The “frontier thesis” affected the documentation and retelling of Native American history because it ended the period in American history that included Western expansion as a major project and defining characteristic of the time, and as such, it ended the time in which resistance by Native Americans of reservation policy and other factors of Westward expansion was the major source of conflict in the American West and between settler colonizers and Native communities living there. The Wounded Knee Massacre being the last piece of Native American history that is taught in many history courses is problematic for a few reasons. In Grua’s paper on the memory of the Wounded Knee Massacre, he describes how the massacre was depicted as the “final battle of four centuries of Indian warfare…. The last battlefield in which the Indian shall show hostility to his white brother (45-46).” If we understand Native American history ending when direct resistance to confinement involving physical resistance and violence ended, then that provides an explanation as to why Wounded Knee is the last bit that is commonly taught and thought of as Native American history. I also think that part of why this is the end of a lot of historical documentation is that newspapers and other media outlets at the time sensationalized violence against Native Americans, and if that violence stopped (especially with a conflict that definitively ended in a victory for the United States that could be outrageously misconstrued and sensationalized by the media) that there simply wasn’t as much mainstream historical documentation on what was happening with Native communities as there was when there was violence and major events happening that was “news worthy,” so to speak.
As historians, it is important to work to look past the problem of “frontier history” because despite it being written out of mainstream historical narrative, Native history, resistance, and work towards sovereignty has continued well after frontier history “ended,” so to speak. One example of this is a continued resistance by the Blackfeet from 1895 to as recently as the 1970s to restriction of hunting in Glacier National Park as the terms of the Agreement that sold that land to the federal government guaranteed hunting rights on the land, hunting rights that were revoked by the transformation of that land from public land to a national park (Craig 2012, 235). The mainstream narrative of Glacier’s history follows the same trend of ending the telling of Native American history right around the time where Westward Expansion was deemed “over” (in fact, they rarely even mention the second agreement (1895) that sold Blackfeet land to the federal government, usually only mentioning the original treaty from 1855, but I digress). But the continued resistance and determination to stand up for treaty rights and tribal sovereignty is an important part of history and shouldn’t be excluded just because it is not able to be sensationalized by the media. Even now, things like water sovereignty and rights are a major topic of concern for Native communities, and the project of resistance and independence is not over. It is the job of historians to look into documentation that isn’t just media and make the effort to include Native context and importance in the fabric of American history.