Understanding the Present and Future West

Question for Discussion: What are the major illusions
that Americans still hold about the West? Why are
these beliefs so hard for Americans to let go of?

Reading: Kittredge, "The Politics of Storytelling,"
Brown, "Courage without Illusion," Neel, "A Place
of Extremes," Righter, "A Mosaic of Different
Environments"

Video: Japanese Lies about their History ;
Western Stories DVD: The Movie West: the Myth
of the West Documentary (1999)

Where is the American West?

Maps of the New West

Kittredge, The Politics of Storytelling
(in-class)

New Multicultural Western Stories
(in-class)

The Multicultural West

Telling a New Western Story (in-class)

Examining the Japanese History Textbook
Controversies (in-class)

Cleansing History, Cleansing Japan
(in-class) (page 5)

Japan Resist Call to Apologize for
World War II Practices--2007

The Importance of History Textbooks in
Japan and America (in-class)

James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me
(in-class)

Debating the American Decision to
Drop the Atomic Bomb

Columbus Day Protest in Denver in 2007

How Should We Learn American History?
(in-class) (See Limerick on West History)

Where is the American West?

Geographical Definitions of the American West (in-class)

Stegner, The West as Hope (in-class)

Limerick on Introducing Westerners to
Themselves (in-class)

Lewis, The West as Cultural Struggle

Brown, Courage without Illusions (in-class)

Neel, A Place of Extremes (in-class)

The Internet Movie Database: Look up
Movie Information on Western Movies

The Man who shot Liberty Valance (1962)

Memorable Quotes from "The Man Who
Shot Liberty Valance"

How the West was Won (1962)

Examining the Japanese History
Textbook Controversies

In...Japan it is the government that influences the content of textbooks. In the United States today the problem is not the government but textbook publishers. As far as the effects on students go, the difference is not great. . . . our students believe absolutely what they read in textbooks."(3)

The Current Situation

A conservative (many would argue ultra-conservative) movement toward reform in the Japanese history curriculum was initiated in the early 1990s by Fujioka Nobukatsu and his Liberal View of History Study Group. Fujioka, a professor of education at Tokyo University, set out to "correct history" by emphasizing a "positive view" of Japan's past and by removing from textbooks any reference to matters associated with what he calls "dark history,"issues such as the comfort women, that might make Japanese schoolchildren uncomfortable when they read about the Pacific War.

By early 2000 Fujioka and his group had joined with others to form the Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform, now headed by Nishio Kanji. It is the Society's textbook, The New History Textbook (one of eight junior high school history textbooks authorized by the Ministry of Education in April 2001), that has caused such debate in Japan over the past year....

Widespread protests against the textbook erupted much earlier in Japan, China, and North and South Korea. By December 2000, reacting to a draft textbook circulated by the Society and shown on national television, a long list of Japanese historians and history educators expressed misgivings about the content of The New History Textbook and its rendering of Japan's past. Their complaints centered around the text's presentation of Japan's foundation myths as historical fact and its characterization of wars launched by modern Japan as wars to liberate Asia.

The intellectuals' appeal to people inside and outside Japan appeared on the internet prior to authorization of the textbook by the Ministry. Following authorization, their voices were joined by an international group of scholars. This "International Scholars' Appeal Concerning the 2002-Edition Japanese History Textbooks" aimed to "ensure that textbooks are consistent with values of peace, justice and truth." It declared The New History Textbook "unfit as a teaching tool because it negates both the truth about Japan's record in colonialism and war and the values that will contribute to a just and peaceful Pacific and World community." (For more information on the scholars' claim, visit their Web site [9].)

