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Notes Introduction . Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xiii. . I alternate deliberately between the term “Native American,” generally preferred by Anglo scholars, and “Indian,” which is the word most often used by Indians, especially those of my father-in-law’s generation, in referring to themselves. . Raymond Firth argues that we must take for granted that over the course of time myths have been altered and garbled from their original versions, and he goes so far as to hypothesize that myths exist solely for the purpose of “sociological validation of an existing structure, the projection of the present back into the past” (). Th. P. Van Baaren concurs, arguing that “The occurrence of changes in a myth . . . does not mean that the myth in question is beginning to lose its function and will probably disappear in time; on the contrary, changes in myth occur as a rule to prevent loss of function . . . by changing it in such a way that it can be maintained. By changing it, a myth is adapted to a new situation, armed to withstand a new challenge” (). . If we understand the function of myths to be, as Lauri Honko claims, a symbolic structuring of the world, a system of social markers defining a group’s identity, or as Raymond Firth argues, a sociological validation of existing social structures, norms, and values, then the idea that myths do not exist in or are not generated by modern societies becomes invalid. As the structures, norms, values, and identity of a society change over time, so must its myths, regardless of a society’s degree of “civilization.” As William Bascom points out, whether or not a society recognizes its own myths as myths, or calls them religion (or science) instead, is irrelevant. . Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life, p. –. . Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence, p. . . Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xxv. . For more discussion of the Boone myth, see chapter of this study. . For a further discussion of the ways in which National Fantasy is produced through American literature, see Berlant’s The Anatomy of National Fantasy. . See Garry Wills’s “American Adam” in The New York Review, pp. –. . Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary. . Women of course also fought in the first Gulf War and were captured as well, but none were so publicly or deliberately dramatized as Jessica Lynch. Chapter 1. Foundation of Empire . I use the term “palimpsest” here as Daniel Cooper Alarcón has employed it in The Aztec Palimpsest: “a site where texts have been superimposed onto others in an attempt to displace earlier or competing histories. Significantly, such displacement is never total; the suppressed material often remains legible, however faintly, challenging the dominant text with an alternate version of events” (xiv). . In The Legacy of Conquest, Limerick argues that the association of the Western landscape with “a potent and persistent variety of nationalistic myth” () coupled with the government’s official declaration of the end of the frontier in resulted in a public perception of “a great discontinuity between the frontier past and the Western present” (). The perception has persisted, she claims, in part because of the romanticization of the frontier experience and in part because such a discontinuity allows the grim realities of conquest and colonization to be viewed from a safe remove, as associated with the distant past and unrelated to the present day. . Slotkin argues, for example, that the common and extremely popular folktale regarding Daniel Boone’s first meeting with his future wife Rebecca Boone is a version of this myth. The story claims Boone was hunting deer by torchlight one night when he saw two eyes shining among the trees. He raised his rifle to shoot but at the last moment stayed his hand. What he had believed to be a deer was actually Rebecca, walking at night through the woods. This portion of the story, though widely repeated, may or may not be true. Neither Boone nor Rebecca denied it, though their children, feeling it to be primitive and pagan and thus reflecting badly on their father, who was already well on the way to achieving mythic status, did so vehemently. We do know that Boone married Rebecca soon after their first meeting. Within the bounds of the myth working at the level of popular culture, this act would have been the proper fulfillment of the rules of the sacred marriage, which culminated the hunt and which decreed that woman or deer, married or slain, the hunter must love...