Remembering the Modoc War: Redemptive Violence and the Making of American Innocence

Using colonial violence and settler colonialism as organizing concepts, Boyd Cothran's case study of the Modoc tribe argues more broadly that Euro-Americans shaped their historical memory of the Indian wars in a manner that portrayed a mythological narrative of American innocence. In a six-chapter analysis of the 1870s Modoc War, Gilded Age newspapers, the late 1800s entertainment industry, capitalist expansion, and twentieth-century tourism, the author contends that the biased accounts and perspectives of non-Indians have come to dominate the memory and memorialization of certain historic events in what he sees as a neocolonial process.