“Some Day This Country's Gonna Be a Fine, Good Place to Be. Maybe It Needs Our Bones in the Ground Before That Time Can Come”: Necropolitics, Native Americans and the Nation in Post-War Western Cinema
Author ORCID Identifier:
Date of Graduation
5-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts in English (MA)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
English
Advisor/Mentor
Yandell, Kay
Committee Member
Cochran, Robert
Second Committee Member
Teuton, Sean
Keywords
1950s; Burial; Native Americans; Necropolitics; Representation; Western Film
Abstract
For all that Lonesome Dove's Augustus McCrae proclaims that "It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's living" (McMurtry 1985, 359), this film ultimately portrays these two states as neither separate nor mutually exclusive. Given the role burial has historically played in nation building and erasing indigenous histories, as well as encoding the national self, it may in fact matter far more not only "where you die [than] where you live" (McMurtry 1985, 359), but also how your survivors treat the earthly remains. The personal does not become less political after death. The American Western has increasingly overtly explored this fact since the 1950s, an era in which the United States struggled to re-establish its strict social heirarchies, following the mass casualties suffered by Americans of all races and ethnic backgrounds throughout the Second World War. In light of this recurrent theme, this paper will use Achille Mbembé's theory of necropolitics (2019) to read burials in films from the post-war 1950s. By exploring how political movements and historical events shifted both the visual depictions of burials and the implicit meanings attached to them within the American Western, my paper will explore anxieties surrounding the treatment by the justice system of the United States of historically “othered” communities, in the aftermath of both domestic social movements and external conflicts. I will examine the treatment of the body of the Native American other in Western cinema in light of the contemporary historical events which defined a nation struggling to cope with the trauma of World War II. Through this genre often dismissed as the most conservative of American film types, we can actually best understand the struggle to maintain and enforce the white, ruggedly masculine face of the American “self” in a changing social landscape.
Citation
Fenwick, A. F. (2026). “Some Day This Country's Gonna Be a Fine, Good Place to Be. Maybe It Needs Our Bones in the Ground Before That Time Can Come”: Necropolitics, Native Americans and the Nation in Post-War Western Cinema. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/6126
