This dissertation is about the problems of global population and women's fertility as constructed, circulated and contested among a network of American environmental actors. The first decade of the new millennium witnessed an upsurge in environmentalist attention to population trends, particularly in the context of widespread attention to climate change. Using ethnographic research conducted among a network of U.S. foreign aid donors, environmental, population and family planning NGO managers, and college youth activists, this dissertation asks the questions: What- and who- is driving the renewed focus on population growth as a driver of ecological crisis? What strategies are being used to drive a linked population-environment development agenda forward, and what effects do these strategies have on population science, policy, and political debates? I argue that, rather than reprise familiar neo-Malthusian arguments, these actors draw on scientific knowledge and social justice frameworks, to position population-environment advocacy in the realm of progressive politics. At the same time, population advocates increasingly enroll young activists as the newest cadre of international population advocates, through contradictory and contentious approaches to framings of race, gender and justice politics. This multi-sited project is highly interdisciplinary, drawing on conceptual approaches from the fields of political ecology, science and technology studies and medical anthropology to interrogate questions the uses of scientific knowledge production, political messaging, and racialized and gendered body politics in international population-environment advocacy.

In chapter 2, I explore the historical processes of articulation which have come together and fractured apart at particular historical conjunctural moments. It focuses on how the population `problem' and its potential solutions have been constructed scientifically and politically over time, crystallizing in the 20th century as hegemonic paradigms within international development. Chapter 3 centers on the micropractices through which college youth are trained in population-environment messaging and other advocacy strategies, focused on the strategic use of social justice discourses, technology-based advocacy, and selective use of ecological and climate science data. In this chapter, I argue that these practices are constitutive of the process of making development actors from afar. Chapter 4 analyzes the changing role of racial politics in population-environment advocacy over time, charting the ways race has moved from a zone of heated controversy to providing an opening for new representational strategies. In chapter 5, I explore the behind the scenes role of private donors whose creative financing of population projects manifests over time as a powerful form of advocacy. Chapter 6 focuses on recent developments in scientific knowledge linking population growth with climate change, arguing that the projections these data represent are productive of both novel forms of thinking about the future, as well as anticipatory interventions that help shape it. The conclusion explores the possible futures of population-environment advocacy, raising questions about the transformative potential of transnational youth organizing predicated on a radical rupture from the past.

This dissertation investigates the pathways and consequences of the commodification of ayahuasca, an Indigenous psychoactive and medicinal Amazonian plant brew, and the Shipibo healing rituals associated with its use. The “ayahuasca complex” is an assemblage of socionatural boundary beings, more-than-human relations, and interspecies and Indigenous practices that produce ayahuasca as a global commodity. I argue that the ayahuasca complex produces worlds in which both plant beings and humans participate, and which create ontological openings toward life. Providing healing services to outsiders is one way that Shipibo communities in the Ucayali region of the Peruvian Amazon have responded to the conditions of globalization and regional histories of colonial violence, racism, and resource extractivism; but these communities are still living in great poverty.

This dissertation unfolds in response to four guiding research questions: (1) how does the commodification of ayahuasca differ, if at all, from the socioeconomic and socioecological relations that have defined the extraction of other resources in Ucayali?; (2) how do Shipibo communities and healers benefit from ayahuasca tourism and what are the limitations on their ability to benefit?; (3) how does the adoption of Shipibo healing practices by outsiders affect relationships between humans and plant beings?; and (4) how can outsiders and researchers like myself work in Shipibo communities in ways that are not exploitative and extractive?

My findings are based on fourteen months of ethnographic research in Ucayali, Peru (over five years), in which I conducted interviews, ecological studies, focus groups, and participant-observation of practices associated with ayahuasca, including harvesting, cooking, and healing. I also lived and worked in Shipibo communities and became involved in NGO projects and a community-based forest management project. My work dwells at the intersection of political ecology, STS (Science, Technology, and Society), environmental history, and environmental anthropology while also emphasizing decolonial approaches and introducing feminist and multispecies lenses to this topic.

