THE MYTH OF THE AMERICAN WEST

The American West has captured the imagination of Americans and Americanists alike. It has been foundational for multi-disciplinary American studies scholarship since Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893 identified the frontier as the most decisive factor in shaping American political and social institutions and in creating a specifically American national character. Shifting the focus away from America's European heritage and divisions between the North and the South, Turner's frontier thesis argued for studying America from an East/West perspective that inaugurated an exceptionalist discourse based on experiences of and with the land

The American West is often viewed not so much as a region or an area than as a space of transition that does not necessarily have a precise geographical location, but rather changes with Euro-American settlement expanding westward. As part of a "homogenized national geography" and as a "nationalist West", it has been a locus, however vaguely defined, for developing epic cultural scripts of Americanness. The West as a region  is connected to visions of an agrarian ideal that for a long time has been seen as standing for authentic Americanness, but also, from a more critical perspective, for an "enduring provincial mentality". Pitting the rural West against the newly emerging urban centers in the East in the 19th century has shaped a whole range of dichotomies that are still at work today and that have been described as the country vs. the city or the frontier vs. the metropolis. Thus, the myth of the West also reflects a rural ideal that grows out of a conception of the United States as predominantly rural or as having a distinct rural past.

The agrarian myth of the West and the myth of the frontier can be traced back to the beginning of European settlement in North America in the 17th and 18th centuries, and connects to narratives of chosenness, and the melting pot. The frontier may well be considered "the longest-lived of American myths"; its scholarly treatment by Turner followed the so-called second founding of the US during Reconstruction, when "the unitary American nation became a primary focus of ideology and power", and the US Census Bureau's declaration in 1890 that there no longer was a frontier. The rise of the US to world power went along with the interpretation of westward expansion and settlement as an integral part of that process and as "a westward creation story"

For one thing, the West can be seen as a space of residence and settlement that is often imagined as a kind of garden or even Edenic paradise symbolizing pastoral simplicity and economic independence based on subsistence farming. This semi'civilized,' "domesticated West" is imagined in popular culture, for instance, in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book Little House on the Prairie and the television series of the same title that was adapted from it, and in the lyrics of contemporary country music.

Mule Train, Tennessee Ernie Ford

Wildfire, Michael Martin Murphey

The American West is constructed as a site of individual and collective quests for land and dominance. Violent conflict between settlers and Native Americans often is the focus of narratives that represent the West as a still 'uncivilized' space yet to be conquered and controlled, as is the case e.g. in classical Westerns. It is useful to distinguish between the two versions of the West as peaceful garden (agrarianism) and as conflicted frontier (expansionism), even if, of course, both versions overlap in most representations: a Western may e.g. tell the story of a farmer and his family (agrarian version of the West) but may for their protection enlist the masculinist, individualist, classical Western hero (expansionist version). The Western may also present the second as a precondition for the first, or use images of the agrarian West to legitimize the violence that is at the heart of expansionism.

The American mind was raised upon a sentimental attachment to rural living and upon a series of notions about rural people and rural life that I have chosen to designate as the agrarian myth. The agrarian myth represents a kind of homage that Americans have paid to the fancied innocence of their origins.We find manifestations of it in writings of the early republic and the 19th century, and increasingly nostalgic ones in 20th-century and contemporary literature and popular culture. Among the early proponents of this myth were a Virginian slaveholder and a French immigrant: Thomas Jefferson and Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Jefferson envisions the United States as a republic of self-determined, autonomous, and virtuous farmer-citizens, who he juxtaposes as "the chosen people of God" with the tradesmen and merchants of mercantilist, predominantly urban Europe, which for Jefferson signifies corruption, alienation, and immorality. In the US, the farmer has remained the emblem of an ethic of hard work, a lifestyle close to nature, and egalitarianism. However, fifthly, Jefferson and Crèvecoeur also reflect different versions of the myth of the West, which can be distinguished into a Northern and Southern version. The Southern imaginary of the West casts the farmer as a plantation owner, and for that reason alone is a far cry from egalitarian dreams; ling" of his protagonists. In the Northern version of the myth on the other hand, the West is usually conceived of as free and as holding the promise of land ownership for everyone.

