West and southwestern borderlands into conversation with
the rather Turnerian concept of the frontier that informs many analyses in settler colonial
studies. Reviewing the work of a broad range of scholars who have offered various
alternatives to Turner’s narrative of settler expansion, we argue – at a moment when settler
colonial studies is poised to make a valuable intervention into the study of settler/indigenous
contact and conflict in the USA – that recent historiographic debates in western and
borderlands history have much to offer the growing field of settler colonial studies.
In the summer of 1908, Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) went on vacation. Rather than lux-
uriating on a beach, Turner took a five-week, labor-intensive canoe tour of the extensive lake and
river systems that straddle the USA–Canada border. An avid outdoorsman for most of his life,
Turner by this time was also a well-established professor of history at the University of Wisconsin
and on the verge of serving as president of the American Historical Association, a deputation that
would pave the way to his subsequent appointment as professor of history at Harvard University
in 1911. Turner’s summer retreat from the settled confines of Madison to the soggy wilds Amer-
icans today call the “Boundary Waters” in many ways functioned as a re-enactment of the history
he is famous for studying.1
The Boundary Waters were formed by the retreat and deposition of the Laurentide Ice Sheet at
the end of the last Ice Age more than 10,000 years ago. Turner’s trek across this glaciated land-
scape began in Ely, Minnesota, a small town located just outside of what is today the Boundary
© 2013 Taylor & Francis
*Corresponding author. Email: alexanty@usc.edu
Settler Colonial Studies, 2013
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2201473X.2013.846385
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3. Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (one of the four major US and Canadian government-protected
parks and forests just west of Lake Superior), and ended at Lake Nipigon, the large freshwater
lake in the province of Ontario. A decade and half prior, Turner drew on the geological forces
that created the Boundary Waters as a metaphor to describe the frontier in his famous essay,
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893). In Turner’s words, “As successive
terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it,
and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics”.2
For
Turner, frontier processes shaped American society over the course of time just as indelibly as
retreating glaciers had shaped the landscapes of this region in which he was raised.
When Turner took his canoe trip across the Boundary Waters – an adventure preserved by his
daughter Dorothy in a now crispy, black turn-of-the-century photo album – he partook in a rec-
reational wilderness experience nostalgic for a particular historical process and era – that of the fur
trade, the inter-imperial, multinational, and multicultural venture at the heart of Euro-American
expansion into North America.3
The family photo of Turner portaging his canoe reproduced
on the cover of this issue of Settler Colonial Studies (Figure 1) situates Turner as something of
Figure 1. Frederick Jackson Turner portaging a canoe near the Atikokan River, Ontario, Canada (1908). “F.
J.T en portage”, Turner Family Photo Album, Box 58, Frederick Jackson Turner Collection, The Huntington
Library, San Marino, CA.
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4. a modern voyageur, the French word used to describe those fur traders who traveled the Boundary
Waters region via canoe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The image of Turner recreating – for the purpose of leisure – this chapter of North American
history is rather ripe with ironic symbolism.4
Take, for instance, the transnational context that
locates Turner, author of arguably the most influential theory of American exceptionalism, rough-
ing it in the Canadian rather than American wilderness, re-enacting a frontier heritage more often
associated with Canada – French Canada in particular – than with the USA.5
When viewed
through the prism of modern historiography, the geographic location of Turner “en portage”
takes on additional resonances. The Boundary Waters region bisects the northwestern portion
of what French colonials referred to as the pays d’en haut (upper country), the region historian
Richard White identified and termed “the middle ground”.6
The image of Turner traversing
through White’s “middle ground” – a case study of frontier social development White deployed
as a direct challenge to the sweeping generalizations of Turner’s “The Significance of the Fron-
tier” – is itself a rather fascinating, direct, and unexpected intersection of the old with the new, of
two competing (if inter-related) orthodoxies in the historiography of North America.
This image, and the story of Turner’s transnational frontier tourism, was very much on our
minds as we organized the symposium that inspired this special feature. This journal roundtable,
which explores intersections not only within US historiography but also between the historiogra-
phy of the US West and transnational settler colonial studies, has its origins in a symposium of the
same title that we hosted for the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West at the Hun-
tington Library in San Marino, California on 25 February 2012.7
This symposium was conceived
of during a series of discussions that began while we were in a graduate seminar on the history of
the American West taught by William Deverell, Professor of History at the University of Southern
California. These discussions continued thereafter during our year-long tenure as Mellon interns
in the Huntington’s Manuscripts Department – during which time we had the opportunity to work
extensively in the Frederick Jackson Turner Collection. One of the topics we repeatedly returned
to was the startling disjuncture between how the field of western American history and transna-
tional settler colonial studies regard the frontier as an analytic concept. Despite the field’s origins
in Turnerian frontier historiography, the word “frontier”, paradoxically, holds little analytical
weight in the contemporary scholarly conversation on the history and culture of the US West;
whereas, conversely, many scholars of settler colonial studies – a field in which Turner is
rarely cited – embrace the rather Turnerian notion that a frontier binary is the structuring principle
of settler societies.
As we traded articles and books from scholars in both fields, we realized that the contempor-
ary moment – in which settler colonial studies is poised to make an important intervention in our
understanding of the settlement of North America – presents an opportunity for a consideration of
two questions: How, broadly speaking, can scholars of US history and culture, especially those
trained and working in the USA, profitably import the insights of settler colonial studies and
the field’s repurposing of the frontier binary? And, on the other hand, how might scholars
working within settler colonial studies profit from considering the problems and debates within
US historiography and its ongoing critique of Turner’s frontier thesis?
Theorizing the frontier: Frederick Jackson Turner, transnational nationalist
Any attempt to answer these questions must include a consideration of Turner’s seminal essay
“The Significance of the Frontier in American History”. The influence of this essay, which US
scholars often refer to as “the frontier thesis”, on twentieth-century Western American histor-
iography was so profound that scholars in the USA have been bemoaning the necessity of dis-
cussing its influence for 70 years or more.8
The impact of Turner’s thought has extended well
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5. beyond academic discourse, transfiguring the very conception and meaning of the word “fron-
tier”.9
Turner conceptualized the American frontier not as a boundary between nation-states, or
even a boundary between indigenous and settler sovereignties, but rather as a primal place: the
“outer edge of the wave – the meeting point between savagery and civilization”.10
Thus, on the
one hand, Turner conceives of the frontier as a transhistorical and translocatable site where civi-
lization clashes with the wilderness and is renewed by nature. In the words of literary critic
William Handley, Turner’s frontier is an almost Emersonian, “spatial-temporal, moving site
whose circumference was nowhere but whose center was everywhere”.11
On the other hand,
the frontier for Turner was also an objective geography, one produced by demographics and
one that could be mapped. An often referred to but little studied aspect of Turner’s essay is
the empirical basis of Turner’s soaring rhetoric and sweeping theorization: namely, “The Pro-
gress of the Nation”, the section of the 1890 federal census report that detailed the growth and
geographic distribution of the US population between 1790 and 1890. In addition to providing a
detailed statistical demographic accounting and analysis, the Census Office staff also visualized
the Office’s data into a series of individual maps that represented population densities of the US
east of the 100th Meridian. These maps charted decadal patterns of migration to the nation’s
frontier, which the Office defined as “settlements which do not reach an average of 2
[persons] to the square mile.”12
Turner’s interest in the report focuses on its pronouncement
– which Turner made famous when he quoted it at the outset of his essay – that the nation
no longer had a “frontier of settlement” due to the fact that “the unsettled area has been so
broken into isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line”
and thus that “the discussion of its extent and its westward movement … can not [sic] …
any longer have a place in the census reports”.13
Turner took this statement to mean that the
American frontier was now an historical rather than contemporary phenomenon, and thus con-
cluded his essay with the declaration that “four centuries from the discovery of America, at the
end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going
has closed the first period of American history”.14
Turner’s pronouncement of the closure of the frontier was expressed with some anxiety and
nostalgia because, for Turner, the frontier was not merely a means of territorial expansion, but
rather a process that structured the whole of American history. In his words, “The existence of
an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward,
explain American development”.15
This ongoing social regression of Euro-American settlers
into the “wilderness” of the American interior occasioned not only the production and reproduc-
tion of American history but also its national identity: “This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of
American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with
the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character”.16
For
Turner, American individualism and American democracy emerged from the experience of
settling the American continent rather than from European antecedents. “The frontier,”
Turner stressed, “is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization . … Little by little
… [the frontiersman] transforms the wilderness but the outcome is not old Europe...[but] a
new product that is American.” Americans and their democratic republic were therefore some-
thing new, something exceptional. The “advance of the frontier”, Turner concluded, “has meant
a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on
American lines”.17
Turner’s emphasis on the structuring and symbolic significance of the frontier binary for the
US nation-state should resound with an uncanny familiarity for readers of contemporary settler
colonial theory. Turner’s frontier thesis could, for example, rather seamlessly take the place of
the Australian ideology of settlement Patrick Wolfe critiques in Settler Colonialism and the Trans-
formation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event (1999). Wolfe’s
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6. characterization of “the primary paradigm” of Australian settler colonialism as “a classic binarism
that opposes two types (civilization vs. savagery, etc.)” is directly analogous to Turner’s binary of
civilization and wilderness.18
The resonance of Turner’s analysis within Wolfe’s diagnosis
suggests more than just a structural parallel.
