The Center of the American West has teamed up with the National Park Service to facilitate Indigenous responses to the Zane Grey House Museum in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. The "Native Peoples and the Zane Grey Museum" project seeks to engage Native peoples’ perspectives of, experiences with, and creative responses to Zane Grey’s myths about the western United States and beyond. We use an expansive interpretive lens that fully recognizes the Native peoples Zane Grey depicted and the broader implications of Zane Grey’s work for Native peoples. What are the lasting effects of the myths of the American West and the myths of Native peoples in the United States?
Before relocating to California for filmmaking, Zane Grey's literary career took off in his home in Lackawaxen, Pennsylvania. This structure is now both a museum to his life and a vistor's center for the larger Upper Delaware Scenic & Recreational River which is admistered by the National Park Service. The NPS is looking to update the museum to include Indigenous interpretive expertise from the western American people and places of Zane Grey's legacy.
Zane Grey was a very popular writer of Western novels, where he traveled through and wrote extensively about the Southwest. Grey wrote many one-dimensional Nativecharacters, including some Hopi, Paiute, and Navajo characters. These characters were loosely based on real people Grey met in his travels.
CAW Research Trips
In late April 2023, representatives from the Center of the American West and the National Park Service traveled to Flagstaff and various sites around the Navajo Nation to meet with indigenous elders in regards to their connection with Zane Grey’s time in northern Arizona in the early 20th century. This photo gallery represents the highlights of our research trip, which became a road trip where the romanticized past blurred into present day ecological and political concerns for future generations.