Reactions in China and Korea took various forms. China Radio International announced that the Chinese government and people were "strongly indignant about and dissatisfied with the new Japanese history textbook for the year 2002 compiled by right-wing Japanese scholars." Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhu Banzao warned that the Chinese people would not accept the interpretation of wartime events put forth by the new textbook.(10) An article in the August 25, 2001 issue of Korea Now, a biweekly magazine published in English, reported that as Seoul prepared to celebrate its Liberation Day (from the Japanese) on August 15, angry Koreans continued to stage anti-Japan protests ignited by the new Japanese "textbooks that allegedly gloss over atrocities by Japanese soldiers during World War II."(11)

.....Kathleen Woods Masalski

Cleansing History, Cleansing Japan

Japan's publishing industry produced a surprising bestseller in 1998: an ultranationalist retelling of the nation's participation in World War Two, in comic book form. Cartoonist Kobayashi Yoshinori's 400-page Analects of War ( Sensron ) received a remarkable level of consumer attention in the wake of its publication, and prompted a public debate that raised questions concerning how Japan's wartime record is represented in the media. Kobayashi's hypothesis – that modern Japan's inability to take pride in the history of the war has lead to a crisis of national consciousness – echoes the arguments of the Liberal Historiography Study Group (Jiyshugi shikan kenkykai), a right-wing organization that seeks to recast Japan's wartime history in a positive and deeply nationalistic light. The organization's members publicly negate or deny atrocities committed by the Japanese military during World War Two, and propose instead a narrative cleansed of all morally problematic elements. Focusing on the themes of purity, guilt, and Japanese national identity, Kobayashi takes this reactionary narrative and offers it up in an easily digestible form, one that is well suited to tales of nationalist heroics. This approach has garnered him a large following, attesting to the appeal of both the medium and the message.
...Rebecca Clifford

The Importance of History Textbooks
in Japan and the United States

The controversy surrounding the adoption of middle school history textbooks in Japan raises the question, Why are textbooks— history textbooks in particular—important enough to fight over? Historians Laura Hein and Mark Selden tell us that "history and civics textbooks in most societies present an 'official' story highlighting narratives that shape contemporary patriotism"; "people fight over textbook content because education is so obviously about the future, reaches so deeply into society, and is directed by the state. Because textbooks are carried into neighborhood schools and homes, and because, directly or indirectly, they carry the imprimatur of the state, they have enormous authority."

.....Kathleen Woods Masalski

Telling a New Western Story

"We figure and find stories, which can be thought of as maps or paradigms in which we see our purposes defined; then the world drifts and our maps don't work anymore, our paradigms and stories fail, and we have to reinvent our understandings, and our reasons for doing things. Useful stories, I think, are radical in that they help us see freshly. They are like mirrors, in which we see ourselves reflected. That's what stories are for, to help us see for ourselves as we go about the continual business of re-imagining ourselves." (42)
....Kittredge

"It starts with broken promises. In the West, people came thinking they had been promised something, at least freedom and opportunity, and the possibility of inventing a new, fruitful life. That was the official mythology. When that story didn't come true, the results were alienation, and anomie, just like in the projects, just like in LA."
(44-45)
....Kittredge

"For the new western writers--at least for many of them and certainly for the ones I am going to discuss--the great issue and problem is the myth of the West: what that myth has meant to them and what it has done to their own lives." (57)
....Brown, Courage without Ilusions

Yet these two remarkable examples of the new western autobiography, All But the Waltz and Hole in the Sky , do not leave the reader sunk in pessimism. After reading them, one is left with both purged and purified emotions and with hope. These two books--like others in the new western autobiography--engrave a lesson of courage without illusions. That is a principal achievement of the new western autobiography: the way its authors have held to the grassroots western heritage of courage without the disabling illusions that have misled so many into failed and fruitless lives across the western dreamscape ."

......Brown, Courage without Illusions

Ransom Stoddard: You're not going to use the story, Mr. Scott?

Maxwell Scott: This is the west, sir. When
the legend becomes fact, print the legend.

from The Man who shot Liberty Valance (1962).