I use a political ecology framework to show that although the ayahuasca boom may appear similar to other extractive frontiers, the plants used to make ayahuasca also resist commodification in certain ways and create their own particular economic pathways that do not conform to usual commodity circuits. Nonetheless, as with other extractive economies, resources flow northward to rich countries through the growing ayahuasca commodity web. Although the commodification of ayahuasca does open up channels for resources to flow back to Shipibo communities, benefits and power continue to be concentrated in the North, and Shipibo communities are constrained by ongoing structural racism from capitalizing on the commodification of ayahuasca.

I find that a legacy of colonial exploitation and extractivism still structures racialized hierarchies in Ucayali and globally, which constrain Shipibo healers’ ability to benefit from capitalist/colonial systems of power. However, ayahuasca’s particular relationships with humans, both material and cultural, causes it to behave unusually as a commodity. This dissertation reveals that plants themselves are important actors in commodity networks. I argue that as the ayahuasca complex moves through capitalist and reductionist frameworks, plant-human relations are altered in such a way that plant agency is constricted. My work draws from the literature on political ontology to understand relational practices as constitutive of worlds. Ayahuasca’s relationship with humans, therefore, is constituted through specific practices that shift as they move through different ontological framings and take on new meanings, values, and configurations of power. I focus on power, knowledge, and healing, as three attributes that are associated with ayahuasca, and use this as an analytic to show that these attributes become unraveled and humanized as ayahuasca is recontextualized. However, new articulations and openings are also created as plants and humans, Shipibo healers and outsiders engage in new types of collaborative worldmaking practices.

In March 2011, the world watched as Burma’s first civilian-led government in six decades took office. The transition of power in Burma brought hope for an end to crippling poverty and the world’s longest running civil war. In the resource-rich forests of Burma’s uplands however, the story was not one of peace, but of war continued by other means. The “war to rule” – the fight to bring rebel frontier landscapes and ethnic minority populations under control of the lowland state – continued, and this time the embrace of markets and foreign capital started to accomplish what a century of counter-insurgency was never able to achieve. This dissertation summarizes nine years of study on the agrarian political ecology of violence and state-making in northern Burma’s rebel frontier from the end of the Cold War in the late 1980s to the present day. In areas once dominated by drugs, rebels and warlords, land has turned to capital, and battlefields to marketplaces. These agrarian transformations began as military counter-insurgency, using direct violence against ethnic minority populations, morphed into a form of economic counter-insurgency using a combination of physical force and market reform during the ceasefire era. Land deals located in rebel territories created state property regimes, making state territory and state subjects where previously ethnic minority rebel governments held sway.

This dissertation examines the outcome of Burma’s celebrated opening to global capital in zones under both ceasefires and renewed civil war in two particular ways. First, I examine how political violence embedded within the structures of Cold War legacies became integral to the nature of capital accumulation. Second, I look at how turning land into capital can act as its own sort of battle on behalf of the military and its statecraft. The case studies taken together reveal how turning land into capital has nationalized natures and consolidated state territorial power and authority in the rebel frontier. These violent agrarian changes have set the stage for the post-colonial state to exclude certain racialized populations from the state’s imaginary of the nation.

In a process I call “ceasefire capitalism,” I examine the production of three resource commodities to demonstrate the ways that the spatial placement of land deals and the allocation of land concessions to military cronies and former warlords helped achieve with the market what military force never fully did. Through case studies on rubber, corn, and timber investments, I examine an assemblage of three techniques, processes, and practices that operate together to build frontier state power. First, these resource investments resulted in state territorialization by privatizing, registering, mapping, taxing and physically occupying land and then allocating those territories to loyal Burman state subjects and companies. Second, I demonstrate the ways in which ethic minority populations have been differentially conceived and governed in relation to their land and resource uses and to the political territories they inhabit. Third, I examine how the rule of law – especially efforts to enforce notions of “environmental crimes” – is used as a discursive cover and a weapon to extinguish rebel group activity by denying ethnic rebel governments’ agribusiness and timber revenues.

