Narrating the American West: New Forms of Historical Memory (review)

In Narrating the American West, Jordana Finnegan explores the various ways western writers use the autobiographical genre to forge connections between personal and cultural identities and experiences. Finnegan is especially concerned with the autobiographical narratives of writers living in and writing about the “New West,” a region where “a diverse variety of texts … revise colonial narratives on multiple levels” (9). Euroamerican writers Gretel Ehrlich, Annick Smith, and William Kittredge figure prominently in New Western revisionism and attempt to rewrite the colonial discourse of Frederick Jackson Turner’s West in their own personal narratives, yet as Finnegan argues, too frequently their efforts reinscribe the concept of the West as a realm for white men. In Finnegan’s “New West,” Native American writers Janet Campbell Hale, Simon Ortiz, and Leslie Marmon Silko as well as Chicana writer Sandra Cisneros use autobiography to confront western colonial narratives and also to challenge the autobiographical form itself.

Finnegan’s reading and critique of New Western autobiographical narratives are particularly astute. Her examination of these texts reveals deep contradictions in how these narratives both challenge and reproduce the grand, colonial narrative of the American West. In The Solace of Open Spaces, Ehrlich reverses conventional, Western gender roles as she depicts her work and life on a Wyoming sheep ranch, but as Finnegan argues, “this inversion … ultimately reinforces mythic versions of the cowboy and colonial representations of landscape, while neglecting the complex histories of racial conquest” (15). Despite the critical reception Smith’s Homestead has received for its romantic descriptions of Montana and call for wilderness preservation, Finnegan reads the narrative as a trope of the West as safety valve. While Smith does call for environmental protection, her memoir, according to Finnegan, “erases contemporary Native American claims to the land … by figuring indigenous people as (tragically) defeated and disappeared” (61). Kittredge’s Hole in the Sky: A Memoir serves as another example of a New Western that attempts to revise historical narratives of colonization and possession. Although the memoir reads as a confession and a repudiation of the “ownership ideology that produces mental and ecological breakdowns,” Finnegan notes that, while Kittredge condemns his family’s role in the conquest of southeastern Oregon, he also “obscures their complicity in Native American dispossession” (107–08). Finnegan’s analysis reveals that, despite the noble efforts of New Western writers, their narratives “leave intact certain aspects of colonial representations” (152).

In the first three chapters of her study, Finnegan pairs Ehrlich’s collection of autobiographical essays with Janet Campbell Hale’s Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter, Smith’s personal narrative with Simon Ortiz’s Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land, and Kittredge’s memoir with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Storyteller. Her intent in these pairings is to show how the voices and narratives of Native peoples, which are too frequently ignored, complicate the New Western paradigm and to demonstrate how Native American writers use autobiographical acts to refocus the re-envisioning of New Western histories and memories. According to Finnegan, autobiographical writing forges connections between personal and cultural experiences and “provides an opportunity for marginalized subjects to reclaim a voice by articulating their versions of selfhood in a historical context” (10). While Native writers have adopted and appropriated Western literary forms to ensure cultural survivance, Finnegan provides only a limited discussion of the contentious use of the term “autobiography” in Native American literary and critical study. For example, she contends that Hale uses personal narrative to invert the conventional Indian captivity narrative and to convey her individualized feelings of confinement and marginalization in the West. Conversely, Ortiz and Silko, Finnegan argues, form a synecdochic self in order to narrate the resistance and survival of colonized peoples and their ancestral homelands in the Southwest. The work of Kathleen Sands and Arnold Krupat serves as Finnegan’s theoretical basis for understanding the problematic nature of autobiography in Native American critical...