by Brandi Denison
“We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort
the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event
and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to
be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a
critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do,
the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the
past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in
each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests.
We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most
obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be
reconstructed.” Milan Kundera, Ignorance
Growing
up in western Colorado, my life was oriented around a variety of mountains.
When I was in town, I only needed to head towards the Grand Mesa, a large, purple flattop mountain, in
order to go home. At home, in order to go to school, I headed towards the
sandstone rock formations that make up the Colorado National Monument. In
order to visit my grandparents, I headed towards a series of hills that formed
the foothills of the Uncompahgre Plateau. To go to the post office, I turned towards the Bookcliffs. Growing up in a place with very little
entertainment for young people, we found amusement along the river, in ditches,
and in the surrounding mountains and desert. Even as I escaped what I felt at
the time to be a provincial life through books, I often made my escape outside.
Now, my
orientation is in relationship to the Atlantic Ocean, a powerful and massive
landmark that is invisible even 50 feet from it. It has taken some time for me
to get used to such a powerful, yet invisible landmark. I spend too much time
inside: writing; prepping for classes; and escaping the heat. However, in my
writing, I am never far from persistent orientation of the American West’s
mountains.
What
does an orientation towards the American West illuminate? The thing about
religion in the American West is that it is not somehow specific or even unique
to that place. After all, there are landscapes that are similar to the American
West throughout the world. Mongolia has expansive deserts and Nepal even more
impressive mountains than the American West. Other places have as much
religious diversity and a similar history of colonialization. One thing that an
orientation to the West does is disrupt the grade school narrative of American
Religious history. It also calls
attention to other issues and frameworks that can prove useful in other
settings outside of the American West. It’s not just about Indians, Catholics,
and Mormons, but also about city-building, utopian dreams, court battles
defining religion, the desire to find freedom, cultural reappropriation, land,
both as sacred place and ownership over, difference, diversity, and identity
crises.
Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about the study of religion
in the American West as an act of memory. For many of us, novelist Milan
Kundera’s words will be eternally true: “we will never cease our critique of
those persons who distort the past. . . who exaggerate the importance of one
event and fail to mention some other.” We, in this imagined community of
scholars, bloggers, and readers, stand united against narratives of American
religion that start with the Puritans arriving on the shores of the East Coast,
insisting instead that maybe the narrative starts with the arrival of the
Spanish, or that it starts with the indigenous peoples who were here long
before any European.
The American West was constituted in part by both cultural
memories of it (through Buffalo Bill shows, early Westerns, and reenactments of
epic battles) and through academic scholarship. For instance, through his Frontier
Thesis, Fredrick Turner created the definitional boundaries of what that
actually was. Scholars of religion in
the American West have inherited these orientations, both in the constant
struggle to assert that religion is important in the West and also that the
West continues to be relevant past Turner’s artificial closing. Even as this
work is rooted in evidence through academic methodologies, it is engaging
memory.
But, how might an orientation toward the American West allow
scholars of religion to account for what memory, Kundera’s poor thing, can
actually do? Individual memories are fragmented, partial, and incomplete.
Cultural memories are even more incomplete and partial, even as those memories
are spun to hide holes or lapses. An orientation towards memory in the American
West, then, reveals that the components of human identity—region, race,
ethnicity, religion—are fundamentally fluid, porous, and uncertain even as acts
of cultural memory attempt to make these identity boundaries certain.
Orientation to religion in the American West is a commitment to
address impartial memories, through an inherently unstable category, and within
an indefinable space. Even as the landmarks of that space overwhelm and frame
day-to-day movements, our commitment as scholars of the American West is to
recognize that orientations are fundamentally relational. In the words of
Jonathan Boyarin, in his The UnconvertedSelf, my hope with orientating my scholarship in the American West
is to “keep . . .the past open, or reopen. . . a chink in the past” (118).
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