Turner in fact exerted a strong influence on mid-twentieth-century Australian historians like
Russell Ward, who identified the pastoral bush-worker as the progenitor of Australia’s national
character.19
With the shift away from ethnocentric and nationalist history in the late twentieth
century, however, Australian historians did not jettison the frontier as a category of analysis.
For instance, in The Other Side of the Frontier (1981), Henry Reynolds decisively recast the Aus-
tralian frontier as a site of settler conquest and indigenous resistance rather than of nation building
in “the wilderness”. Unlike the contemporaneous critique of the New Western Historians in the
USA, who rejected the frontier outright as a category of analysis, Reynolds, in The Other Side
of the Frontier and other works, transformed the content and conclusions of Australian frontier
historiography by recuperating the suppressed history of the violence that subtended settlement,
and the indigenous agency expressed through various forms of resistance. The stark binary form
of the Australian frontier is, however, never called into question. As Reynolds later observed,
“there was no ‘middle ground’ in Australia – that long era of American history described by
Richard White when Indians, whites and mestizos mixed on terms of equality and left abundant
documentary evidence behind”.20
Unlike New Western Historians like White working in the
USA, Reynolds transformed the ideological content of Australian frontier historiography
without questioning its form.
Wolfe’s work, which always operates in productive tension with Australian frontier histor-
iography, transforms Reynolds’ conception of the frontier in several key ways – most notably,
perhaps, by arguing that the frontier is a transnational and transposable concept rather than one
specific to the Australian situation. For Wolfe, there is no “middle ground” in Australia, or in
any other settler society. Wolfe employs the concept of the frontier, somewhat paradoxically, to
describe both a foundational moment in the development of settler colonial projects, and a dis-
course of settler nationhood aimed at whitewashing or disavowing the violence of settler inva-
sion. For Wolfe, settler frontier narratives such as Turner’s, that imagine the frontier as a site of
dynamic pluralism, serve to distract both from the past violence of the historical frontier and
from the contemporary forms of violence and administrative power employed by the settler
state against indigenous societies. As he pithily puts it, “the point is not simply that the idea
of the frontier is misleading. What matters is that it was a performative representation – it
helped the invasion to occur”.21
In his diagnosis of the “performative representation” of the frontier, Wolfe’s analyses can
often read like the ideological obverse of Turner’s writing on the frontier:
[T]he “truth” of the frontier was that the primary social division was encompassed in the relation
between natives and invaders. This notwithstanding, the suppression of divisions within settler
society was an ideological effect of the concept of the frontier. Correspondingly, though the “truth”
of present day multiculturalism is a racially divided society, the reduction of the primary Indigen-
ous/settler divide to the status of one among many ethnic divisions within settler society is an ideo-
logical effect of multiculturalism.22
Wolfe’s binary, of course, is one that replaces the “civilized” and the “savage” with settlers and
indigenous natives, reframing both the terms and the ideological significance of the Turnerian
frontier. The carefully bracketed “truth” which Wolfe employs to describe his own historical nar-
rative further indicates that the significance of his frontier is relational rather than world-historic –
his critique of the representational strategies of settler societies lacks the ontological certainty of
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7. either Turner or many of his critics. Nonetheless, strong echoes of Turner remain in Wolfe’s work.
Just as Turner argued that a frontier binary “explains American development”, Wolfe argues that a
frontier binary structures settler invasion. Turner’s argument that the “the frontier promoted the
formation of a composite nationality for the American people” aligns closely with Wolfe’s con-
tention that “the suppression of divisions within [Australian] settler society was an ideological
effect of the concept of the frontier”.23
Similarly, Turner’s conception of the frontier as a
“moving site whose circumference was nowhere but whose center was everywhere” maps
closely onto Wolfe’s representation of the Australian frontier as “shifting, contextual, negotiated,
moved in and out of and suspended”.24
For Wolfe, however, settler representations of the frontier are Janus-faced, on the one hand,
offering sanitized representations of the frontier as a space of hybridity and nation-building
such as Turner’s, and on the other, portraying the frontier as a lawless violent space of exception
beyond the reach of the law of the settler state.25
This latter mode of “performative representation”
of the frontier serves as a sort of “screen” that works to insulate the juridical order of the settler
state from the genocidal violence that facilitated indigenous dispossession. This disavowal of
frontier violence as the work of “irregular mavericks”, however, belies the fact that the settler
state directly benefited from their unlawful activity. As Wolfe puts it, “rather than something sep-
arate from or running counter to the colonial state, the murderous activities of the frontier rabble
constitute its principal means of expansion”.26
It is in Wolfe’s explication of the historical frontier behind such “performative represen-
tations”, however, that the Turnerian aspects of his work are most evident. In his recent essay
“Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction”, Wolfe addresses Turner’s legacy directly
in an argument that makes his most strident case yet for the validity of an historical frontier
binary. He opens with a provocative observation and question:
As one who argues that settler colonialism is premised on a zero-sum logic whereby settler societies,
for all their internal complexities, uniformly require the elimination of Native alternatives, I have reg-
ularly been accused of binarism – though not once by a Native. Why should it be that the spectre of
binarism, so disturbing to non-Native sensibilities, should be less troubling to Natives?27
Wolfe suggests that the answer to this question might be found by examining the role the frontier
plays in producing “the affective dimensions of settler subjecthood” (or what the exceptionalist
Turner might have called “the American character”):
To situate settler subjecthood historically, we can start with the frontier. For all its empirical inade-
quacy, the concept of the frontier has the virtue of expressing the protean fact of a historical
coming together of societies that had previously been mutually discrete. Prior to a certain point or
points, their separateness had been unqualified. In our theoretical enthusiasm at the complexities,
hybridities and transgressions that the study of frontiers opens up, therefore, we should not lose
sight of the fact that, for all the holes and inconsistencies in the concept, its primary referent is
stable enough. Behind all the indeterminacy, the frontier is a way of talking about the historical
process of territorial invasion – a cumulative depredation through which outsiders recurrently
advance on Natives in order to take their place. Go back far enough, in other words, and there can
be no disputing the existence of an unqualified empirical binarism.28
Wolfe’s description of a site of settler subject formation defined by an “unqualified empirical
binarism” that is historically and empirically specific, yet also recurrent and translocatable, cer-
tainly has strong echoes of the Turnerian frontier. It is in his description of the closure of the fron-
tier, however, that Wolfe acknowledges that he “agrees with Frederick Jackson Turner” insofar as
both scholars read the years surrounding 1890 marking a watershed moment in US history. Wolfe
describes this moment as “the profoundest of ruptures” occasioned by “the end of the era of
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8. Indians’ armed military resistance” that coincided with the same year that Turner identified as “the
end of the first period of American history”.29
For Wolfe, however, the closing of the US frontier
does not signal an uneasy new beginning for an erstwhile frontier society, but rather a shift in the
tactics of the logic of elimination. The “post-frontier era” emerges when “the settler colonial logic
of elimination in its crudest frontier form … was transformed into a paternalistic mode of govern-
mentality which, though still sanctioned by state violence, came to focus on assimilation rather
than rejection”.30
This tendency to repurpose rather than reject Turnerian frontier historiography is not,
however, limited to Wolfe or even Australian settler colonial studies. In a recent essay in
which he suggests that Baruch Kimmerling and Gershon Shafir laid the groundwork for the
legitimization of the “colonization approach” within Israeli scholarship, Uri Ram notes that
both Kimmerling and Shafir “modify … [Turner’s] original thesis in a number of ways, and
draw different conclusions about the effect of the frontier on this society” (our emphasis).31
Like much scholarship working with the settler colonial paradigm, Kimmerling and Shafir’s ana-
lyses of Israel as a settler society are predicated on a conception of the frontier as the structuring
binary of the settler society. What is more remarkable, especially from the US perspective, is that
both writers – Kimmerling in particular – cite Turner’s frontier thesis relatively uncritically as a
source that adequately describes the relationship between frontier processes and democracy in
the USA.32
By appropriating certain aspects of Turner's frontier thesis, scholars of settler colonialism
often work through a Turnerian tradition of frontier historiography even as they work to discredit
that tradition’s ideological underpinnings. While it might seem unremarkable from the perspec-
tive of scholars outside the USA, such embraces of the frontier binary and use of a frontier/
post-frontier periodization break one of the biggest taboos in contemporary Western American
scholarship. US historiography since the 1980s has been so insistent in its rejection of Turner’s
ideology that even a gesture as seemingly benign as Wolfe’s repurposing of Turner’s periodization
has come to be viewed, by many scholars in the USA, as problematic at best. Wolfe claims that the
rejection of the frontier binary by US scholars “partakes of a certain sacredness.” In assessing the
political valence of US scholars’ rejection of the “primal binarism” of the frontier, however, it is
important to recognize that these scholars have not been reciting poststructuralist pieties, but
rather conducting a broad-based reassessment of the Eurocentric and exceptionalist focus of
Turnerian historiography.33
New Western History and the frontier in US historiography
Understanding the extent to which Turnerian conceptions of the frontier inform the field of settler
colonial studies explains in part why many scholars in the USA, especially those who study the
US West, have been slow to identify settler colonialism as a useful category of analysis. Just as
settler colonial studies began to emerge as a distinct field of analysis in the last 20 years of the
twentieth century, the historiography of the US West was undergoing transformations that were
leading the field away (even if only temporarily) from the comparative study of settler colonial
expansion, and toward a more inward-looking regionalist approach. Perhaps, because Turner
was such an omnipresent figure in US historiography, many of the scholars associated with
New Western History sought to push the study of the US West beyond the nationalist and ethno-
centric biases that framed Turner’s thesis by rejecting the frontier binary as a structuring principle
of US history.
