West of the Border: The Multicultural Literature of the Western American Frontiers (review)

West of the Border participates in the ongoing recovery project of Western American literature, expanding the canon to include previously neglected works, especially those written by women and people of color. Noreen Groover Lape insists on the notion of many frontiers and defines them as “contact zones.” Here on these multiple frontiers, “occupied by diverse cultural groups at disparate geographical points,” writers “negotiate their new American identities through cross-cultural dialogues” (3).

The first two chapters are the most ambitious but also conceptually and methodologically problematic. Lape compares The Life and Adventures of James P. Beckwourth (1856), written by a mulatto mountain man and honorary Crow chief, and Life among the Piutes (1883), written by the Native American author Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins. In order to forge connections between an African American and a Native American autobiography—both of which, Lape contends, “intercede between whites and Native Americans” (19)—she minimizes cultural differences, making acultural, critical leaps between texts. Because Beckwourth lived for a time among Indians, Lape wants to claim that he “speaks as a Native American” (25). Because he was African American, she also insists that Beckwourth possessed what W. E. B. DuBois termed “double consciousness” (20), even though (if we’re counting) a man who was part black and part white, and who lived with the Crow, must have possessed at least triple consciousness. Conversely, Lape uses African American critics to explicate Hopkins’s autobiography, without explaining the need to read Native American literature through an African American lens.

In chapter 2, a comparison between Mourning Dove’s Coyote Stories (1933) and John Rollin Ridge’s The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta (1854), Lape refers to the Mexican bandit Murieta as an Indian “trickster” figure, in part because the author was half white and half Native American. Lape cites the appearance of tricksters in Iroquois and Cheyenne (58), in Comanche (61), and in Apache cultures (63), but not in Cherokee folklore. Because Ridge was a Cherokee, it would seem reasonable to establish the presence of tricksters in Cherokee tribal mythology, and the author’s familiarity with such figures, rather than presupposing such knowledge and redefining Murieta as a trickster for the sake of convenience.

The final three chapters—on the writings of Sui Sin Far, Onoto Watanna, and Mary Austin—offer discrete analyses of each author’s work. Lape argues that these women perpetuated but also challenged stereotypes of Chinese, Japanese, and Native Americans, respectively. Her readings are convincing as well as engaging, partly because she chooses to focus on each writer separately instead of conflating them and making cross-cultural equations. Although five of the seven writers in Lape’s study are women, the author prudently avoids generalizing about Western women writers as a homogeneous group. However, since Lape addresses the West as a region and privileges a racially diverse collection of writers, perhaps she should also explain her decision to emphasize women in her project; for example, her more critical assessment of Beckwourth and Ridge versus Hopkins and Mourning Dove, makes the reader wonder why women writers may have been more successful in maneuvering their way through the contact zone.