Review of Custer on Canvas: Representing Indians, Memory, and Violence in the New West By Norman K. Denzin

• Main Author: Rusted, Brian
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln 2013
• Subjects: First Nations
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/greatplainsquarterly/2484; https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/context/greatplainsquarterly/article/3484/viewcontent/Rusted.pdf

This thematic collection exploring Last Stand paintings by white and First Nations artists has three origins. As Denzin notes, it extends his 2008 collection, Searching for Yellowstone: Race, Gender, Family, and Memory in the Postmodern West, also published by Left Coast Press. Both books gather Denzin’s efforts to involve himself reflexively with the West. Spurred by an engagement with a politics of representation, Denzin locates Custer on Canvas in relation to the “performance turn” and its “new writing practices.” A third origin is personal: Denzin’s effort to engage memories that reach from childhood into contemporary, professional encounters. One in particular that provides narrative direction is a question posed by Denzin’s granddaughter viewing two Last Stand paintings at the Whitney Gallery of Western Art in Cody, Wyoming: why do they represent events differently?