Letter to the Editor

Tell the story of today's West

Thursday, July 28, 2005

Deborah and Frank Popper

Dear Steven Spielberg:

Have we got a deal for you -- today's West!

We watched your "Into the West." We had such hopes for what you could do with a six-part, 12-hour TV miniseries that took up much of TNT's weekend prime time this summer. But we have to admit we were disappointed that you went with the 19th century West.

You're a brave guy. You've taken on projects that people thought you couldn't do well, hard subjects no one wanted to face as popular entertainment, movies like "Schindler's List" and "Saving Private Ryan." You did them brilliantly.

And "Into the West" has good things too. You show a West that is big, varied and beautiful. You offer complex people and groups, none with a monopoly on virtue, vice or violence. White settlement meant horrors and heartbreak. So much churning entailed continual leave-takings and new connections.

But while it is important to look back and tell the stories of the 19th century's westward expansion, Americans also must examine the present West and tell its stories if they are to figure out how best to go forward into the future.

So how about taking another 12 hours to dramatize today? The contemporary West offers real scope for your talents, partly because today's West is harder to dramatize than yesterday's. It is less torn by war and mayhem, more subject to abstract economic, demographic and environmental influences.

The contemporary West still features dramatic conflict, heartbreak and ingenuity, but more subtly. In the Great Plains, after that wave of upheaval you portray that moved Native Americans onto reservations and created so many towns, farms and ranches, things slowed way down. Over the past century it's been the tractors, farms and ranches that have grown. Towns and households have shrunk. So many natural resources, whether gold, silver, copper, uranium, timber or good rich soils, were exploited. What did they produce? What did they give the country? What's left?

Or that nice extended family at the heart of "Into the West" -- part Lakota, part Virginian, talented and conflicted -- what became of them? Did they leave the rural West and head to Hollywood? Who stayed behind? Who took over their homesteads and shops? Did they get to Hollywood, make it big, and then figure they needed a trophy ranch?

The leave-takings of the 19th century continue today as Plains young people depart for jobs elsewhere. Towns need their own Indian-style elders as they strive to retain their schools, churches and grocery stores, and to outwit the impersonal and now international forces of the market. In many rural areas newcomers have been few, often concentrated in industries like meatpacking that employ immigrants. Explore these struggles and encounters.

You follow the coming of the railroads, but in the 20th century interstate highways and transportation deregulation harmed many towns‚ local businesses, and no one yet knows the ultimate effects of the ongoing telecommunications changes. Some Western farmers and ranchers expect prosperity from globalization's expanding links, while others see their own demise. Everyone knows they need a more diversified economic base, but few know what it should look like or how to attract it.

Today's relations be-tween Native Americans and whites spring from the mutual atrocities and misunderstandings you depict. Reconciliation has long been needed. How is it going? What do the growing Native numbers and in some cases affluence portend? What's the relationship between the Pine Ridge reservation and nearby Rapid City?

In today's West you can find both the small-town security of shared values and the small-town danger of abundant crystal meth. There are children well cared for and children discarded, a productive entrepreneurial spirit and an equally striking but miserably soul-destroying one. This is the stuff of great movies.

The country emerged from the 19th century you show. It has lived with many of the past's ugly attitudes, often so submerged it doesn't even know they are there. But the West keeps changing and reacting, and it needs someone like you to make the country aware of what is happening. Take the project on before Oliver Stone does.

-- Deborah and Frank Popper are authors of "The Great Plains: From Dust to Dust" and "The Buffalo Commons: Metaphor as Method." Deborah Popper teaches at the College of Staten Island-City University of New York. Frank Popper teaches at Rutgers University. They wrote this essay for the Land Institute's Prairie Writers Circle, Salina, Kan.