Stegner on the West as Hope

"...The West--and I mean the interior West of plains, mountains, and deserts--is the geography of hope, the native home of optimism, the youngest and freshest of America's regions.."
Stegner, "The Geography of Hope"

Limerick on Introducing Westernerns to Themselves

"Indians, Hispanics, Asians, Blacks, Anglos, businesspeople, workers, politicians, bureaucrats, natives, and newcomers, we share the same region and its history, but we wait to be introduced. The serious exploration of the historical process that made us neighbors provides that introduction." (349)
...Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest

Lewis on the West as Cultural Struggle

The modern American West, like the Old- and New-West, is a shifting ground that is shaped by competing groups trying to establish and protect their economic, political, and cultural dominance. The problem facing the 21st-century West is that all too often these groups refuse to recognize and accept each others' competing claims. Thus, environmentalists, ranchers, loggers, wilderness advocates, snow mobilers, immigrant workers, etc. all challenge each other's legitimacy and rights in the West. We do, in fact, know each other, but we refuse to accept each other as equals who have legitimate rights and concerns. In searching for our freedom and dreams in the West, we all too often have to challenge and undermine others' freedom and dreams.
...Chris Lewis, Ph.D.

New Multicultural Western Stories

The West is an extremely rich site for exploring the rewriting of American history as the story of interactions, often tragic, sometimes creative, among a variety of peoples. Our implicit argument, based in what is sometimes called the "new western history," is that the "multicultural West" is the only West there has ever been. This includes challenging conceptions of the frontier that have ignored or covered over the indigenous, Spanish and Mexican, and Asian/Asian American histories.
....The Multicultural West

These two books--like others in the new western autobiography--engrave a lesson of courage without illusions. That is a principal achievement of the new western autobiography: the way its authors have held to the grassroots western heritage of courage without the disabling illusions that have misled so many into failed and fruitless lives across the western dreamscape ."
.....Richard Brown

"We must define some stories about taking care of what we've got, which is to say life and our lives. They will be stories in which our home is sacred, stories about making use of the place where we live without ruining it, stories which tell us to stay humane amid our confusions." (46)
...William Kittredge

"This tradition of regionalism has influenced much of the new western history. Rejecting the idea of scholarship as neutral or objective, the new western historians have adopted the stance of social critics and reformers. In the past, they argue, are to be found the roots of a contemporary West rife with racial injustice, economic inequity, and wanton destruction of the environment. An imperfect understanding of the past, however, has too often blinded us to these problems and inhibited efforts to correct them. Only by lifting the veil of old Turnerian mythologies, the western historians argue, can society be reformed. If we are to create a more humane and just society, we must begin by taking a cold, hard look at our flawed past. "We need new kinds of heroes," says Worster, "a new appreciation of nature's powers of recovery, and new sense of purpose in this regional history, which means we need a new past."
.........Susan Neel

"This diversity enhances rather than diminishes the importance of the western environment. The West is a region where nature dominates and humans accommodate. Neither does environmental diversity deny the West its most distinguishing environmental characteristic. The West has space, vast landscapes with minimal human impact.
......Righter, "A Mosaic of DifferentEnvironments"

Kittredge, The Politics of Storytelling

"We live in stories. What we are is stories. We do things because of what is called character, and our character is formed by the stories we learn to live in. Late in the night we listen to our own breathing in the dark, and rework our stories. We do it again the next morning, and all day Iong, before the looking glass of ourselves, reinventing reasons for our lives. Other than such storytelling there is no reason to things. " (42)

"So it is deeply ironic that the Native Americans are being joined in their disenfranchisement by loggers and miners and ranchers, and the towns which depend on them. Our ancestors came to the West and made homes for themselves, where they could live independent lives. Because of their sacrifices, we in the dominant society think we own the West, we think they earned it for us. But, as we know, nobody owns anything absolutely, except their sense of who they are."(43)

"What we need most urgently, in both the West and all over America, is a fresh dream of who we are, which will tell us how we should act, a set of stories to reassure us in our sense that we deserve to be loved. We want the story of our society to have a sensible plot. We want it to go somewhere, we want it to mean something." (46)