If one had to choose one work that most fully (and forcefully) represents New Western His-
tory’s rejection of the frontier thesis, it would be Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Con-
quest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987). As its title suggests, this monograph
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9. shared with contemporaneous interventions in settler colonial studies the goal of foregrounding
the history of indigenous dispossession and its consequences – indeed, Wolfe cites it favorably
in an early essay comparing the USA and Australian indigenous policy.34
A synthesis of numer-
ous secondary works, The Legacy of Conquest recontextualized Western American history in a
number of important ways. For one, Limerick charged that frontier was “an unsubtle concept
in a subtle world”. Worthy of study as an “historical artifact”, narrative trope, or national
origin story, the frontier thesis was, Limerick argued, sorely outmoded as an analytical tool.35
Limerick faulted the unfolding panorama of the frontier thesis and its unidirectional, east-to-
west focus for two main reasons.36
First, it consecrated a triumphalist teleology of Western expan-
sion that “relentlessly trivialized the West” by celebrating the conquests of white men; and
second, it denigrated place in favor of processes that distorted historical analysis by focusing
almost solely on the early phases of settlement.37
“When ‘civilization’ had conquered ‘savagery’
at any one location”, Limerick argued, “the process – and the historian’s attention – moved on”.38
Limerick, unlike Wolfe, took particular exception with Turnerian historiography’s focus on the
closure of the frontier. If Western history is defined by a frontier that ceases to exist in 1890,
then the horizon of Western history effectively ends then too. To combat this temporal enclosure,
Limerick argued in favor of a regionalist approach, one that situated the American West (a region
she identified as all US territory west of the Mississippi River) as a place and that stressed con-
tinuity as well as change within the history of the region. Such an approach, Limerick contended,
would situate the West “as an important meeting ground, the point where Indian America, Latin
America, Anglo-America, Afro-America, and Asia intersected” and thus as “a preeminent case
study in conquest and its consequences”.39
To treat the trans-Mississippi West as a distinct and
coherent region rather than a process was to treat the West as a significant and illustrative
theater of national history rather than national myth.
The New Western History, in many ways inaugurated by the publication of Limerick’s Legacy
of Conquest, set in motion a vigorous, and at times hard-fought, historiographic debate. In her call
for a robust historical regionalism, Limerick was joined by a host of other scholars, most notably
Richard White and Donald Worster. Equally concerned with separating the historical wheat from
the mythical chaff, Worster argued that Turnerian historiography, in all its abstractness, obfus-
cated the real significance of Western history for late twentieth-century scholars and readers.
Worster tethered regional identity to aridity (the dominant climatic condition across large parts
of the US West) and argued for regionalism as a methodology that could narrate not only a
more socially inclusive history of the West, but also a more rigorous “total history” that could
unify the region as “an evolving human ecology”.40
Worster put this body of theory into practice
in a number of works, including Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American
West (1985).
Following the works of Limerick and Worster, Richard White published – in a single year –
two major challenges to the frontier thesis. In “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New
History of the American West (1991), White argued that “The West that Americans recognize in
the twentieth century” is not the byproduct of some bygone, pre-1890 era, but rather the product
of “their own work”; which is to say, a place defined not by geography but by the ongoing history
of “conquest and of the mixing of diverse peoples”.41
In one fell swoop, White reproved not only
Turner, but also regionalist allies like Limerick and Worster, both of whom identified aridity as a
key definitional feature of the American West. White’s rejection of Turner was twofold: he jetti-
soned Turner’s contention that Western history ended in 1890 by looking primarily at the twen-
tieth-century West, and excised the word “frontier” from the entire text. As for Worster and
Limerick, White advanced a “political” rather than environmental definition of the American
West – one that focused on all the territory west and south of the Missouri River, all of which
was acquired by the USA after national independence, beginning with the Louisiana Purchase
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10. of 1803.42
As White put it, “Geography did not determine the boundaries of the American West;
rather history created them”.43
For all the attention it received at the time, It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own has fared
poorly in comparison to White’s other major work of 1991: The Middle Ground: Indians,
Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815. A highly influential and
deeply researched history of collaborative colonialism, The Middle Ground thoroughly chal-
lenged Turner’s frontier thesis by documenting in subtle detail a “frontier” society altogether
different from the settler frontier imagined by Turner. The mutually unintelligible but interdepen-
dent societies created by French colonials and Algonquin Indian refugees in the pays d’en haut,
White argues, contained none of the Manichean binaries imagined by Turner, but pivoted instead
around “the inability of both sides to gain their ends through force” and thus “the need for people
to find a means, other than force, to gain the cooperation and consent of foreigners”.44
The result,
as White famously put it, was a sociocultural “middle ground” sustained by the fur trade where
neither side had economic or military primacy. The contrast with Turner could not be more strik-
ing. Whereas Turner reveled in the triumph of Euro-American modes of settlement and concep-
tualized their frontier as an inexorable historical force, like a moving glacier, White countered not
only with a picture of a European frontier that was largely non-Anglo, but one also predicated on
contingency, collaboration, and exchange rather than conquest.45
In his preface to the recent 20th anniversary edition of the book, however, White has also chal-
lenged those who have employed the notion of the middle ground as a transposable and transhis-
torical descriptor for colonial contact. For White, the metaphor of the middle ground cannot be
unmoored from the cultural dynamics of the pays d’en haut.46
Regardless, The Middle
Ground, by describing a historically and geographically specific exception to any generalizable
theory of settler conquest, poses a challenge to any historiographic project (such as that of
Turner or Wolfe) that would imagine a transhistorical, translocatable frontier.
The historical American regionalism advocated by Limerick, White, Worster, and others
was met with a number of critics and detractors. The most thoughtful critics of New Western
History and its attention to regionalism defended the utility of the frontier thesis (shorn, of
course, of its ethnocentric and nationalistic trappings) by using Turner to call attention to the
most fundamental contradiction of the regionalist argument. For all its attention to historical
continuity, convergence, conquest, and complexity, New Western History’s regionalism still
defined itself in relation to the American nation-state and thus, ultimately, to a narrative of
American national development.47
New Western Historians were, after all, and quite proudly
in most cases, historians of the “American West”. In their attempt to unshackle twentieth-
century Western history from the frontier thesis, they imposed new and equally vexing limit-
ations related to geography and periodization by rather arbitrarily focusing on the trans-Missis-
sippi West. This regional approach was ahistorical in that it disregarded and denied one of the
fundamental continuities of US history: namely, the continuity of US patterns of settlement and
conquest that originated east of the Mississippi. As historian Stephen Aron noted, to ignore the
fact that the American West in 1776 was the trans-Appalachian West rather than the trans-Mis-
sissippi West was to ignore the contingent nature of US expansion and that “the history of the
conquest, colonization, and capitalist consolidation of the continent” did have an east-to-west
trajectory.48
Similarly, William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin argued that the “paralle-
lism” of Turner’s theory – the notion that the frontier “repeated itself” in different times and
places (both original italics) – was not a liability but in fact the theory’s greatest strength,
because it provided an analytic that could examine continuities in American patterns of settle-
ment. Moreover, the frontier thesis provided the means by which to explain “the tendency for
different parts of the continent to make the long transition from frontier to region”.49
To main-
tain that the trans-Mississippi West was historically determined but also somehow historically
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11. discrete from other regions of the nation – particularly those regions whose histories might illus-
trate similar patterns and problems of settlement – was, Cronon, Miles, and Gitlin argued,
simply untenable.
This critique of the New Western History was amplified in the late 1990s in the work of
Kerwin Klein, who, in a 1996 article entitled “Reclaiming the ‘F’ Word, or Being and Becoming
Postwestern”, and the historiographic monograph, The Frontiers of The Historical Imagination:
Narrating the European Conquest of Native America (1997), outlined a robust revisionist histor-
iographic tradition that emerged out of Turner’s emphasis on frontier processes. In addition to
highlighting a tradition of US frontier historiography “at odds with the triumphalist frontier
tales that New Regionalists rightly criticize”, Klein criticized the New Western History for (poten-
tially) foreclosing the opportunity to contextualize the history of the US West within transnational
and interdisciplinary frameworks. “New Western Regionalists”, Klein argued, “have written some
wonderful histories, but they have chained them to a geographic abstraction created by western
historians”:
They would also segregate the field from all the exciting frontier history now in the works, at a time
when even Shakespearean scholars like [Stephen] Greenblatt are scurrying to get in on the action.