In the third decade of the 20th century, however, the agrarian myth of the West underwent an important crisis: in the context of the Great Depression, the American farm was turned into an icon of the rural population's collective suffering. Dorothea Lange pointedly critiqued the agrarian myth and pastoral projections on the rural West (cf. Lange, American Exodus).

More recently, this sense of crisis has prevailed and coexists with discourses that continue to idealize farm life and heroize the farmer. Organizations and initiatives such as the American Farmland Trust, which was founded in 1980, and Farm Aid (inaugurated by Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, and Neil Young), which since 1985 has raised funds for the preservation and support of family farms in the US through benefit concerts, indicate that the farmer still holds a prominent place in the cultural imaginary. Farm Aid's political engagement also led to the passage by Congress of the Agricultural Credit Act of 1987, which was intended to help small farmers in financial distress. It should be noted, however, that organizations such as Farm Aid "sell authenticity as much as they sell sound land-use policicy", as the lyrics of many singers and bands show (cf. e.g. John Mellencamp's "Rain on the Scarecrow," Shannon Brown's "Corn Fed," or Kenny Chesney's "She Thinks My Tractor's Sexy").

Arthur Rothstein, Potato Pickers, Rio Grande County, Colorado (1939).

In the history of the American West, settlement policies were certainly less invested in egalitarianism than popular representations of pioneers and homesteaders would have us believe, as agrarianism relied on the cheap labor of migrant workers from Asia, slaves and former slaves, poor immigrants from Europe, and, not least, on the expropriation of Native Americans. Thus, popular visions of farming and gardening in the early republic and the 19th century are not as 'innocent' as they may appear at first. For Jefferson, agrarianism and expansionism clearly went hand in hand, as his notion of an "empire of liberty"  was based on landownership. The purchase by the Jefferson administration of French Louisiana in 1803, which doubled the size of the US and in the logic of the Jeffersonians created new opportunities for yeoman farmers out West, must be seen in this context. Official rhetoric emphasized that the 1804-06 expedition of the (tellingly named) Corps of Discovery under Meriwether Lewis (1774-1809) and William Clark (1770-1838), which was sent to explore the newly acquired territory, was "destined" to extend the "discovery" of Christopher Columbus.

Despite all the fanciful depictions, the winning of the West was above all a process of taking possession. Jeffersonian (and later Jacksonian) visions of the yeoman going west helped build not a "virtuous republic," but a "violent empire".

America is destined for better deeds. It is our unparalleled glory that we have no reminiscences of battle fields, but in defence of humanity, of the oppressed of all nations, of the rights of conscience, the rights of personal enfranchisement. Our annals describe no scenes of horrid carnage, where men were led on by hundreds of thousands to slay one another, dupes and victims to emperors, kings, nobles, demons in the human form called heroes. We have had patriots to defend our homes, our liberties, but no aspirants to crowns or thrones; nor have the American people ever suffered themselves to be led on by wicked ambition to depopulate the land, to spread desolation far and wide, that a human being might be placed on a seat of supremacy.

The ideology of US expansionism and empire was resonantly articulated by John L. O'Sullivan (1813-1895) in an article published in the Democratic Review in 1845 that advocated the annexation of Texas, which indeed came to pass later in the same year; in this editorial, O'Sullivan most notably coined the phrase "manifest destiny.  O'Sullivan was a journalist, lawyer, and a leading propagandist for the Democratic Party; he also was a key member of the so-called Young America Movement, a group of intellectuals and politicians "who concocted a new ideology of American expansion in the 1840s"

American Progress, John Gast, 1872

In neo-Jeffersonian fashion, they saw in westward expansion the opportunity for an "agrarian counterrevolution" against industrialization and urbanization in Europe and the Eastern United States. O'Sullivan's claim that US-Americans by right of their manifest destiny could and should spread over the whole American continent connected the myth of the West to notions of Puritan chosenness and "destinarian thought".

The West is conceived by Frederick Jackson Turner not as a specific region or place but as the dynamic space of the frontier, which according to Turner is "the meeting point between savagery and civilization."In that Turner's definition of the frontier remains analytically underdetermined as well as imaginatively evocative, it serves as an "elastic" term  describing the experience which Turner believed captures best the ambivalent and partially regressive process of Americanization.

