SEARCHING FOR YELLOWSTONE
I read this book in one thoroughly engrossed sitting and immediately began planning a family trip to Yellowstone, with stops at other historically reconstructed sites of the postmodern West in and around the nation’s first national park: Cheyenne, Mount Rushmore, Custer State Park, Fort Laramie, Deadwood, Red Lodge, Jackson Hole, and then back home again to Arizona. We took that trip—3250 miles—somewhat ironically but somehow perfectly suited to Denzin’s postmodern themes in a blue Toyota Prius rather than a rickety Conestoga wagon or on sturdy horseback.
We went there, after all, not to find the authentic American West, or even an authentic Past, but instead to see what had been made out of it. We went there, as Denzin phrases this “tiny slice of the postmodern West, [where] cowboys, Native Americans, park rangers, and cultural tourists collide.” We went there in search of a new connection to our common cultural narratives, to the new performances that reclaim forbidden territories of hidden historical scripts. We also went there to enjoy the spectacular scenery where our mythic, rough, tough, genocidal frontier once was, and where, in its place we now find the overlay of cultural capital invested in well-tended monuments, theme parks, casinos, lodges, and dude ranches made to exist alongside real herds of buffalo, and, at least in Yellowstone proper, fields and mountain meadows where real deer and antelope do, in fact, play.
The juxtaposition then and now does to the spirit, and to memory, what Denzin’s chapters intend it to do: confound, disturb, cause to question if not to interrogate, the serious play and pleasures of experience in the park against what we have come to learn that wasn’t in the movies we watched as children, nor laced into the games of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ we enacted in schoolyards: blankets laden with smallpox given to the Indians as “gifts”; the half-truths told about Sacagawea and the sexualized representations of Indian women in general; the wholesale indiscriminate slaughter of Indians, the buffalo, and the rape of the land; the vanity of George Armstrong Custer; the bloody wars between sheep herders and cattlemen; and so on.
It is a tribute to Denzin’s fine performative text that he captures in his memories, his performance scripts, his recovered historical records and art, and in his analyses of the visual and visceral representations of the West the curious admixture of what I elsewhere call “the plural present.” For there is in the discourses creating the new Old West a revisioning of the past made more inclusive by these counter-narratives, more democratic in their depictions of “what happened,” and more accountable for it. In Denzin’s words, this new collective and personal search for Yellowstone “speaks to the soul of a nation, and to the kind of nation we want America to be.”