Brown, Courage without Illusions

"Born in 1909 and growing up close to the bone of the North American West, Stegner wrote: " I grew to hate the profane Western culture, the economics and psychology of a rapacious society. I disliked it as reality and I distrusted it when it elevated itself into the western myths that aggrandized arrogance, machismo, vigilante or side-arm justice, and the oversimplified
good-guy/bad-guy moralities." 4 Of the mythic cowboy hero whose prototype is Owen Wister's Virginian, Stegner wrote that the hero had "irritated" him all his life. "I would obviously like to bury him. But I know I can't.
He is a faster gun than I am. He is too attractive to the daydreaming imagination. It gets me nowhere to object to the self-righteous, limited, violent code that governs him."5 (56-57)

"For the new western writers -- at least for many of them and certainly for the ones I am going to discuss -- the great issue and problem is the myth of the West: what that myth has meant to them and what it has done to their own lives." (57)

"Hole in the Sky is not only a searing story of a family ruined by false illusions and the inability to express love but also, interwoven with the family memoir, a disquieting environmental history of the Warner Valley. Without moralizing, the book is a cautionary tale about how illusions without love destroyed a family and how commercial values degraded an ecology and an environment. 18 Not until the members of the Kittredge family sold the ranch in the late 1960s were they able, at last, to find satisfaction in other pursuits."

Yet these two remarkable examples of the new western autobiography, All But the Waltz and Hole in the Sky , do not leave the reader sunk in pessimism. After reading them, one is left with both purged and purified emotions and with hope. These two books -- like others in the new western autobiography -- engrave a lesson of courage without illusions. That is a principal achievement of the new western autobiography: the way its authors have held to the grassroots western heritage of courage without the disabling illusions that have misled so many into failed and fruitless lives across the western dreamscape ."

Susan Neel, A Place of Extremes

"Westerners, to paraphrase Wallace Stegner, seem to need a history to match the scenery. We are intent on rooting our region's exceptionalism and significance in the land, in its vastness, its magnificence, even its harshness. Out West, it is said, nature has worked some kind of wonder, transforming the ordinary into the remarkable, the old into the new, molding us into a more audacious and egalitarian people or, depending on who is telling the tale, into a society of extraordinary villainy and rapaciousness. "

"Like the strong, steady current of the Green River, the idea of a distinctive western society shaped by a distinctive nature courses through the canyons of our imagined past. This is no less true of the "new" western historians than the old, for they too have found in nature both means and moral for the West's past."

"For the most part, the new western history takes as its starting point the idea that the West is a specific, identifiable place and that western history is properly the story of how that region was formed and reproduced over time through the interaction of diverse cultures with each other and with nature."

"Even as he wrote The Great Plains, its environmental essentialism and determinism had fallen into disfavor among geographers and historians alike. Webb also indulged in racial stereotyping, moving Indians, the Spanish, and Mexicans on and off the stage of his historical drama for the sole purpose of demonstrating by comparison the adaptive "genius" of white settlers. As for women, Webb saw the West as "strictly a man's country."

"Nationalistic, simplistic, and hopelessly mired in metaphors of racial and sexual domination, Turner's frontier thesis seems to tell us more about the ambitions and anxieties of his own age than about the realities of Euro-American settlement or, more specifically, about the history of that region we now call the West."

"Trying to understand the West from the perspective of the frontier is like viewing the scenery from a moving car -- the passing terrain is blurred and distorted. Calling the idea of frontier "abstract," "bewildering," and "unsubtle," the new regionalists insist that it is better to pull the car over, turn off the engine, and survey the vista in all its stationary detail. Focusing on region seems to give concreteness to western history, a "down-to-earth clarity, " says Limerick : Replacing frontier with region also allows historians to connect the twentieth-century West with its past. "

"The fact that in the dry West rivers are few, erratic, and often surrounded by formidable canyons has an entirely different significance to indigenous agriculturalists, His-panic pastoralists, and Anglo urban entrepreneurs. From the many meanings climate has had in the West, why select aridity, which reflects a particularly Anglo-American perception of the environment, as the region's defining feature?"