The first part of the dissertation demonstrates how contemporary land deals rearticulate Cold War political violence through the means of the market. Chapter 2 traces the making of Burma’s early post-colonial state through the government’s reliance on para-militaries who held together the fractured nation in the midst of widespread ethnic-based and communist insurgency. As the Cold War became more pronounced and the drug trade mushroomed starting in the 1960s, Burma’s military again relied on para-militaries to help quell rebellion. The military enticed these ethnic strongmen to side with the state and fight rebel groups in return for unfettered tax and trade in the opium economy. After the end of the Cold War and socialism in the late 1980s and the subsequent rise of China in the region, Chapter 3 details how generals applied these counter-insurgency strategies within the new context of market transformation. Land and resource concessions offered financial rewards to national “cronies” and provincial strongmen for their service to the military. Using land deals to entice ex-rebel strongmen and cronies to work as counter-insurgency agents effectively commercialized counter-insurgency. My study of contemporary Chinese cross-border land deals is set within this legacy of political violence.

The second overall dissertation claim is how the Burmese state’s policy to “turn land into capital” and the implementation of China’s opium substitution program in northern Burma continued to wage war in ethnic territories by other means. In the three empirical field chapters I examine natural resource governance regimes and efforts to turn battlefields to marketplaces in armed territories in Shan State and Kachin State. As the Cold War came to an end in the late 1980s, the governments of Thailand and China convinced Burma’s military to grant them access to natural resources in the borderland territories then controlled by ethnic-based rebel groups. Militarism and markets worked together with Burma’s nascent state-making entrepreneurs: national crony companies, provincial strongmen, town moneylenders, and village elites. Chapter 4 highlights the two land laws that rolled out in 2012, which effectively carried the so-called paddy nation into the upland ethnic minority forest frontiers by turning government-labeled “wastelands” into private property. In Chapter 5, I show how these same wastelands were transformed into smallholder fields of corn, but with starkly different economic effects among households. Many poor households in northern Shan State lost their land to ethnic Chinese brokers in towns and state-backed elites in their villages. In Chapter 6, similar dynamics were at work in the forest areas of Kachin State. Despite holding onto forest territories during war-time, under the ceasefire the Kachin rebel group lost their guerrilla forests to regional leaders’ logging and agribusiness concessions and road construction permits granted by the military. The three case studies collectively illustrate how the “repertoire of rule” in Burma enlisted state-like elites, Chinese capital, and the rule of law to turn land into capital and subsequently push rebels further into the forested mountainous margins.

The third main argument advanced in the dissertation is how commodifying nature and turning land into capital opened new pathways for violent forms of state-building and subject-making in the upland rebel frontier. Land deals, processes of racialization, and the “rule of law” built state territories and state subjects out of what I call the borderlands’ “armed sovereignties.” Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 pointed to the legacies of racialized rule in how the military state governed in the lowland paddy nation comprised of majority Burman Buddhists, versus rule by war in the non-Burman, predominately Christian upland forest frontier. Rubber estates profiled in Chapter 4 present cases on how agribusiness contributed to state territorialization and subject-making. Agribusiness concessions demarcated property under state-like armed authorities, and subsequently erased customary claims to the area by farmers who were more sympathetic to rebel governance. Concessionaires built roads, and police forcibly removed villagers who were thought to be associated with rebel groups; sometimes they were resettled into new roadside strategic hamlets. Burman Buddhist landless migrant laborers often moved into the area seeking to work on the plantations. The roads, para-military landlords, state property, removal of ethnic minority villagers, and monocultures cultivated a landscape more conducive to eradicating rebellion. Only by enlisting foreign capital and liberalizing the land and resource sectors has the Burman Buddhist paddy nation made progress in enclosing the upland rebel frontier.

