The Last Frontier

This chapter identifies ways that American authors and filmmakers during the 1930s and 40s depict the ecological, economic, and/or cultural value of wilderness spaces and inhabitants. While Walt Disney’s Bambi (1942) celebrates the value of nonthreatening forest animals through innovative animation techniques and critiques of human carelessness and hunting, Aldo Leopold, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway acknowledge the ecological importance of nonhuman predators in their hunting stories. In his novel The Surrounded (1936), D’Arcy McNickle critiques the social and environmental legacy of the frontier by uncovering the environmental, social, and cultural effects of frontier practices on indigenous communities and lands.

6. The Native novel

‘The Native novel’ outlines the first Native American novels— John Rollin Ridge’s Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit (1854) and Sophia Alice Callahan’s Wynema, a Child of the Forest (1891). It then goes on to describe the novels of Cherokee writer John Milton Oskison, Osage writer John Joseph Mathews, Salish writer D’Arcy McNickle, and Mourning Dove as well as the Red Power writing of the 1960s and 1970s. Since the first two novels, Native writers have used the form to test various responses to North American colonialism, from violent resistance to passive acceptance. The Native American novelist seeks to mediate, often subversively, between the “novel of resistance” and the “novel of assimilation.”