But Where Were They? Race, Era(c)sure, and the Imaginary American West

Deeply embedded within the myth of the settlement of the American frontier is a systematically conscious project of era(c)sure. This imperial project necessitates and indeed perpetuates a cultural amnesia, disappearing the lives, stories, and histories of not only native and indigenous people but that of all other racial and ethnically marginalized peoples. Through a series of autoethnographic confessions interspersed with historic/academic texts, nursery rhymes, and minstrel song lyrics But Where Were They offers a personal wrestling with the complex consequences of the era(c)sure of race in nostalgia of Americas western frontier.