Abstract

Rethinking the Resource Curse:

Natural Resources and Polywar in the Ituri District, Democratic Republic of the Congo

By

Dan Fahey

Doctor of Philosophy in Environmental Science, Policy and Management

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Nancy Peluso, Chair

This dissertation examines the people, events and processes that contributed to the onset and duration of war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with a focus on armed conflict in northeast Congo's Ituri district. Building upon theories about the typology of war and critically engaging literature that depicts Congo's wars as civil wars, I argue that war in Congo was a polywar of numerous internal and international conflicts taking place in the same geographic area. The concept of polywar helps to make sense of how several disparate armed conflicts coalesced in 1996 to produce a regional war that absorbed pre-existing conflicts and spawned new wars. One such new war started in June 1999, when a relatively minor dispute in Ituri escalated into a major war that killed 60,000 people before it ended in November 2007.

Two natural resources - gold and land - figured prominently in war in Ituri, although in ways anomalous to conceptions of the resource curse equating resource abundance with increased risk of civil war. I argue that Ugandan interests in Ituri's gold were more important than internal Congolese interests in explaining the onset of the second Congo war in 1998, while land disputes were tangential to the local struggles for political and economic power that produced the brutal inter-communal "war within the war" in 1999 in Ituri. This dissertation provides new insights into how local, regional, and international interests in natural resources can contribute to the onset and duration of war.

This dissertation demonstrates how historical patterns of governance over people, territory, and mineral resources intersected with more recent struggles for political and economic power to produce war. The interaction of space, natural resources, and power helped to launch and to sustain war in Congo and in Ituri, but these links also provide insights into ways to transform conflict to produce peace and security for the Iturian and Congolese people.

In the first half of 2009, a highly controversial public debate emerged in Vietnam over government plans to mine bauxite in the remote upland regions of the Central Highlands. Many and diverse persons and organizations spoke out vociferously against these plans. They included, among others, government scientists, artist–intellectuals, domestic reporters, activist bloggers, religious leaders, overseas Vietnamese, and retired high level state officials, including no less than the iconic military leader of the anti-colonial revolution and “wars of independence”, General Võ Nguyên Giáp. Their means for engaging state authorities on bauxite mining were also many and diverse. They included organizing workshops and seminars, publishing articles in the domestic press, writing open letters and petitions, posting information and commentaries online, and, in a few exceptional cases, demonstrating publicly, distributing “no bauxite” T–shirts, and filing a lawsuit against the Prime Minister. The critiques raised against bauxite mining were also wide–ranging. While early discussions emphasized a wide range of social and environmental impacts of bauxite mining, these discussions quickly became embroiled with such divisive issues as national security, Sino–Viet relations and, not least of all, the relations of the communist party to the Vietnamese people.

This widespread opposition to bauxite mining generated one of the most significant domestic confrontations with the party–state since at least the Vietnam War. This dissertation provides a detailed ethnographic examination into this controversy and the different groups, people and processes that made it happen. It argues that the bauxite mining controversy signaled the emergence of strong “political cultures of opposition” in contemporary Vietnam. Political cultures of opposition are significant for their capacity to bring many and diverse groups and processes together and translate their diverse grievances into a common opposition to the ruling regime. As such, they can also signal a potentially pivotal moment in processes of broad socio–political transformation. The research for this dissertation is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, while I was living in Hanoi, Vietnam, from 2009 to 2011. It comprised in–depth and semi–structured interviews with sixty different informants, whom I interviewed on nearly one hundred distinct occasions; the collection of hundreds of different types of texts that were generated from the bauxite mining controversy; and participant observation in various settings.

Who controls the underground, how, and with what consequences? National resource management policies worldwide maintain that subsurface resources should be owned by states and extracted by permitted industrial firms. However, a rapidly growing number of small-scale miners across the globe challenge this longstanding governance maxim. They insist that mineral deposits are resources that should be open to direct use by local people. Today, an estimated 134 million people spanning 80 countries depend on this use for their livelihoods. In this dissertation, I examine an increasingly common form of resource conflict that has emerged from this context: the juxtaposition of, and competition between, large-scale and small-scale gold mining.

