Transnational Frontiers: The American West in France by Emily C. Burns (review)

In Reasoning Together: The Native Critics Collective, Craig Womack noted, “Some critics are stymied by the transnational turn in cultural studies and the seemingly contrary sovereigntist emphasis in Native studies” (37). A decade later, Transnational Frontiers: Th e American West in France lands squarely at this intersection, contributing to a now-vibrant discourse about Indigenous cultural production in global transit. The book’s engagement with Native studies is not exclusive; rather, Emily Burns examines the “tripartite dialogue” that unfolded among French, United States, and Lakota subjects in France between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I (3). She maintains that citizens of each nation used images, objects, and performances of the American West to explore distinctive projects of cultural renewal amid upheaval, while attending to asymmetries of power. Following much contemporary cultural theory, she treats nations as multiple, contested, and unfinished— transformed, rather than superseded, by transnational engagements. Using art historical methods, Burns demonstrates that Indigenous, French, and US identities and interests were negotiated through material exchanges.

Organized thematically (and in a loose chronology), five chapters uncover an interwoven field of visual and embodied culture. Chapters 1, 3, and 5 add significant nuance to familiar themes by studying their export: the phenomenon of “playing Indian” (beyond the well-known European tours of Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show), vanishing race myths and contestations (especially at the 1900 Exposition Universelle), and the figure of the virile cowboy as a French-American interface (centered on Cody), respectively. Chapters 2 and 4 break newer ground by arguing for the two-way impact of Native travelers in France and Indian removal and assimilation in the United States. Chapter 2 examines how Lakota performers Ógle Lúta and Íŋyaŋ Matȟó, French painter Rosa Bonheur, and US sculptor Cyrus Dallin harnessed cultural capital to challenge the Sioux Commission of 1889, which secured the necessary Native signatures to reduce Great Sioux Reservation lands by half. Chapter 4 details a remarkable, nine-year postcard correspondence between Jacob Ištá Ská (later, White Eyes), a performer with Cody’s troupe in Europe, 1905– 1906, who became a clerk and translator for the Indian Agency at Pine Ridge, and French aristocrat Folco de Baroncelli, who imagined that Provence and Pine Ridge shared analogous struggles against assimilation. Baroncelli ultimately rejected White Eyes’ complex negotiations with bureaucratic modernity, leaving readers to wonder what enduring impact did French exchange have on the indigenous “sovereigntist emphasis” that Womack identified a century later?