"An arid region, in this sense, is an aberrant one, a deviation from an environment of adequacy, specifically one suited for European-derived, non-irrigated agriculture. The "arid " West has meaning only in relation to the "normal" East, where the landscape is verdant, the wide rivers are traversable, and all the "customary" ways of making a life from the land are possible. Which environment is called normal and which aberrant depends entirely on who is doing the labeling. It would be just as accurate to point out the abundance of rainfall in the East, but that condition is rarely remarked on by scholars because they assume it as the norm ."

"Regionalists rightly insist that some level of generalization must be tolerated in defining the West because no region is entirely homogeneous in its physical characteristics. But such diversity would as easily warrant the conclusion that climate divides the West internally as the assertion that aridity unifies the region. What logic justifies accepting aridity as the appropriate generalization when so many events important to western history occurred in non-arid places
-- the California and Alaska gold rushes, for example, or the rise of the Pacific-Asia trade, the growth of the timber and fisheries industries, and the creation of America's first national parks and forests?"

"The danger in accommodating aridity as a generalization is that it obscures what may be a far more salient characteristic of the western environment--extreme variability..... Throughout the West, precipitation occurs unevenly over the course of widely differing annual cycles.... The West also experiences irregular wet and dry cycles, some extending over many decades. In Los Angeles, for example, the annual average is nearly fifteen inches of rain for a one-hundred-year period, but within that time span were years with as much as forty inches and as little as six. The hallmark of the West's hydrology is unpredictability and variability. 22"

Righter, A Mosaic of Different Environments

"The major virtue of Professor Susan Neel's essay is that she provides us with a fresh reminder that the American West is a region of environmental or natural extremes. This idea is surely worthy of comment. But first, a definition of the American West is in order. Historians, environmental or otherwise, will continue to debate whether the American West is a geographical place or a cultural process. But let us grant the new western history a victory, relegating the "American frontier" to process and the "American West" to place. If the West is a place, where is it, and what are its characteristics? Eschewing the many geographic spats, let us define the West as the region between the ninety-eighth meridian and the Pacific Ocean, bordered on the north by Canada and on the south by Mexico."

"According to Susan Neel, the West finds its distinctiveness in its diversity, its extreme environments, of which aridity is only one. Perhaps a more accurate description would be the "mosaic West," reminiscent of the Yellowstone landscape after the spectacular 1988 fires. The fires swept over the lodgepole pine forests, but almost miraculously and surely capriciously, the windblown inferno spared patches of wild, green groves; the result was a fascinating mosaic of different environments."

"Susan Neel advocates looking at the West in a similar fashion, as a place of geographic diversity and a region of extremes. "A region of extremes" fits nicely into my plethora of definitions."

"This diversity enhances rather than diminishes the importance of the western environment. The West is a region where nature dominates and humans accommodate. Neither does environmental diversity deny the West its most distinguishing environmental characteristic. The West has space, vast landscapes with minimal human impact. Any easterner traveling west perceives that somewhere in the middle of Nebraska (or Kansas or South Dakota ), the West begins. Just where is speculative...."

"As we re-write western history we must find the proper balance between the anthropocentric and the biocentric. In the past, people have always been on center stage in the epic of the West; nature has been the backdrop--a dramatic backdrop summoned when necessary to illuminate the human drama. The environmental historian must now move nature onto center stage."

"To return to Neel's thesis, we had best confine our narrative to human sentiments and reactions to the extreme variations of the West rather than to entrap ourselves in unfamiliar arenas. We need to tell and interpret stories illustrating, according to Neel, that "the peoples of the West have found in nature sources of delight and of terror, tools of oppression and means of maintaining human dignity." The interaction of humans and their environment is where we can be most
effective." 7