GALA KNÖRR
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The Basque Shepherds: The Lonely Sentinels of the American West
The imagery of the American West has traditionally revolved around the figure of the “cowboy,” the quintessential hero of the classic mythology associated with this territory. The dominance of the “cowboy” archetype in Western literature and film has long distorted and obscured the roles of other essential communities in the history and culture of the American West, such as Native Americans or Chicanos, and has rendered women’s presence in this mythical territory nearly invisible. Moreover, the hegemony of the cowboy figure within the Western imaginary has for years condemned other groups involved in different ranching activities, like shepherding, to invisibility or insignificance. Indeed, shepherds in the American West have traditionally received little attention from culture or art in general. Several factors certainly did not favor the integration of shepherds into the classic Western imagery: they were often viewed as secondary figures in the westward expansion, if not as rivals to the cowboys in the struggle for water and grazing lands, and the usual association of shepherding with ethnic minorities, such as the Basques, also limited their social and cultural visibility.
Thus, when the Basque-American writer Robert Laxalt (1923-2001) published Sweet Promised Land in 1957, it can be said that the imagery of the American West began to acknowledge the figure of the shepherd, particularly the Basque shepherd, as an important element in the history of this region. The work is essentially the story of Robert Laxalt’s own father, Dominique, a shepherd in Nevada for 47 years, and it became the definitive story of Basque immigrants in the U.S., giving social, cultural, and literary visibility to those whom Laxalt would later describe in an article for National Geographic as “the lonely sentinels of the American West.” The impact of Laxalt’s work was such that, following its publication, various events solidified the recognition of the Basque role in the American West. These included the first Basque Festival of the West (1959), the prestigious Basque Studies Program at the University of Nevada, Reno (1967—now known as the William A. Douglass Center for Basque Studies), and the Basque Shepherd Monument in Reno by the acclaimed artist Néstor Basterretxea (1989). Today, 66 years after the publication of Sweet Promised Land and 100 years since Laxalt’s birth, the legacy of Basque shepherds in America remains alive and open to renewed perspectives and multicultural viewpoints, as attested by this exhibition through the evocative and questioning gaze of Gala Knörr.