Heritage tourism and New Western history: a narrative analysis of six Colorado museums

Museums are important in heritage tourism, often presenting interconnected national, regional, and local histories. This article explores how six Colorado museums present state and regional identities. I ask how these museums have attempted to incorporate insights from ‘New Western’ History into their exhibits. New Western historians have called attention to the ‘legacies of conquest’ – the peoples displaced, the cultures destroyed, and the environments damaged by Anglo-American colonization of western lands – and offered critical and dissonant ‘counter-narratives’ of the region’s past. However, the region’s heritage tourism – a significant and growing industry – has emphasized more conventional narratives of settlement and economic progress. This study applies narrative theory to analyze how these critical histories are presented to tourists in Colorado museums and historic sites. Narrative theory examines how objects, texts, and media are shaped into stories, in this case stories linking popular readings of heritage to critical understandings of past events. Six case studies indicate that critical histories are presented in some sites, but are rarely the central focus of these attractions. However, the spatial juxtaposition of narratives and counter-narratives in these museums offers insight into how critical and dissonant history is beginning to be incorporated into heritage tourism in the American West.