Montana 1948

Use these questions or activities to help gauge students’ familiarity with and spark their interest in the context of the work, giving them an entry point into the text itself.

Short Answer

Consider the phrase the “Wild West.” What images, concepts, and time periods do you associate with this phrase? How did this era shape the development of the United States as a colonizing country and the treatment of Indigenous Americans as colonized?

Teaching Suggestion: This question orients students with the theme of Wild West, particularly in the context of Racism and Law and Law Enforcement in the US in the 19th and 20th centuries. Watson’s story, which is set in the place and time of the novella’s title (i.e., Montana 1948), centers on the remote smalltown community of Bentrock. The combination of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and the rhetoric of “Manifest Destiny” in mid-19th century American rhetoric led to an increase of government-encouraged expansion of both infrastructure and commerce, ultimately resulting in the rapid development of American settlements and increased interaction with Indigenous settlements. As a result, white American colonizers used loose structures of Law and Law Enforcement to establish unequal power structures that were often based on Racism, in which local sheriffs and government officials used the “law” to take advantage of Indigenous Americans.