An interpretation of frontier texts must respond to the demand
by Gesa
Mackenthun and other scholars that “empire be added to the study
of
American culture.” As written by authors like Frederick Jackson Turner,
who placed themselves on the colonizing side of the frontier, these texts
described the frontier as “the meeting point between savagery and
civilization” where European immigrants became “Americanized,
liberated,
and fused into a mixed race.” Here was forged a “composite
nationality for the American people.” Such texts with their understanding
of the “Indian frontier ” as a “consolidating agent in
our
history” which
developed “the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman,”
helped
to construct the American identity as the “imperial self” with
its
implicitly patriarchal, Eurocentric, and colonial assumptions. Describing
the frontier as a “military training school, keeping alive the power
of
resistance to aggression,” such texts failed to acknowledge the aggressive
acts that seized the land from its original inhabitants.