 In Turner's view, the frontier also promoted "individualism, democracy, and nationalism [...]", which he thus connected to the westward expansion of the US, and served as a kind of safety valve for potential social unrest. His essay concludes with an affirmation of the frontier's importance in shaping the American nation and character by linking it to well-known foundational figures and events such as Christopher Columbus and American independence

In the 1950s in the context of the 'Cold War,' the Turner Thesis once more was widely praised only to be yet again radically critiqued in the 1970s by revisionist scholars, who have emphasized the violence of colonization and expansionism.

Both images of the American West as mythic rural Arcadia and as a site of historic conflict and conquest of mythic proportions remain entangled with each other and are central elements in discourses of nation-building and American exceptionalism in its crudest form, as both agrarians and expansionists ignore or dismiss the indigenous population as inhabitants of the land they seek to conquer and/or 'cultivate:' "The divisibility of the native and the land permitted the formulation of a myth and ideology of expansion in which racial warfare complements the processes of agrarian development". We can see this complicity perhaps most clearly in writings of authors who are critical of the American empire yet at the same time remain attracted to its expansionist logic. Henry David Thoreau for example, one of the central figures in early American nature writing, wrote that

"[t]he nation may go their way to their manifest destiny which I trust is not mine"

yet at the same time was fascinated by the West:

"Eastward I go only by force; westward I go free"

(Thoreau, "Walking" ).

Let's notice the absence of women in classical accounts of the West and the westering experience.  Two images prevail: on the one hand, the "weary and forlorn frontier wife, a sort of helpless heroine" who is generically derived from the captivity narrative and is often described as a 'Prairie Madonna,'

and on the other hand, "the westering woman as sturdy helpmate and civilizer of the frontier"; additional stock characters include "the good woman, the schoolmarm, [and] the kindhearted prostitute".

An early and noteworthy instance of US memorial culture dedicated to the role of women in the history of the West is the Madonna of the Trail series of twelve statues, which commemorates the endurance of pioneer women in the US. Commissioned by The National Society of Daughters of the American Revolution and created by sculptor August Leimbach, the statues were dedicated in 1928 and 1929, and today are still placed in each of the twelve states along the National Old Trails Road, which led from Cumberland, Maryland, to Upland, California. The monuments are placed mostly in small towns in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and California. Even if the monuments seek to remind us of the hardships undergone by women in the West, their representation of women as mother and nurturing presence in the West affirms traditional gender roles and once again asserts woman's out-of-placeness in the West.

In the context of westward expansion, women have been commonly portrayed as "obstacles to the male hero's freedom"  in popular culture, which is why they are often left behind - in the East, in the domestic space of the house or the log cabin, or in the garden. It is the symbolic capital of the feminine, so to speak, that is appropriated to signify metaphorically on the male experience of settlement in a patriarchal fantasy of 'exploring' the 'virgin land.'

Johnny Guitar, 1954

The critique of Turner's Eurocentrism has led to correcting a tacit assumption that underlies many representations of the West, namely, that one arrives there from the east - arguably, North America was settled from west to east as well. The history of Asian immigration to America provides a view from the West on the West as East, so to speak, and thus the basis for a forceful rebuttal of the mythical West. Asian immigration to the US and to the 'West' was restricted by a series of exclusionary acts (e.g. the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Asiatic Barred Zone Act of 1917; the Asian Exclusion Act of 1924; and the TydingsMcDuffie Act of 1934) until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which marked the end of the National Origins quota system. Lisa Lowe and Mae Ngai, among others, have traced the way in which "Asian immigrants" have been defined in legal, racial, economic, and cultural terms in opposition and contradistinction to "American citizens". The Asian American experience of the West is marked by "legal exclusions, political disenfranchisement, labor exploitation, and internment", which time and again affirmed Asian Americans' status as 'other' and as 'alien'. Against the backdrop of this history, the American West is, not surprisingly, often portrayed by Asian Americans as a space of restriction and confinement rather than of freedom.

Kung Fu in the 7Os

Kung Fu

For an analysis of print culture's role in the making of heroes and villains of the West in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we can turn to pioneer Daniel Boone's (1734-1820) elevation to the status of national hero in John Filson's pamphlet The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784) and to the heroes of James Fenimore Cooper's historical romances.