Drawing on twelve months of ethnographic research, I explore the history, dynamics, and consequences of competing claims to gold between industrial and small-scale mining. I examine the case of Pongkor, a mining region located in upland West Java just outside Indonesia’s massive Jabodetabek metropolitan area. In Pongkor, the state-owned mining company, Antam, and thousands of independent, technically illegal, miners have competed over the same gold deposits for more than twenty-five years. Antam insists that it alone holds legal rights to local minerals, but nearby residents have challenged this authority, claiming that informal extraction has benefited the community more than the company ever has. In my analysis, I complicate the outward appearance of this environmental “conflict,” showing the many ways Antam and informal, small-scale miners are entangled. Together, they have co-produced Pongkor’s overlapping extractive landscape—a space in which competition over gold has transformed livelihood strategies, labor dynamics, modes of governing territory, personal identities, and regional politics.

I describe these processes of transformation and their uneven effects on the people who live and work in Pongkor through five interlinked chapters. I focus especially on two groups of mining workers: Antam’s employees and small-scale miners. In Chapter One, I dive into Pongkor’s history, arguing that present conflicts between Antam and small-scale miners are rooted in earlier efforts by the state and industrial mining operations to order and extract profit from the region. In Chapter Two, I examine mining labor in Pongkor. I describe the social organization of local gold production, argue that small-scale miners are increasingly differentiated, and demonstrate that insecurities also plague industrial mining workers. I move underground in Chapter Three to examine how the materialities of the subsurface have shaped competing territorial projects in intersecting small-scale and industrial mining tunnels. By analyzing various ways of accessing, navigating, and knowing the subterranean, I demonstrate the specific, three-dimensional challenges entailed in maintaining and contesting vertical territory. In Chapter Four, I trace the movement of labor, capital, and information between Antam and small-scale miners and detail the interpersonal connections that tie them together. These forms of everyday entanglement blur the boundary between industrial and small-scale mining, undermining the discursive distinction that the state-owned company attempts to construct. Finally, in Chapter Five, I examine the battle over hearts and minds in Pongkor. Though Antam attempts to shape local residents into subjects amenable to corporate extractive development and to steer them away from unlicensed resource use, many have instead become politically active advocates of small-scale mining. I argue that the identities of all miners, both corporate and informal, in Pongkor have been remade in the process.

Globalization, many now acknowledge, is characterized by disconnection as much as by connection. Capital “hops” across various hubs of development, bypassing underdeveloped spaces altogether. Yet between zones of intensive development and those areas entirely “left behind” are the places that straddle the difference. Northeastern Madagascar provides a unique example. Through its illicit trade in endangered rosewood, this remote region of Madagascar is tied to the global cosmopolitan centers of Chinese consumption and Western conservation, despite its extreme lack of development outside of these basic connections. China sends thousands of ships to the undeveloped shores of northeastern Madagascar to pick up rosewood fresh from the forest in order to fuel a growing demand for classical furniture, while the United States and Europe fund a “rosewood task-force” to fight against the trade. The equivalent of over a billion US dollars has been channeled into Madagascar to finance either rosewood conservation or logging in an area where most make less than a dollar a day.

This dissertation uses the case of rosewood, as it travels from the Malagasy forest to the modern Chinese home, to explore emerging global resource dynamics. I find that the rosewood logging crisis has not only transformed the forests of northeastern Madagascar, but has also contributed to the political rise of a group of local rosewood traders with direct ties to China. These elite traders now ride the wave of Chinese demand for rosewood, gaining new political heights within the Malagasy government in a power grab the international community has yet to fully appreciate. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world in China, global financial speculation has reinvented classical rosewood furniture into a new form of speculative investment. Certain species of rosewood have become worth nearly their weight in gold. Paradoxically, environmental restrictions imposed for the protection of these species often exacerbate the speculation, driving Chinese importers deeper into the forest to satisfy the booming market.

