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SHAME AND GLORY "The West" holds a mirror before the double face of a nation By GARY KAMIYA "Eastward I go only by force, but westward I go free." -- Henry David Thoreau "Do not misunderstand me, but understand me and my affection for the land. I never said the land was mine to do with as I chose. The one who has the right to dispose of it is the one who has created it. I claim a right to live on my land, and accord you the privilege to live on yours." -- Chief Joseph it is the dream at the end of the trail, the memory over the next hill, the fable that we can never quite reach. It is where the sun is always setting and the future always rising. It is America's essential myth, our dream of freedom, the territory to which we are forever lighting out. It is a vast landscape, sublime and fatal, which has witnessed the most stirring and the most shameful deeds in our nation's history. It is the one story we never tire of telling ourselves. It is the West, and in his new PBS documentary Stephen Ives brings its oversized history to magnificent life. The American West is about as big a subject as one can tackle without losing all possibility of coherence. It possesses not one but hundreds of competing histories, forces one to choose between innumerable perspectives. It can be celebrated or deplored, demythologized or painted in dreamlike hues. The artist can aim at comprehensiveness, moving quickly over its limitless terrain, or linger on a face, a plowhandle gleaming in the sun, a valley. He can search for meaning in history, or, echoing Mark Twain's prefatory Note to "Huckleberry Finn," warn that "persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Ives' nine-part, 12-and-a-half-hour film succeeds in bringing together the best of all of these approaches. Like a good textbook, "The West" offers an overview of the most important events and characters that shaped the region during the fateful century -- starting with that day in 1805 when William Clark carved the words "By Land from the U States..." into a tree on the Pacific coast, to Chief Joseph's death, "of a broken heart," in 1904 -- that gave it its fame and sealed its fate. (Geoffrey Ward's "The West: An Illustrated History" is a solidly-researched and beautifully illustrated companion volume.) Like a good novel, it highlights representative lives in all their messy, moving contingency. And like a good essay, it finds a unifying thread in what would otherwise be a shapeless jumble of facts, giving a meaning -- however difficult, complex and challenged -- to all that blood, sweat and tears. That meaning is stated beautifully, and with appropriate ambiguity, by one of the show's most eloquent commentators, the nature writer Terry Tempest Williams. "It may be that the real story of the West is one of spirit," Williams says, "about how to live -- and live with a broken heart." Heartbreak is not the West's only story. This film is about cowboys, and explorers, and Mormons, and 49ers; it is about Tejas, and the Chinese, and Bleeding Kansas, and the Californios; it is about Cabeza de Vaca and George Custer and Buffalo Bill. Above all, however, it is about the saddest of all this nation's sad stories -- the ravaging of the lives, appropriation of the lands, and destruction of the cultures of the continent's original inhabitants. The unutterable tragedy of the American Indians runs through the film like a dark note, always audible, never forgotten. This wasn't necessary. Ives and his collaborators could have given one hour, perhaps two, to the stories of Sitting Bull and Chief Joseph, the massacres at Sand Creek and in the foothills of California, the endless broken promises and betrayals, the final, heartrending embrace by many natives of a religious practice, ghost dancing, based on the shockingly understandable belief that everything that had happened after the appearance of the white man had all been a bad dream. To be sure, the film's chronological structure would have made it difficult to downplay the Indian story, which inconveniently (for upbeat mythologists) lingers on until the frontier is completely settled and the story told. But for whatever reason, the filmmakers did not downplay it: I'd estimate that close to half of "The West" deals with the Indians. This may have a powerful cultural effect. With the almighty name of executive producer Ken Burns plastered all over it, many viewers will no doubt expect "The West" to be as wholesome, mistily all-American and celebratory as "Baseball," and to carry the authority of "The Civil War." If it draws the audiences it deserves, Ives' film may do for the American Indian holocaust what "Roots" did for slavery -- without the distortions, simplifications and sentimentality that marred that work. It is not its focus on the West's dark side that makes this film so remarkable, however. After all, for the last 30 years or so the old jingoist, cowboys-and-Indians model of Western history has bitten the dust as regularly as an extra falling off a Hollywood horse. What elevates "The West" beyond the sterile preachiness of much of what passes for "multiculturalism" is its refusal to reduce history to morality. What was done to the Indians cannot be forgotten (although, as a contemporary Lakota man says in one of the film's most searingly eloquent scenes, it can be forgiven), but that tragedy, infinite and ungraspable as it is, does not invalidate everything else that happened in the West. By acknowledging that the West's inspiring and noble stories are as legitimate as its dismal ones, its dreams as real as its nightmares, Ives lets the full sweep of the West, the rich and strange torrent of its history, wash over the viewer. Walking a tightrope between moral urgency and artistic detachment, "The West" manages to convey the contradictions and complexities of its fabled subject -- that region, or state of mind, which Wallace Stegner described as being "America, only more so." "The West," like Burns' acclaimed documentary on the Civil War (and his singularly ill-timed one on baseball), weds images to words with care, accuracy and occasional high artistry. As past and present mingle, visual images acquire a mysterious double significance, at once mythical and real. And like those films, "The West" uses a stirring mixture of material and narrative techniques to bring its story to life: archival photos, interviews with historians and writers, contemporary footage of the landscape, letters read by actors, a narrative voiceover, and of course, music. One of the most memorable things about "The Civil War" was its haunting, repeated violin melody, whose thin, yearning notes seemed somehow to sum up all the pathos of that great struggle. "The West," too, has such a melody -- an Indian chant, sung by a man whose cracking voice sounds as ancient and strong as the earth itself, that accompanies the majestic aerial photography with which each episode opens. The song does not sink in immediately, but by the time one has watched the entire series, it remains in the mind like a weatherbeaten boulder. And as in "The Civil War," "The West's" most powerful and moving stories are those of ordinary people -- men and women whose undramatic, all-too-human lives, told with dignity, are endowed with the majestic fatality of retrospect -- and bring a vanished era into the mind and heart. Next: The adventure of a lifetime