Both authors popularized the binary stereotypes of the noble and the ignoble savage whose most prominent exemplars are perhaps the heroic and 'noble' Chingachgook and Uncas, and the villainous, 'ignoble' Magua in Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1826); whereas the former correspond to the image of the 'vanishing Indian' and support Euro-American westward expansion as they conveniently seem to anticipate their own extinction, the latter is representative of depictions of Natives as barbaric and primitive peoples who need to be vanquished in order for the West to be 'won,' settled, and 'civilized.'

Even more widely read than Cooper's highly successful novels were the dime novel Westerns, which became an unprecedented phenomenon in publishing and consumer culture in the second half of the 19th century. Sold at very cheap prices (five to twenty-five cents), these pocketsize 'novels' were put out in series that ensured the recognizability of their title heroes, and prominently included dramatic scenes of violence as a major part of their attraction. Somewhat paradoxically, these texts projected rugged individualism and outstanding heroism in a format that relied to a large extent on standardization, serialization, and mass consumption:

Anachronism is at the heart of the popularity of the Western: while the success of dime novel Westerns hinged on mass production and thus on the industrialization of the US, the texts depicted pre-industrial frontier life. With the so-called Indian Wars still going on, the dime Westerns time and again staged and re-staged conflicts with the Native population as wars against 'savages' to which there was no alternative. Borrowing selectively from the racist "Cooperian mythology", these Westerns focused on the ignoble savage and indulged in and legitimized white violence against the indigenous population of the American West

A closer look at Edward S. Ellis's Seth Jones; or, The Captives of the Frontier (1860), one of the most successful early dime novel Westerns - we could sample randomly from many others to find similar constellations, though - reveals how Native Americans are demonized in stereotypical descriptions such as the following one:

Behind were a half-dozen savages, their gleaming visages distorted with the passions of exultation, vengeance, and doubt, their garments flying in the wind, and their strength pressed to its utmost bounds. They were scattered at different distances from each other, and were spreading over the prairie, so as to cut off the fugitive's escape in every direction.

The Natives' dehumanizing representation as evil, animalistic, and dangerous puts them into stark opposition to the white characters, whose sense of entitlement to land and power is unquestioned and whose extreme brutality is condoned and legitimated by the narrative. White violence is described almost gleefully and in disturbing graphic detail, and is obviously supposed to be pleasurable for the (white) audience.

So sudden, so unexpected, so astonishing was the crash of Seth's tomahawk through the head of the doomed savage, that, for a moment after, not an Indian moved or spoke. The head was nearly cleft in twain (for an arm fired by consuming passion had driven it), and the brains were spattered over numbers of those seated around. Seth himself stood a second to satisfy himself the work was complete, and when he turned, walked to his seat, sat down, coolly folded his arms and commenced whistling.

The slaughtering of the Native in this passage is described in hyperbolic yet at the same time realist fashion; whereas many other cultural productions (including Cooper's) would disavow or at least camouflage violence against Native Americans, in scenes such as this one - which abound in dime novel Westerns, even the most 'savage' white violence is represented as acceptable and legitimate in an unequivocal assertion of white superiority. The dime novel Westerns do not claim national allegorical status, which is perhaps why their implication in the construction and affirmation of white supremacy is more overt than in other, more subtle cultural productions. The fact that these mass-produced and mass-consumed fantasies do not hide or feel the need to explain the white violence that they describe points us to the tacit dimension of the myth of the West in hegemonic discourse.This "familiarity" is grounded in the unquestioned acceptance and successful naturalization of the fundamental ideological premises of frontier discourse, which above all include the assumption that white people's usurpatory presence in North America is justified at all

That the Western is to a large degree "a matter of geography and costume"  is also in evidence in this second example of how the West figures in popular culture: Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a national as well as international phenomenon that evolved out of the 19th-century print culture on the West. This Wild West Show was founded in Nebraska in 1883 by William Frederick Cody (1846-1917), a veteran of the Civil War and former bison hunter who created Buffalo Bill as his alter ego. For roughly 30 years (1883-1916), this show was one of the largest and most popular entertainment businesses in the world; it toured in the US and throughout Europe, and in addition to Buffalo Bill featured other prominent western figures such as James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok, Annie Oakley, and Calamity Jane. Cody a.k.a. Buffalo Bill became a "national icon". Buffalo Bill carried on the legacy of an ethnically white man who had partially 'gone native' and incorporated aspects of both the white and the Native world yet for the same reason was also an outstanding 'Indian fighter' and buffalo hunter, and was never in doubt about his cultural loyalties and allegiances: the gist of many of Cody's Buffalo Bill sketches is that the white man, time and again, outperforms the Native by using the latter's techniques.

