Review of The Frontier in American Culture: An Exhibition at the Newberry Library, August 26, 1994-January 7, 1995 Essays by Richard White and Patricia Nelson Limerick

Authors

Susan A. Miller, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Date of this Version

Winter 1997

Document Type

Article

Citation

Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 1997, pp. 63-65.

Comments

Copyright 1997 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

THE EMPEROR ON THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

Richard White, the creator of the touring panel exhibition "The Frontier in American Culture," made his reputation promoting a product labeled "New Western History." He wrote a textbook on the topic, and one passage in that book reveals the conception that frames this exhibition: "People simply murdered Indians," he writes (It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own [University of Oklahoma Press, 1991], p. 338). If you are one of the people, perhaps that kind of statement seems acceptable, but from the point of view of one of the Indians it looks like full frontal bigotry. Further, it calls into question the moniker New Wester'n History: there's nothing new about an American historian's conception that distinguishes Indians from people.

Does the imaging of native people in "The Frontier in American Culture" reflect a new interpretation? Of some eighty-one images of American native persons in the exhibition, three of the adults are women, one is of indeterminate gender, the gender of two of the children cannot be determined, the third child is a girl, and the other seventy-five images are of adult males. These images of native persons may be considered in two ways: as part of a scholarly performance stating a thesis and striving to support it, and as a commoditymarketable images of the past.

Viewing the exhibition as scholarship, one asks where the images of natives fit. The thesis of the exhibition is that two white men in the late nineteenth century wielded great influence as image makers: Frederick Jackson Turner and William F. Cody ("Buffalo Bill"). Mr. White displays his interpretation of the icons those other two white men created and tacks on a few images by native men relating to one of Cody's icons. Are we to believe that the exhibition thus incorporates a significant native point of view?

What are the native men doing who are depicted in this set of icons? They are either engaging in violence against the invaders of their homeland or standing by passively at the margin of the frame while the "people" stream into the country like ants at a picnic.