Foreword

ix

Acknowledgments

xiii

Introduction: “I was indigenous and…they made me indigent”: Colonialism and New Western Narrative

1

Western American History as Colonial Palimpsest

2

New Western Revisionism

7

Autobiographical Conventions in New Western Narrative

10

Chapter 1: Historical Erasure and Recovery in Gretel Ehrlich’s The Solace of Open Spaces and Janet Campbell Hale’s Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter

13

Autobiographical Adaptations of the Western in The Solace of Open Spaces

13

Refiguring Legacies of Personal and Cultural Dysfunction in Bloodlines: Odyssey of a Native Daughter

26

Chapter 2: Haunting Anxieties and Synecdochic Selfhood in Annick Smith’s Homestead and Simon Ortiz’s Fight Back: For the Sake of the People, For the Sake of the Land

43

The Contradictions of a Western “Eden” in Homestead

43