American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Native Americans may resist colonial expansion in multiple ways. Some methods of resistance are direct confrontations, while others utilize subtlety. This paper examines resistance to the concept of the frontier by Native American authors, a term prevalent in settler colonial narratives connoting borders and “progress.” We claim that the term frontier is used differently by Native American authors compared to non-Native authors. The term frontier, given its centrality to American historiography, frames westward expansion and “open land” as shaping the national character. To Native Americans, the frontier ushered in a different experience. Displacement, geographic sequestering, and often genocide accompanied colonial expansion. We offer a novel approach to resistance by first employing “text mining” to identify differences in tone by Native authors. We then explore these results through a qualitative analysis for greater context. By analyzing Native-authored and non-Native-related works in the HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) for the years 1826–2009, we demonstrate that writing by Native authors qualitatively differs in its use of frontier themes, and algorithmic methods successfully detect this difference. We suggest that one interpretation of these differences is that many Native American authors subtly resist the legitimacy of the framing of colonization as understood in terms of a frontier.