What we’re watching here, in other words, is not only the end of the West. It’s the West memorializing itself, performing itself in the moment of its own ending. There are real cowboys in New Ponca, but one of the ways to make a living as a cowboy now is to become a “cowboy”—to pretend to do, for a crowd, the thing you actually do. There are Indians still living in traditional ways on tribal lands near town, and the region itself is one of the nation’s great hubs of Native American heritage—mostly for tragic reasons, but still—yet the Indians who play “Indians” for the 101 are arguing with the
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