Worse, they would separate the West from the imperial processes that placed it at the center of national
memory and joined it to transnational global histories. And they propose that replacing “frontier” with
“West,” historically the key word of Orientalism, will eliminate ethnocentrism from our scholarly dis-
course! It is more than faintly ironic that we arrived at this parochial position out of a desire to recon-
nect the specialty to larger dialogues about race, class, gender, and sexuality.50
Arguing against the turn toward “New Western Regionalism”, Klein imagined an alternative
agenda, a “postwestern” history that optimistically imagines a return to the big frontier tales of
the European occupation of Native America as a central event in our past, and a future in
which histories set in California or (dare we say it) Sonora are as ‘American’ as those set in Mas-
sachusetts and Virginia.51
Klein’s over-the-top rhetoric marked something of a high (or low) point in the “process
versus region” debates that dominated Western historical discourse in the 1990s. These con-
versations, however, acrimonious as they were, resolved themselves with an uneasy détente
rather than any sort of decisive paradigm shift. In her 2000 president’s address to the
Western Historical Association entitled “Going West and Ending up Global”, Limerick
offered something of an olive branch to Klein and her other critics by pointing out that
the aim of New Western History was to “contribute to the cause of freeing the history of
the American West from the grip of American exceptionalism and restoring it to a position
of significance in the global history of European expansion”, but admitted that that aim was
lost, to a certain extent, amidst “the whole vexing, endless fray over the ‘frontier.’” Her aver-
sion to the word, she explained, was rooted in her concern “that ‘frontier’ ran the risk of
confirming the claims of exceptionalism”, and that her attempt to “substitute the word ‘con-
quest’ … ended up giving some people the impression that I was attempting to restrict their
First Amendment right to use the f-word”.52
Limerick thus suggests that her initial opposi-
tion to frontier historiography was rhetorical rather than categorical before concluding her
address with a call for a new generation of western historians willing to develop comparative
studies of colonialism and conquest.
In the decade since Limerick’s address, her dismissal of the arguments over the term frontier
as being semantic rather than substantive seems to have resonated with many younger scholars.
In Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War, his Bancroft Prize-winning monograph on
the Ludlow Massacre and the rise of the coal industry in Colorado, Thomas Andrews relegated
his definition of frontier (a term he uses as an occasional descriptor rather than as a structuring
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12. concept) to a footnote in which he tersely states, “I define the frontier as a zone of intercultural
contact and conflict, not, with Frederick Jackson Turner, as the dividing line between civiliza-
tion and savagery”.53
If contemporary Western historians share in Limerick’s fatigue regarding
definitional debates, they have not, with a handful of notable exceptions – Margaret Jacobs’
own Bancroft Prize-winning White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism,
and the Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940
(2009) being one – demonstrated a similar enthusiasm for comparative transnational
history.54
Twenty-first-century Western history has certainly gone transnational and global,
but not quite in the fashion that either Klein or Limerick foresaw. In some of the most cele-
brated recent Western histories narrating some aspects of settler “contact and conflict” with
indigenous societies, the transnational emerges not through comparative history, but through
an examination of the multiple ways in which the American West is a region that has been
both shaped and perforated by multiple and conflicting migrations, cultures, conquests, and
sovereignties.
The post-New Western frontier: the Southwest and borderlands historiography
One of the primary ways the history of the Western US has been transformed by “transnationa-
lization” is through an embrace of the historiographic tradition of borderlands scholarship. While
borderlands scholars were affected by the frontier debates precipitated by New Western History,
they were largely unmoved by New Western History’s case for Western American regionalism. In
fact, in recent years it has been to the borderlands that the Western historians have turned for ways
out of not only the restrictive east-to-west axis of the frontier thesis (the paradigm that still dom-
inates US history textbooks to this day), but also for a way out of the region-process dichotomy
that many by the mid-1990s had identified as the new Scylla and Charybdis of the field.55
To be
sure, New Western History had a profound impact on the field of Western history. Its attention to
the study of “race, environment, women and gender, [and] urban issues,” as well as its encourage-
ment of “the adoption of comparative frameworks,” certainly moved the field well “beyond the
easy acceptance of notions of national and regional exceptionalism.”56
Still, perhaps the most
salient development since the end of the debates over New Western History in the 1990s has
been the manner in which western historians have incorporated – geographically and historiogra-
phically – the work and insights of borderlands scholars into their narratives of U.S. history and
expansion.
This is not surprising given the fact that borderlands scholarship, going back to Herbert
Eugene Bolton’s call in the 1930s for comparative histories that could narrate “The Epic of
Greater America,” have generally developed more fluid and flexible understandings of frontier
processes and places.57
In 1992, at the height of the debates over New Western History and
the frontier thesis, the late David J. Weber published his landmark study of Spanish colonization
of North America titled The Spanish Frontier in North America. In The Spanish Frontier, Weber
offered an expansive definition of the frontier, one surprisingly similar to White’s middle ground
and the earlier reconfiguration of the frontier thesis developed by Howard R. Lamar and Leonard
Thompson, who theorized the frontier “not as a boundary or line, but as a territory or zone of inter-
penetration between two previously distinct societies”.58
Spain’s North American frontier was,
Weber argued, a “process of expansion and contraction” that gave “shape to the place that
Spain regarded as its North American frontier … or its multiple North American frontiers”.59
The expansion of Spanish “frontier settlements”, Weber argued, “set into motion several simul-
taneous frontier processes, including urbanization, agriculture, ranching, and commerce”.60
The changing tides and fortunes of Spanish colonization efforts, which sometimes resulted in ter-
ritorial contraction, were the consequence of Spanish intrusion into a multifarious,
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13. multidirectional frontier shaped by colonial–indigenous, indigenous–indigenous, and colonial–
colonial contact, exchange, and conflict. For Weber, the frontier was a useful analytic in that it
revealed “contention and transformation” relating to land and resources.61
Weber’s focus on fron-
tier spaces as seedbeds of historical change is, Weber happily admits, fundamentally Turnerian,
insofar as the frontier thesis explains how frontier societies come to differ “from their respective
metropoli [sic]” due to their location “at those edges where cultures come into contact, friction,
and cross-fertilization transform[s] local peoples and institutions”.62
Less Turnerian, though, is
Weber’s proposition that there were multiple Spanish frontiers and that every frontier was a
meeting ground of multiple cultures – a borderland composed of strata or sub-frontiers – embody-
ing heterogeneous migrations and conquests that cannot be distilled into reductive binaries of
savagery and civilization, colonizer and colonized, or even indigene and settler.
Contemporaneously with the work of Weber, the field of borderlands studies was also being
transformed by the interventions of Chicana/o scholars and activists who reimagined la frontera
as a generative site of an oppositional, mestisaje subjectivity. Gloria E. Anzaldúa’s genre-bending
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987) stands as perhaps the most influential text in
this effort to reconceptualize the interstices of borderland and frontier across both space and time.