Native Americans figured prominently in Cody's shows; for one thing, because they included re-enactments of 'Custer's Last Stand,' i.e. the defeat of the 7th Cavalry Regiment of the US Army in the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876 by a coalition of Native tribes. This battle re-enactment was performed with Sitting Bull, military leader of the Lakota, who actually led the fateful attack against Custer. Knowing that the Natives' military success had only been temporary, white audiences apparently did not feel threatened by this performance; at the same time, it provided a great deal of spectacle. The collaboration between Cody and Native American leaders has been considered quite remarkable. Besides Native celebrities, Cody also needed Native actors for the 'typical scenes' and tableaux vivants his troupe staged. The ambivalence of their appearance can be grasped when weighing the worldwide reception and (apparently equal) pay they received during the tours against the fact that it helped freeze the image of Natives - by way of the show's content - into that of stereotypical, archaic warriors whose resistance to a superior Euro-American civilization had to be overcome, and indeed was by and large overcome by the time the performances took place. The show produced, enhanced, and affirmed the myth of the West and of the frontier for national and international audiences. The decline of the show coincides with the rise of another medium that would become dedicated to representing and mythologizing the West: film.

In the 20th century, the Western can be considered the American film genre par excellence; it has been an important object of scholarship in American popular culture studies. From Edwin S. Porter's The Great Train Robbery (1903) onwards, the Western's negotiation of questions of individualism and community, masculinity, alterity, and violence as well as national and racial supremacy has codified the West as a formative space of US national identity. The so-called Golden Age of the Western is often dated from John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) to Sam Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969), with the latter already operating at quite a distance from the classical Western.

My poney my rifle and me

High Noon, Fred Zinnemann, 1952

High Noon. Opening scene

Rio Bravo, Howard Hawks, 1959

Rio Bravo. Opening scene

Neo-Westerns that have partially absorbed revisionist historiography include Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990), Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992), Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man (1995), Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (2005), and Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained (2012). its cast of characters usually includes settlers and outlaws (who are sometimes Native Americans but, somewhat surprisingly perhaps, more often are white); its hero, who has a horse and a gun, intervenes on behalf of the "agents of civilization"while sometimes taking recourse to the same methods as the outlaws in order to win over them, and thus remains ambivalently 'in the middle' as he is at the same 'advancing' and escaping from 'civilization' ; its plots usually revolve around capture, flight, and pursuit.

In many ways the Western films seem to transform the 'virgin land' into a 'crowded prairie"from which, however, one part of the North American population is increasingly and symptomatically absent: Native Americans appear to disappear from a genre for which they actually were foundational. In line with the pernicious notion of the 'Vanishing Indian,' the West in the Western becomes a stage for white (male) fantasies. In the 19th century, the stereotype of the Native as either evil or noble savage slowly gave way to a white view on Natives as an inferior 'race' that belonged to an earlier (and thus doomed) stage of civilization.

As a public myth, the West has not only been expressed in mass culture but has also been used in political culture; presidents, presidential candidates, and others seeking or holding office have often fashioned themselves as farmers, cowboys, or pioneers, and employed the rhetoric of the frontier myth.

In the context of the 20th and 21st centuries, we may think for example of Lyndon B. Johnson, who wore a Stetson and rode on horseback in his 1964 presidential campaign.

Richard Nixon, who exploited his friendship with John Wayne for political gain.

Ronald Reagan, who made political use of the cowboy image even if among his 54 films only six were Westerns.

George W. Bush, who liked to pose on his Texas ranch dresse in a cowboy outfit. All of them used these references to the West in order to convey a sense of rugged masculinity and strong leadership.

