Beyond it all: Surveying the intersections of modern American Indian, environmental, and western histories

Abstract At the close of the twentieth century, the related fields of American Indian, environmental, and western history produced the discipline's most dynamic historiographies. For all their collective insights, however, these works rarely crossed into the twentieth century to examine modern Indians in the American West. This is no longer the case. This essay, thus, first explores the social and political conditions that produced the “New Indian History” and the “New Western History” by the 1990s, and then examines recent work that incorporates “post‐colonial” and “settler colonialism” approaches to reveal a more nuanced picture of the recent Indian past and the meanings indigenous people attach to it. Finally, the analysis turns to calls for a new historiography—labeled variously as the “indigenous paradigm” or the “writing back” approach—and details the benefits and challenges it poses to the study of history. Throughout, the essay demonstrates the fundamental connection between the ever‐changing present and our evolving understandings of the past.