In Borderlands/La Frontera (itself a generic hybrid of poetry as well as fictional and non-fictional
prose), Anzaldúa – who was a bilingual queer woman from a family of migrant agricultural
workers with one foot in the academic world and another in the world of activist art – situated
the borderlands in opposition to la frontera. The borderlands are a real as well as metaphoric
space of mobility, hybridity, and non-normative identity repeatedly torn asunder by la frontera,
the borders of the nation-state which aim to impose a conceptual as well as spatial binary of
order and control over the borderlands.63
For Anzaldúa, mestisaje border culture is defined by
illicit mobility and hybrid subjectivities that constantly contest state violence and elude normative
subjectivities through its transgression of la frontera. As she memorably characterizes the mes-
tiza’s relationship to the borderlands, “this is her home, this thin edge of barbed wire”.64
In The Frontiers of The Historical Imagination, Kerwin Klein notes that the rhetoric of
Chicana/o nationalism is often split into two distinct but inter-related directions. There is, on
the one hand, an indigenist claim that is “the frontier romance in revolt: spirit, consciousness, heri-
tage, blood, power, destiny, all rooted in the soil, the homeland described in Aztec tradition as
Aztlán, the place of origin”; and, on the other hand, narratives that recognize that “Mexicano
culture could not pretend to an uninterrupted holism”, and that explore, in Anzaldúa’s words,
how “the new mestiza copes” with the plural nature of her heritage “by developing a tolerance
for contradictions, a tolerance for ambiguity … [and] a plural personality”.65
Noting Anzaldúa’s
commitment to a “composite” or hybrid identity, Klein draws a provocative parallel between
Anzaldúa and Turner. As he puts it:
Pluralistic experience demands pluralistic forms, but pluralism was not chaos, and Anzaldúa’s narra-
tive description of the new mestizo consciousness emplotted an ascending dialectic … We have seen
history as dialectic before, and while Anzaldúa scarcely reproduced the historical imagination of a
Frederic Jackson Turner or [mid-century Tejano American studies scholar] Americo Paredes, in
some ways the book lies closer to those traditions than to the works dominating the canon of moder-
nist and postmodern literature … For Anzaldúa this was history, not an ironic parody … “The future
will belong to the Mestiza,” because “it depends on the straddling of two or more cultures”.66
However tenuous the parallels between “the fluidity of American life” on Turner’s frontier and the
plural hybridity of Anzaldúa’s borderlands, the interventions of Ramon A. Gutiérrez, José David
Saldívar, James F. Brooks, and other scholars of the Southwestern borderlands had a similar effect
to Turner, insofar as they decisively drew the attention of US scholars across disciplines in the
humanities to a new region and problematic of US history and culture.67
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14. Western historians were no exception: Western and borderlands historians now enjoy a broad
and productive scholarly exchange. One early landmark effort to synthesize Turnerian frontier
historiography, Southwestern borderlands scholarship, and White’s notion of the middle
ground came late in the 1990s with Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron’s “From Borderlands
to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History”
(1999). Published just as the embers of the New Western History debates were passing from
glowing orange to dying pink, and just as borderlands historiography was about to go through
a prodigious period of growth, “From Borderlands to Borders” expanded on Aron’s critique of
New Western History by building on both Turner’s attention to frontier periodization and border-
lands scholarship’s focus on the contingent nature of power and cultural exchange. Stressing
Bolton’s characterization of New Spain as a theater of European competition and rivalry that
structured postcolonial America and its various “transitions from colonies to nation-states”,
Adelman and Aron inverted what up to that point had been standard usage of “frontier” and “bor-
derland” by defining frontier as a “borderless” land – a “meeting place of peoples in which geo-
graphic and cultural borders were not clearly defined” (original italic) – and borderlands simply as
“the contested boundaries between colonial domains”.68
Stressing change over time as opposed to
“cross-cultural mixing, social fluidity … [and] the creation of syncretic formations” that sideline
“profound changes in favor of continuity”, Adelman and Aron aimed to synthesize frontier and bor-
derlands studies intoa broad-based methodology that could explain how “the shiftfrom inter-imper-
ial struggle to international coexistence turned borderlands into bordered lands” (original italics);
how, to put it another way, “colonial borderlands gave way to national borders” and “fluid and
‘inclusive’ intercultural frontiers yielded to hardened and more ‘exclusive’ hierarchies”.69
Focusing on Native agency, the far-reaching and unintended consequences of colonialism,
and the historical contingencies of nation-building projects in the Southwestern borderlands, a
number of recent histories both challenge and work through the various elements of Adelman
and Aron’s borderlands-to-bordered lands thesis. These histories have largely resisted framing
themselves within the meta-narrative of settler conquest that predominates in historical narratives
as disparate as Limerick’s and Wolfe’s. As historians Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett
recently put it, borderlands histories have instead privileged processes of “economic exchange,
cultural mixing, and political contestation at the edges of empires, nations, and world
systems”, and places where human interactions are defined by “spatial mobility, situational iden-
tity, local contingency, and the ambiguities of power”.70
One work that brilliantly exemplifies this formulation is Brian DeLay’s War of a Thousand
Deserts: Indian Raids and the US–Mexican War (2008). Delay convincingly demonstrates the
centrality of various non-state actors – the Comanche and Apache Indians in particular – to US
territorial expansion and Mexican nation-building efforts in its beleaguered northern states
prior to the US–Mexican War of 1846–1848. In the early decades of their national independence,
the USA and Mexican nation-states were bordered polities in name only. Straddling much of the
southern Great Plains of modern Oklahoma and Texas was La Comanchería, the home range of
the Comanche Indians, a powerful organization of nomadic pastoralists, as well as numerous
other Indian peoples. In the 1830s, the Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, and others conducted a
decade-and-a-half-long series of raids deep into northern Mexico that resulted in the depopulation
and abandonment of numerous Mexican towns and settlements along that nation’s northern fron-
tier. These raids did more than frustrate Mexico City’s plans for its northern border and territories;
they created, in DeLay’s words, a “vast theater of hatred, terror, and staggering loss for indepen-
dent Indians and Mexicans alike”.71
This “vast theater of hatred”, DeLay demonstrates, greatly
“influenced the course and outcome” of the US–Mexican War, the war that concluded with
Mexico ceding more than a half of its territory to the USA.72
The story of “the Mexican
Cession” is thus really the story of “a forgotten nexus” between state actors and non-state
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15. actors; one, moreover, where non-state actors prove to be utterly central to the histories of the two
contemporary nation-states. DeLay’s story, then, is one of how a frontier borderland became a
bordered land not so much through “the struggles of native peoples to resist, cope with, and
even profit from the activities of Europeans and their descendents”, but rather “the efforts of Mex-
icans and Americans to resist, cope with, and sometimes profit from the activities of Indians”.73
Delay’s work therefore portrays the emergence of the contemporary state formations that now
define the “bordered lands” of the US–Mexican border not as products of transnational settler
conquest, but rather the product of the violent struggles of specific communities of settlers and
indigenous peoples (and even mixed coalitions of both) that were pitted against each other in a
struggle that had more to do with the contingencies of local environmental and economic con-
ditions than global trends.
In The Comanche Empire (2008), Pekka Hämäläinen makes a series of similar claims.
Whereas DeLay sees the Comanche as one of many (though, the most powerful to be sure)
Indian peoples to challenge the dominance of North America’s two fledgling nation-states, Hämä-
läinen argues not for indigenous agency but rather for indigenous empire. A detailed history that
examines nearly every aspect of Comanche political ecology on the southern Great Plains – a
region spanning New Spain to the south and southwest and the Louisiana territory to the north
and east – during the mid-eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, The Comanche Empire expli-
citly smoothes over many of the contingencies foregrounded by DeLay’s “forgotten nexus” of
US–Mexican-Indian history. For Hämäläinen, the story is rather simple: where Mexico and the
USA were continental nations or empires in name only, La Comanchería was an empire in every-
thing but name. The Comanche empire might not have conformed to European modes imperial
governance – for instance, it did not have “a rigid structure held together by a single central auth-
ority, nor was it an entity that could be displayed on a map” – but it was nonetheless a “deeply
hierarchical and integrated intersocietal order that was unmistakably imperial in shape, scope,
and substance”.74
In Hämäläinen’s formulation, the Southwestern borderlands of the mid-eight-
eenth to mid-nineteenth century were not defined by a middle ground or a similar diffusion of
power between Indians and Euro-American colonists. Additionally, “raiding, enslaving, ethnic
absorption, and … exchange” (the dominant modes of economic behavior at the time) did not
benefit all indigenous peoples equally. On the contrary, the “process toward inequality [among
American Indians] was a cumulative one” – one that resulted in the Comanche achieving the
status of regional hegemon.75
The borderlands of the Comanche era, then, were defined by
stark asymmetries of power, only in reverse of those we typically associate with modern colonial
spaces. The Comanche, Hämäläinen argues, used the terms and material of Spanish colonization
to establish a political order that eclipsed their allies and enemies, both Indian and European,
alike.76
Both in terms of historical content and representational strategy, Karl Jacoby’s Shadows at
Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History (2008) stands as a particularly
dramatic example of borderlands scholarship’s focus on contingency, competition, and
cooperation, and thus as a compelling counterpoint to the frontier binary paradigm at work
in settler colonial studies. A fractured narrative history of the Camp Grant Massacre of
1871, Shadows at Dawn investigates how a coalition of white Americans, Tohno O’odham
natives, and Mexicans came together to execute the mass-murder of nearly 150 Apache
men, women, and children. Jacoby deftly moves between American, Mexican, Tohno
O’odham, and Apache archives in narrating a tragedy that hitherto had been largely superseded
in the American national imaginary by the massacre of Northern Plains Indians by US Cavalry
at Bear River in 1863 and Wounded Knee in 1890. The complex cross-cultural nature of the
Camp Grant Massacre has made it difficult to assimilate into paradigms of US national histor-
iography, and likewise poses an equal challenge to transnational settler colonial paradigms that
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16. would imagine the settler-indigenous frontier as a zone of binary competing sovereignties. In
response to this dilemma, however, Jacoby deploys an extreme representational strategy in
recounting the complexities of the event. Instead of interweaving his work in the four archives
into a single narrative, he instead presents each archive separately in four discrete narratives of
the massacre, each of which recounts the massacre from the perspective of the four cultural
communities involved. Jacoby contends that this strategy is necessary because “we cannot
confine ourselves to a single one of these narratives without enacting yet another form of his-
torical violence: the suppression of the past’s multiple meanings”.77
Jacoby’s claim regarding the epistemological violence of synthetic history situates his rep-
resentation of the history of Native genocide as something of a direct antithesis to Wolfe’s.
Wolfe’s history of “the logic of elimination” refuses to “categorize Indigenous strategies of resist-
ance, survival or anything else”, because he reads such “[c]laims to authority over indigenous dis-
course made from within the settler-colonial academy” as “necessarily participat[ing] in the
continuing usurpation of indigenous space”.78
Wolfe’s one-sided account, of course, is put in
the service of a harsh indictment of the contemporary settler state. Jacoby, on the other hand,
works to recuperate indigenous histories as hermetic narratives, even narrating the origin
stories of the Tohno O’odham and Apache peoples, but undertakes this representation in the
spirit of a history that imagines the frontier moment, narrated as it has been through a multiplicity
of cultural and political communities, as an alterity that is impossible to refract into a critical nar-
rative that could be brought to bear on the present.79
The stark contrast of Wolfe and Jacoby’s representational modes neatly dramatizes the ques-
tions that we hope the future dialog between transnational settler colonial studies and Western
American studies will explore. On the one hand, how can we think about the settler indigenous
binary in a frontier as complex as that described by Jacoby? In particular, how can we theorize the
place of former subjects of nation-states with their own distinct modes of indigenous oppression,
such as Mexico, within the context of the conflict between Anglo settlers and indigenous peoples?