By the 20th century, the frontier myth had become engrained in political discourse and campaign rhetoric through a set of tacit references that were understood by all Americans. One of the best-known examples of an appropriation of the American West in political rhetoric by way of the frontier myth is certainly John F. Kennedy's acceptance speech at the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles. While Kennedy did not fashion himself as a cowboy during his candidacy and later as president but rather displayed the habitus of an East Coast urbanite, he did use the myth of the West in this so-called "New Frontier" speech, and invested it with new meanings:

I stand here tonight facing west on what was once the last frontier. From the lands that stretch 3000 miles behind us, the pioneers gave up their safety, their comfort, and sometimes their lives to build our new West. [...] [T]he problems are not all solved and the battles are not all won, and we stand today on the edge of a new frontier - the frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats. [...] I'm asking each of you to be pioneers towards that new frontier. [...] For the harsh facts of the matter are that we stand at this frontier at a turning point of history.

Kennedy's 'new frontier' rhetoric, which helped him win the presidential election, was fuelled by a 'Cold War' logic that would also provide the rationale for the US military involvement in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. The latter's descriptions in official rhetoric, fiction, film, and memoirs likewise often reference the frontier and the 'Indian Wars,' and draw analogies between Native Americans and the Vietnamese.

The invocation of the Indian war and Custer's Last Stand as models for the Vietnam war was a mythological way of answering the question, Why are we in Vietnam? The answer implicit in the myth is, "We are there because our ancestors were heroes who fought the Indians, and died (rightly or wrongly) as sacrifices for the nation." There is no logic to the connection, only the powerful force of tradition and habits of feeling and thought. The interdependency of the myth of the West and the interpretation of the war in Southeast Asia as well as the "Vietnamization" of the West can be identified on several levels; we can for instance analyze how representations of the 'Vietnam War' use the Western formula in order to describe individual and collective war experiences. The convergence of the West and the East is most clearly evident in the Pentagon-sponsored The Green Berets (1968), which was one of the first Vietnam War films; based on Robin Moore's bestselling novel of the same title which had been published three years earlier, it starred and was co-directed by John Wayne, the prototypical Western hero. Hoping to "make the old magic work", this film is quite overtly anti-communist propaganda cloaked in Western imagery: the film's depiction of a base camp in Vietnam is very similar to that of cavalry forts in Westerns, and its demonization of the Vietcong also strongly resembles that of Native Americans in earlier films and other media. The film heroized the Green Berets - i.e., the US Army Special Forces, whose guerrilla and counterinsurgency tactics were endorsed by the Kennedy administration - by representing them as "a fused image of sophisticated contemporary professional and rough Indian fighters" that embodied the "paradox of the genteel killer" and "the deathdealing innocent" on the new frontier in Asia .

We can observe that "the literature of the Vietnam War is filled with American characters who enter Vietnam as traditional frontier huntsmen, then become men trying merely to survive in a wilderness they do not understand". In many ways, Vietnam brought the American foundational mythic formula to a crisis, because the myth failed to successfully work the war into a coherent narrative; as many have noted, the war could not be easily contained in the language of the frontier myth, and moreover brought to the surface the 'origins' of the myth - the collectively dis- or misremembered 'Indian Wars' - which thus became the object of reinterpretation.

The doubts about individual and collective American identities triggered by the war were articulated in many forms; representatives of the American counterculture and the peace movement argued that Vietnam revealed the pathological nature of the American empire, or, less radically, that it signified a loss of values. Activists and writers who visited North Vietnam, among them Susan Sontag, regarded Vietnam as "the America that no longer exists".

'Indian country' migrated back from Vietnam to the American heartland when Native American activists occupied the town of Wounded Knee, South Dakota, from February 27 to May 8, 1973. The protest of the American Indian Movement (AIM) at Wounded Knee focused on what many considered as America's racist imperialism at home and was joined by a number of Native American veterans who had just returned from Vietnam.

Clearly, and in spite of the most radical protest at the time of the war in Southeast Asia, the frontier myth was not entirely debunked and much less destroyed, but perhaps it was expanded to the extent that post-Vietnam, it could include failure as well as triumph and victory. Beyond Vietnam, the US national security apparatus has continued to conflate 'Indians' with those it felt the need to frame as enemies, and to use the semantics of the frontier myth in acts of epistemic violence; the Old West revenge tale, for instance, has figured prominently in the political rhetoric of the 'War on Terror' ('dead or alive'), and it led protesters against the War in Iraq to chant "it's the Middle East, not the Wild West". A connection between the 'Indian Wars' and US foreign policy was established once again in May 2011 when 'Geronimo,' the name of an Apache leader, was used as a code word in the CIA-led operation that presumably resulted in the killing of Osama bin Laden.