The recent discovery of a trove of letters from Otto Frank to American officials may have returned attention to the wartime plight of the Frank family, but, as an exhibition set to open in the American Southwest next month shows, Anne Frank has never really strayed far from the collective imagination - and not only for Jews.

From April 4 through May 11, New Mexico's Bosque Redondo State Monument, a site commemorating a tragic chapter of Native American history known as The Long Walk, will host the traveling exhibition "Anne Frank: A History for Today."

"The Anne Frank exhibit will help connect the tragic events at Fort Sumner to the larger context of human rights abuses that have taken place across the globe," said Mary Ann Cortese, president of the Friends of Bosque Redondo. While in some ways historic - Bosque Redondo is quite possibly the first Native American memory site to host an exhibition connected to the Holocaust - the joining of Native American and Jewish narratives is not entirely new. In recent decades, Native American scholars and spokesmen have often adopted the language of genocide, in some cases even the word "holocaust," in describing the Native American experience.

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Bosque Redondo's Anne Frank exhibition sheds light not only on another battle in the "memory wars," but the long and complicated history of Jewish-Native American interaction in the Southwest, a tale that stretches back to the arrival of Spanish (and converso) settlers in the 16th and 17th centuries and continues today in the small but vibrant Jewish communities of Albuquerque and Santa Fe.

According to Albuquerque's Henry Tobias, author of "A History of the Jews in New Mexico" (University of New Mexico Press, 1990), the relationship between Jews and Native Americans was historically more intimate than the ties between Native Americans and the settler community as a whole. Links between the two groups, Tobias said, are now tighter than ever. At the ceremonies surrounding the opening of a new Jewish Community Center in Albuquerque in 2000, Tobias recalled, one visiting Native American leader rose and said: "Your history is our history."

Another local historian, Stanley Hordes, welcomed the drawing of parallels between Native American and Jewish histories. "Nobody has a monopoly on being victims of genocide," said Hordes, the author of a recently-published book on New Mexico's crypto-Jews. "What happened to the Navajos in the 1860s and what happened to the Jews in the 1930s inevitably begs that kind of comparison."

But not all are so comfortable with the comparison. Literary critic and Holocaust scholar Lawrence Langer expressed some misgivings about the upcoming exhibition, arguing that the drawing of parallels between the Holocaust and other atrocities is often problematic. "To understand a particular exploitation," he said, "you have to examine it in its own context."

And then there are scholars who have argued that some Holocaust historians have been overly vigilant when it comes to the language of genocide. To further complicate the picture, there are some Native American scholars who have refused to draw parallels between Jewish and Native American narratives because of the present-day Middle East strife.

"I've had people call me and say they would like to do some sort of collaboration looking at Jewish and Dine [Navajo] historical experiences," said Jennifer Nez Detendale, a professor of Native American history at the University of New Mexico, "and I've always not wanted to do that, because of what's going on now in the Palestinian experience."

Arguably the most unusual commentator on the Jewish-Native American connection at work today is David Treuer, a writer of fiction and a professor of English at the University of Minnesota, whose father is a Viennese Jew who left Austria in 1938 and whose mother is an Ojibwe tribal judge. Perhaps because he straddles the Jewish-Native American divide, Treuer is able to find balance where others scholars see stark divisions. "The Holocaust," he said, "is unique. It's special, if you can call it that. It has its own special brand of horror. But, if anything good can come of something like that, it is by drawing attention to other ongoing processes.

"People talk about Native American genocide and holocaust," he continued, "but I think it's a bit misplaced. Just a bit. I don't think the goal was ever to completely wipe us out. ... American Indians were very much a part of America's foundational myths."

By arrangement with the Forward.