Can the violent and asymmetric relationships between indigenous peoples be subsumed within an
historical narrative that privileges a settler-indigenous binary without engaging with a “form of
historical violence”?
On the other hand, contemporary borderlands and Western history scholarship surely stand to
gain from a consideration of Wolfe’s question and injunction to scholars of settler colonialism
concerned with “writing in the agency of the subaltern”. As Wolfe has observed:
A question that generally goes resoundingly unasked in this connection is, Writing into what? In the
settler colonial contest, the question answers itself: the ideal of writing agency is a contradiction in
terms. … It follows, therefore, that what needs to be written in is not the agency of the colonized
but the total context of inscription.80
Do not interpretive frames like Jacoby’s, that privilege complexity, contingency, and historical
specificity over the “total context” of settler invasion and indigenous dispossession, risk reprodu-
cing the “strategic pluralism” that continues to thwart indigenous peoples’ claims to
sovereignty?81
There are scholars of the Southwestern borderlands that have taken a notably different tack
than the one exemplified by the work of DeLay, Hämäläinen, and Jacoby, and in so doing
suggest some potential trajectories for future dialog between borderlands studies and transnational
settler colonial studies. In a recent review essay of War of a Thousand Deserts, historian Jared
Farmer identified Ned Blackhawk as an historian “working against the scholarly current” in bor-
derlands studies insofar as he does not portray Indian violence in the Southwest as comparable to
settler violence, but rather suggests that Indian violence during the frontier period was a chaotic
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17. effect produced by the violence of settler invasion.82
The work Farmer refers to here is Black-
hawk’s Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006), an intri-
cate history of the socio-politics of empire- and nation-building in the Great Basin (the
mountainous desert region most closely associated with the states of Utah and Nevada). Black-
hawk’s focus is the bloody and tortured history of Spanish–Indian and US–Indian relations
and the reverberative effects of imperial contact and violence on Indian communities between
the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. So central is violence to the work, Blackhawk flatly
states in the book’s introduction that violence serves as “both a subject and a method” throughout
the work.83
By focusing on the Great Basin, a region closely tied to but geographically distinct
from New Mexico and Texas (the states or regions typically studied by borderlands scholars),
Blackhawk is able to trace the deleterious effects of colonization – particularly slave and livestock
raiding and trading – as they radiate outward beyond the boundaries of the colonial borderlands.
In Blackhawk’s words, “The shifting relations of violence that remade Native worlds throughout
the early West did so largely outside of colonial settlements and the purview of authorities”.84
For
Blackhawk, violence was so pervasive that it came to “organize the region’s nascent economies,
settlements, and polities”.85
Much like DeLay, Blackhawk situates American incorporation of the
Great Basin in the context of antecedent political economies of violence. As Blackhawk puts it,
“violence both predated and became intrinsic to American expansion”.86
Echoing Klein’s call for
“big frontier tales of the European occupation of Native America”, and following Turner in his
contention that “American expansion is the foundational experience of American history”, Black-
hawk also incorporates Bolton’s call for an inter-regional history by tying the conditions of Amer-
ican expansion to the colonial regimes that preceded it, in this case Spain and Mexico. European
expansion and contact is the vector not only for “the violent deformations of Native communities”
but also for situating “indigenous pasts within the broader field of European global expansion”.87
In many respects, then, Blackhawk’s conception of frontier violence, which clearly distinguishes
between colonizer and indigene, has more in common with Wolfe’s embrace of frontier binaries
than it does with his fellow borderlands scholars’ conception of a borderlands history in which
fluidity, contingency, and complexity trump settler conquest as organizing narrative principles.
At the same time, by tracing the heterogeneous effects of settler invasion beyond the frontier,
understood as a spatial site of contact or a singular conflict, Blackhawk’s method engages with
the complexities of frontier violence in a way that exceeds the sometimes Manichean lens of
settler colonial studies.
Recent work by literary scholar Ben V. Olguin in the Chicana/o archive, an area of research
that thus far has had little exchange with transnational settler colonial studies, offers a final
example of how settler colonial studies might impact borderlands scholarship. In his provoca-
tively titled “Caballeros and Indians: Mexican American Whiteness, Hegemonic Mestisaje, and
Ambivalent Indigeneity in Proto-Chicana/o Autobiographical Discourse, 1858–2008” (2013),
Olguin reads Chicana/o studies through settler colonial frameworks to reconsider the origins of
Chicana/o identity. Focusing on early Tejana/o autobiography, Olguin identifies the origins of
Chicana/o identity as being at least partially settler colonial in orientation. Olguin critiques
early Chicana/o writers like Américo Paredes and Anzaldúa for trading in “the cultural capital
of a model of indigeneity overdetermined as always already subaltern”.88
For Olguin, the expand-
ing scholarly literature on borderlands history and culture that seeks to “map interstitial and Third
Space modalities performed through an infinite number of intersections and negotiations” is
haunted by the “unacknowledged specter” of a nostalgic performance of indigenismo that risks
effacing the claims of specific indigenous groups.89
Olguin contrasts these contemporary “indi-
genist” performances with nineteenth- and twentieth-century Tejano autobiographies that
contain a troubling triangulation: one in which Tejano identity is shaped by Tejanos’ participation
in colonial frontier violence “at the constitutive moment of cultural nationalist constructions of
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18. Mexican American and Chicana/o identity as inherently oppositional to white American settler
colonialism”.90
By gesturing toward this contradiction, Olguin does not seek to condemn all articulations of
Chicana/o nationalism as settler colonial, but rather to effect an “expanded mapping of the indi-
genous/indigenist aspects of Chicana/o subjectivity” in order to acknowledge the troubling role
settler colonial processes played in the formation of that subjectivity.91
This analysis of the
role of violent frontier processes and their representation played in forming the complexities
and contradictions of contemporary identity in the borderlands stands as one example of the
rich potential for a continuing conversation between scholars of settler colonial studies and
those of the history and culture of North America.
The significance of the frontier in an age of transnational history: roundtable and
commentary
The scholars represented in this roundtable are all pioneers (to use a particularly inapt metaphor)
in the effort to put the incisive critical narratives of transnational settler colonial and indigenous
studies into conversation with those that aim to present the complexities of the USA’s “settler
empire”, to use contributor Aziz Rana’s compelling description of the “post-frontier” form of
US hegemony.92
While not all of them are immediately engaged with the historiographic geneal-
ogy outlined above – indeed, they work in a remarkably diverse range of disciplines, ranging from
American Indian studies, gender studies, history, indigenous studies, legal history, literary studies
– all of them have made incisive interventions in our understanding of the past and present of the
settler invasion of indigenous societies, challenging and extending our understanding of frontier
processes.
Trained as a literary scholar, Jodi Byrd (American Indian Studies and English, University of
Illinois, Urbana) has made a major impact on interdisciplinary American Indian studies and trans-
national settler colonial studies with her first monograph, The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Cri-
tiques of Colonialism (2011). In her contribution to the roundtable, she addresses head-on the
limitations of the “frontier binaries” that inform settler colonial studies. Byrd argues that while
“the dialectical binaries produced through the European logics of colonialism provide scholars
the means to draw the sometimes necessarily hard Manichean differentiations that separate
settler from native”, ultimately these binaries reflect the continuing dependence of settler colonial
studies on Hegelian (and Eurocentric) paradigms of thought. Byrd suggests that the alternative to
the equally unappealing options presented by a Manichean understanding of the settler/indigen-
ous binary and the “strategic pluralism” of liberal multiculturalism lies in a future conversation
that would privilege indigenous ontologies and epistemologies “that have the priority, the
right, and the responsibility to determine the frames of debate”. Such a shift, Byrd concludes,
would allow us to see that “U.S. empire propagates itself at the site of a transposable Indianness
rather than through a forever relocatable frontier”.
Margaret Jacobs (History, University of Nebraska—Lincoln) is perhaps the most notable
scholar who has emerged from the field of Western American history to engage with transnational
colonial studies, and her Bancroft Prize-winning White Mother to A Dark Race: Settler Coloni-
alism, Materialism, and The Removal of Indigenous Children in The American West and Austra-
lia, 1880–1940 (2009) stands as one of the most notable comparative Western history
monographs since Lamar and Thompson’s comparative study of the USA and South Africa.
Jacobs’ contribution to the roundtable addresses first the origins of her work on the abduction
of Australian Indigenous and American Indian children, how her comparative work opened up
for her a new perspective on history, and concludes with an expansive overview of the questions
about specific historical phenomena and broader historiographic issues toward which the
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19. burgeoning conversation between Western American history and settler colonial studies might
address itself.
