This paper represents an attempt to define an emerging sub-genre of contemporary Asian American literature that I am tentatively calling the Asian American neo-frontier narrative. These works portray the stories of Asian American or Asian diasporic characters as they move the nineteenth-century American West – from Missouri, to North Dakota, to Idaho, to California – and encompass a number of overlapping modes of storytelling, including historical fiction, the western, speculative or antirealist fiction, young adult fiction, and graphic narrative. As one might expect, all of these works critique the exclusionary and violent foundation that the myth of the American “frontier” was built on, providing counter-narratives that deliberately confound the nationalist and generic conventions associated with that space. The specific focus of this paper will be to analyze how these representations of the “frontier” as a space that is foundational to histories of anti-Asian violence and exclusion are in tension with the “frontier” as a space of indigenous extermination. The question that I attempt to answer is: what happens when the Asian American imperatives to grapple with nationalist structures of memorialization come up against the histories and dispossession of settler colonialism? I suggest that in disrupting the claims of the historical, these neo-frontier narratives do not confront the Native American presence in the “West.” This refusal risks transforming their own anti-historical approaches into the examples of a liberal, multiculturalism that they seek to counter.