Trained as an historian of South Africa, Laura Mitchell (History, University of California,
Irvine) has taught and published on African, colonial, and world histories. Her book, Belongings:
Property, Family, and Identity in Colonial South Africa (2009), for instance, studies the connec-
tions between land tenure, household formation, and frontier conflict. Her contribution here,
which draws from her current research into art created by Africans, settlers, and visitors in
South Africa during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, looks at the material culture of
settler colonial South Africa, and the settler colonial frontier more generally. Focusing on four
objects from the nineteenth-century Western Cape region, Mitchell poses compelling questions
about how South African settlers related to the cultures of indigenous peoples, exogenous
others, the colonizing metropole, and the settler colony itself. Putting this exploration of the
Cape Colony’s material culture into conversation with both US frontier historiography and
broader conversations regarding the history of colonialism globally, Mitchell makes a compelling
case for the import and role that an attunement to alternative archives – such as the household
items she carefully considers in her paper – can play in shaping broader theoretical discussions
regarding settler colonial culture.
Aziz Rana (Law School, Cornell University) is a legal historian whose 2010 monograph The
Two Faces of American Freedom (2010) has had a wide-reaching impact on how scholars across a
variety of disciplines view the relationship between US jurisprudence and the status of the USA as
a settler society. In his contribution, Rana argues that early violent conflicts between European
settlers and American Indians provided the young US nation-state with “key political and legal
scripts concerning which political communities can claim full sovereignty as well as who
rightly enjoys meaningful protections during wartime”, and that these scripts continue to
inform the contemporary US national security state. Through a deft reading of the infamous
decisions of the Marshall Court regarding Indian title and sovereignty in Johnson v. M’Intosh
(1823), Rana outlines how US juridical discourse grounds its understanding of what constitutes
a “just war” in such early justifications of settler conquest. Rana extends this argument to inter-
national law, arguing that similar settler colonial juridical genealogies inform the contemporary
category of the “unlawful combatant” in international humanitarian law.
Mark Rifkin (English, University of North Carolina at Greensboro) is another scholar trained
in US literary studies who has branched out into interdisciplinary indigenous and settler colonial
studies, and has published three transformative monographs in these fields: Manifesting America:
The Imperial Construction of U.S. National Space (2009), When Did Indians Become Straight?
Kinship, the History of Sexuality, and Native Sovereignty (2011), and The Erotics of Sovereignty:
Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination (2012). These last two titles have been
instrumental in facilitating the growing exchange between indigenous studies and queer studies
regarding the central role of heteronormative kinship structures played in the imposition of
settler sovereignty. In his contribution to the roundtable, Rifkin thinks through the concept of
the frontier via Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of exception, arguing that the frontier
is an extra-juridical concept that is better understood as a “settler state of feeling” that not only
constructs indigenous peoples as “bare life” at the threshold of the settler state, but also imagines
a space “in which settler subjects can envision a kind of space beyond the political authority of the
state but yet not within that of another state or polity”. Thus, the frontier stands as a “state of
feeling that reflects the settler society’s deepest contradictions about its ostensible commitment
to constitutionalism”.
Lastly, we are very pleased to conclude this roundtable with commentary by John Mack Far-
agher, Howard R. Lamar Professor of History at Yale University. In addition to serving as director
of the Howard R. Lamar Center for the Study of Frontiers and Borders, Faragher is author and
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20. editor of numerous books and articles on the frontier history of North America, including Women
and Men on the Overland Trail (1979); Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance
of the Frontier in American History” and Other Essays (1994); A Great and Noble Scheme: The
Tragic Story of the Expulsion of the French Acadians from their American Homeland (2005); and
Frontiers: A Short History of the American West (2007), with Robert V. Hine. His current research
examines the problem of violence and justice in nineteenth-century frontier Los Angeles, Califor-
nia. Faragher’s comments here range across the contours of his own work as well as the historio-
graphic trajectories of both Western history and settler colonial studies. By situating North
America and the USA as the original laboratory for modern practices of settler colonialism, Far-
agher opens a number of channels of discussion and debate between scholars of North America
and transnational settler colonial studies, including the observation that “settler colonialism posits
a ternary [rather than binary] model of relations among metropole elites, colonial settlers, and
aboriginal peoples” (a triangulation utterly vital to understanding early US history); but also sig-
nificant differences as well, including two case studies – the native Lenni Lenape people of the
Delaware Valley and the French settler colony of Acadia – that demonstrate that not all settler
projects are predicated (at least initially) on the logic of elimination. Faragher ends his essay
with a call for more local and comparative studies of settler projects over time.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the following for all their support and encouragement in helping make this
roundtable possible: William Deverell, John Mack Faragher, William Handley, David Igler, Lorenzo Vera-
cini, Patrick Wolfe, the staff of the Huntington Library, as well as all the scholars who participated in the
symposium of the same name.
Notes
1. Accompanying Turner on this particular outing were (among others) his wife Mae, his daugher
Dorothy, and the family of C.R. Van Hise (1857–1918), professor of geology and president of the Uni-
veristy of Wisconsin. The families were friends and neighbors in Madison and together made a similar
canoe trip across the same region the prior summer. See Ray Allen Billington, Frederick Jackson
Turner: Historian, Scholar, Teacher (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 236.
2. Frederick Jackson Turner, ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’, in The Frontier in
American History, ed. Frederick Jackson Turner (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920), 4.
3. The literature on the North American fur trade is voluminous. Richard White’s The Middle Ground:
Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1991) is perhaps the most influential study of the trade’s pre-national phase. For a brief
but highly readable account of French fur traders, and the fur trade’s global dimensions and importance
in Canada, see Timothy Brook, Vermeer’s Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global
World (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008), 26–53. For a history of the fur trade during the era of the
nation-state that situates the fur trade as transcending state affiliations at the dawn of the nineteenth
century, but as circumscribed by them five decades later, see Anne F. Hyde, Empires, Nations, and
Families: A New History of the American West, 1800–1860 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
2011).
4. There can be little doubt that Turner was quite conscious of the historical antecedents of his holiday
and that his adventure was something of an historical reenactment. Ever the student of frontier
society and culture, Turner identified the fur trade as one of the five key economies – along with
fishing, farming, ranching, and mining – of the American frontier. See Turner, Frontier in American
History, 12.
5. For a study of voyageur history and culture, as well as its importance to Canadian national identity, see
Carolyn Podruchny, Making the Voyageur World: Travelers and Traders in the North American Fur
Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006).
6. See the map of the pays d’en haut in White, Middle Ground, xii–iii.
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21. 7. The program of the event covered the state of the frontier in current US Western historiography; literary
studies of the American West and the frontier; and the state of the frontier in settler colonial studies and
indigenous studies. Audio files of a majority of the event can be accessed through iTunesU© under the
title “The Significance of the Frontier in an Age of Transnational History”, or through the iTunes
website at https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/significance-frontier-in-age/id542709249
8. For a brief overview of Turner’s frontier thesis, its critics, and its influence on US historiography,
see John Mack Faragher, ‘Afterword: The Significance of the Frontier in American Historiography’,
in Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History”
and Other Essays, ed. Frederick Jackson Turner and John Mack Faragher (New York: Henry
Holt and Company, 1994), 225–41. For an extended analysis of Turner and his continued usefulness
to Western American historiography, see William Cronon, ‘Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier:
The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner’, Western Historical Quarterly 18, no. 2 (April 1987):
157–76.
9. For discussions of how Turner refashioned the meaning and usage of the word “frontier” in the USA,
see Kerwin Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native
America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 18–22; and John
T. Juricek, ‘American Usage of the Word “Frontier” from Colonial Times to Frederick Jackson
Turner’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 110, no. 1 (February 1966): 10–34.
For a contrary account, one that situates Turner’s use of frontier tropes as being highly conventional
rather than innovative, see Richard White, ‘Frederick Jackson Turner and Buffalo Bill’, in The Frontier
in American Culture, ed. James R. Grossman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1994), 12–26.
10. Turner, Frontier in American History, 3.
11. William Handley, Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West (New York: Cam-
bridge University Press, 2002), 63.
12. See Robert P. Porter, Henry Gannett, and William C. Hunt, ‘Progress of the Nation’, in Report on
Population of the United States at the Eleventh Census: 1890, Part I, by Office of the Census
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895), xvii. For a study of “Progress of the Nation”
and its influence on Turner, see Robert E. Lang, Deborah Epstein Popper, and Frank J. Popper, ‘“Pro-
gress of the Nation”: The Settlement History of the Enduring Frontier’, Western Historical Quarterly
26, no. 3 (Autumn 1995): 289–307.
13. Porter, Gannet, and Hunt, Report on Population of the United States, xxxiv.
14. Turner, Frontier in American History, 38.
15. Ibid., 1.
16. Ibid., 2.
17. Ibid., 3–4.
18. Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics
of an Ethnographic Event (London: Cassell, 1999), 165.
19. See Ronald Lawson, ‘Towards Demythologizing the ‘Australian Legend’: Turner’s Frontier Thesis and
the Australian Experience’, Journal of Social History 13, no. 4 (Summer 1980): 577–87, for a discus-
sion of the influence of Turner’s frontier thesis on the work of Russell Ward and the mid-century
debates over Ward’s The Australian Legend, 2nd ed. (1958; Melbourne: Oxford University Press,
1966).
20. Henry Reynolds, The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of
Australia (1981; Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006), 7.
21. Wolfe, Settler Colonialism, 165.
22. Ibid., 168.
23. Ibid.
24. Ibid., 165.
25. We build off this aspect of Wolfe’s writing on the settler representations of the frontier in an argu-
ment about Western genre films and television programs in Erik Altenbernd and Alex Trimble
Young, ‘A Terrible Beauty: Settler Sovereignty and the State of Exception in the Home Box
Office’s Deadwood’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 1 (2013): 27–48. It has also productively
been explored in David Lloyd, ‘Settler Colonialism and the State of Exception: The Example of
Palestine/Israel’, Settler Colonial Studies 2, no. 1 (2012): 59–80, and Mark Rifkin, ‘Indigenizing
Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the “Peculiar” Status of Native Peoples’, Cultural Cri-
tique 73 (Fall 2009): 88–124.
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22. 26. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native’, Journal of Genocide Research
8, no. 4 (2006): 392.
27. Patrick Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism: A Heretical Introduction’, Settler Colonial Studies 3, no. 3–4
(2013), 257. It is important to note that, contrary to Wolfe’s implication, examples abound of indigen-
ous scholars in the U.S. who do not share Wolfe’s enthusiasm for binary thinking, even insofar as that
thinking relates to the frontier. See, for instance, Louis Owens, Mixedblood Messages: Literature,
Film, Family, Place (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998), 25–6:
Within the language of the colonizer the term “frontier” may indeed, as [Mary Louise] Pratt argues,
be “grounded within a European expansionist perspective” – and thus bear the burden of a dis-
course grounded in genocide, ethnocide, and half a millennium of determined efforts to erase indi-
genous peoples from the Americas. I want to suggest, nonetheless, that when one is looking from
the “other” direction, “frontier” is a particularly apt term for this transcultural zone for precisely the
reason that Pratt cites. Because the term “frontier” carries with it such a heavy burden of colonial
discourse, it can only be conceived of as a space of extreme contestation. Frontier, I would suggest,
is the zone of trickster, a shimmering, always changing zone of multifaceted contact within which
every utterance is challenged and interrogated, all referents put into question. In taking such a pos-
ition, I am arguing for an appropriation and transvaluation of this deadly cliché of colonialism – for
appropriation, inversion, and abrogation of authority are always trickster’s strategies. “Frontier”
stands, I would further argue, in neat opposition to the concept of “territory” as territory is ima-
gined and given form by the colonial enterprise in America. Whereas frontier is always unstable,
multidirectional, hybridized, characterized by heteroglossia, and indeterminate, territory is clearly
mapped, fully imagined as a place of containment, invented to control and subdue the dangerous
potentialities of imagined Indians.
See also Gerald Vizenor, Manifest Manners: Narratives on Post-Indian Survivance (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1994), and Jodi Byrd’s contribution to this volume.
28. Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism’, 257.
29. Ibid., 258; Turner, Frontier in American History, 38.
30. Patrick Wolfe, ‘After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in U.S. Indian Policy’, Settler Colonial
Studies 1, no. 1 (2011): 13. See also, Wolfe, ‘Corpus Nullius: The Exception of Indians and Other
Aliens in U.S. Constitutional Discourse’, Postcolonial Studies 10, no. 2 (2007): 127–51, where
Wolfe analyzes the problems and paradoxes of Native American sovereignty in US law and culture.
Wolfe maintains the notion of a post-frontier era here as well, noting at one point, that “For internalized
Indian wards of the US Government, the constitutional no-man’s land of the post-frontier condition
held a refusal of rights that was without limit or restraint”. Wolfe, 143.
31. Uri Ram, ‘The Colonization Perspective in Israeli Sociology’, in The Israel/Palestine Question: A
Reader, ed. Ilan Pappé (New York: Routledge, 1999), 60.
32. See Baruch Kimmerling, Zionism and Territory: The Socio-Territorial Dimension of Zionist Politics
(Berkeley: Institute of International Studies, University of California, Research Series no. 51,
1983), 1–8; and Gershon Shafir, Land, Labor and the Origins of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,
1882–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), xi.
33. Wolfe, ‘Recuperating Binarism’, 257.
34. Patrick Wolfe, ‘The Limits of Native Title’, Meanjin 59, no. 3 (2000): 133, n. 2.
35. Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West
(New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1987), 25.
36. For an example of the Turner’s unidirectional vision of frontier history, one that locates the frontier
moving westward from the “Atlantic coast”, to the Cumberland Gap in the Appalachian Mountains,
to South Pass in the Rocky Mountains, see Turner, Frontier in American History, 12.
37. Patricia Nelson Limerick, ‘The Trail to Santa Fe: The Unleashing of the Western Public Intellectual’, in
Trails: Toward a New Western History, ed. Patricia Nelson Limerick et al. (Lawrence: University Press
of Kansas, 1991), 69.
38. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 26.
39. Limerick, Legacy of Conquest, 27, 28.
40. Donald Worster, ‘New West, True West: Interpreting the Region’s History’, Western Historical Quar-
terly 18, no. 2 (April 1987): 147, 149.
41. Richard White, “It’s Your Misfortune and None of My Own”: A New History of the American West
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 4, 3.
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23. 42. Ibid., 4.
43. Ibid., 3.
44. White, Middle Ground (1991), 52.
45. In Settler Colonialism: A Theoretical Overview (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Lorenzo Ver-
acini argues forcefully against White and what he calls “middle ground traditions” of historical rep-
resentation. Where Reynolds argued against the empirical applicability of the concept of the
“middle ground” in the Australian context, Veracini argues that the whole perspective is premised
on a sort of nostalgia: As he puts it, “the ‘Middle Ground’ sustains a fantasy of ‘returning’ to a
non-colonial past”, failing to “address the specificities of the settler-colonial situation”. Veracini, 112.
46. For a discussion of the book’s wide-ranging influence, and White’s mixed feelings on the matter, see
Richard White, ‘Preface to the Twentieth Anniversary Edition’, in The Middle Ground: Indians,
Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
(1991; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011), xi–xxiv. See also, Philip J. Deloria, ‘What is
the Middle Ground, Anyway?’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 63, no. 1 (January 2006):
15–22, for nuanced analysis of the book, and the utility and perils of using the “middle ground” as
an analytical concept outside of the pays d’en haut.
47. The descriptors “continuity, convergence, conquest, and complexity” are taken from Patricia Nelson
Limerick’s most recent summation of New Western History’s intellectual intervention. See Patricia
Nelson Limerick, Something in the Soil: Legacies and Reckonings in the New West (New York: W.
W. Norton & Co., 2000), 18–26.
48. Stephen Aron, ‘Lessons in Greater Conquest’, Pacific Historical Review 63, no. 2 (May 1994): 127.
49. William Cronon, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, ‘Becoming West: Toward a New Meaning for Western
History’, in Under and Open Sky: Rethinking America’s Western Past, ed. William Cronon, George
Miles, and Jay Gitlin (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1992), 6, 7.
50. Kerwin Lee Klein, ‘Reclaiming the “F”-Word, or Being and Becoming Postwestern’, Pacific Histori-
cal Review 65, no. 2 (May 1996): 182.
51. Ibid., 214.
52. Patricia Nelson Limerick, ‘Going West and Ending Up Global’, Western Historical Quarterly 32, no. 1
(Spring 2001): 10–11.
53. Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor War (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2008), 296, n. 8.
54. See Margaret Jacobs, White Mother to a Dark Race: Settler Colonialism, Maternalism, and the
Removal of Indigenous Children in the American West and Australia, 1880–1940 (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 2009). See also Jacobs’ comments on the state of western historiography and settler
colonial studies in the roundtable below.
55. For appraisals of, and attempts to move beyond the debates over New Western History, see John Mack
Faragher, ‘The Frontier Trail: Rethinking Turner and Reimagining the American West’, American His-
torical Review 98, no. 1 (February 1993): 106–17; William Deverell, ‘Fighting Words: The Signifi-
cance of the American West in the History of the United States’, Western Historical Quarterly 25,
no. 2 (Summer 1994): 185–206; and David M. Wrobel, ‘Beyond the Frontier-Region Dichotomy’,
Pacific Historical Review 65, no. 3 (August 1996): 401–29.
56. David M. Wrobel, ‘What on Earth Has Happened to New Western History?’, The Historian 66, no. 3
(September 2004): 440.
57. Herbert E. Bolton, ‘The Epic of Greater America’, American Historical Review 38, no. 3 (April 1933):
448–74.
58. Howard Lamar and Leonard Thompson, The Frontier in History: North America and Southern Africa
Compared (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 7. Lamar and Thompson’s notion
of the frontier, it should be noted, is Turnerian in that they conceive of frontiers as temporally deter-
mined (i.e. they open and close) and as dichotomous sites of colonial invasion and struggle. “Usually”,
Lamar and Thompson argue,
one of the societies [of a frontier zone] is indigenous to the region, or at least has occupied it for
many generations; the other is intrusive. The frontier ‘opens’ in a given zone when the first repre-
sentatives of the intrusive society arrive; it ‘closes’ when a single political authority has established
hegemony over the zone. (Lamar and Thompson, 7)
59. Stephen J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven and London: Yale University
Press, 1992), 11–12.
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