As the world’s most trafficked endangered wildlife, rosewood serves as a powerful symbol of wider struggles for resources as they unfold across the globe. While often portrayed in terms of an East-West tension, the divergent global demands to cut or conserve rosewood demonstrate not the stark contrast of an increasingly bifurcating global order, but rather an emergent space of global connectivity that complicates binary understandings of East and West while simultaneously speaking to the reality of these geopolitical imaginaries. Taken altogether, the case reveals the paradoxical reality that those closest to global resources benefit least from their extraction and, conversely, that places that seem to be furthest removed from larger clashes in the global system can become one of the primary arenas of their unfolding.

In 1986, the New Zealand government implemented one of the world’s first nationally comprehensive private fisheries management systems, or Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) systems. However, complete implementation was only possible after Māori groups agreed to formally renegotiate their Treaty and Aboriginal Title rights to fisheries. These negotiations resulted in the internationally acclaimed 1992 Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act. In the Settlement, Māori groups obtained commercial fishing rights in the form of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs). They also received subsistence fishing rights, and later, customary governance rights. Today, Māori groups collectively own some 50% of the nation’s Individual Transferable Quota. This should give them unprecedented formal control over national fisheries and related fishing revenues. Yet, few Māori can make a living by fishing. Māori groups’ efforts to establish commercial fishing operations and to govern fisheries have been unsuccessful in addressing the uneven development seen in New Zealand’s fisheries and Māori communities. This puzzle—of how an indigenous group can hold rights to valuable commercial and subsistence resources, but be unable to fully benefit from them—is what underlies the histories told here.

In this dissertation, I identify the barriers blocking Māori fishery management and precluding Māori from realizing the benefits that ITQ ownership should bring them. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research and extensive interviews in New Zealand’s South Island, with Māori and non-Māori fishers, processors, tribal leaders, scientists, and state regulators, I argue that conceptions of property and sovereignty are at the heart of these problems. In the Settlement, Māori groups were not granted sovereignty over natural resource access and trade arrangements. Rather, they have been expected to re-organize hundreds of years of practices to meet entirely new conditions in the current political economic regime. They must also adapt their management strategies to additional restrictions imposed by the government on their fisheries. While the Fisheries Settlement granted property and governance rights to Māori groups, the state retains authority over how, when, and where these property and governance rights can be implemented. While Māori are expected to comply with the “full and final” condition of the Settlement, the New Zealand government continues to change the physical, social, and legal environments within which Māori can operate their fishing rights.

Māori groups’ restricted control over their fishing practices and rights—the barrier to their development—is made visible in examining the effects of state regulations imposed after the 1992 Settlement. In this dissertation, I analyze three policy, ecological, and practical contexts within which the New Zealand government has created barriers that constrain Māori access to the benefits from the fisheries in which they hold legal rights. First, fish processing regulations have restricted Māori fishers’ access to markets, even though they hold the required quota rights needed to sell their fish. Second, government subsidies and programs supporting predominately non-Māori dairy farming operations upstream from Māori fisheries have intensified production and degraded water quality downstream, negatively impacting fishery sustainability and development. Third, the government’s establishment of new marine reserves in particular regions has legally excluded Māori from fisheries they previously managed and utilized for subsistence. These findings demonstrate that the creation and allocation of private property rights to indigenous groups, without granting them concurrent authority to amend the regulations affecting the broader economic and ecological contexts in which these rights are realized, is unlikely to redress the consequences of their dispossession from land and marine resources.

This dissertation examines the start of a new era in the history of biodiversity conservation. While new parks, nature reserves, and other conservation areas are being created all over the world, many older parks have lost funds for continued management. Waza National Park in northern Cameroon, is one such site. I analyze the effects of a crumbling fortress conservation area and demonstrate that the absence of authority within it has been devastating to both the surrounding populations and the animals previously protected by the park. Farmers and pastoralists in the region are exposed to physical violence and food insecurity on a par with those faced by those evicted in the early years of park establishment and an open access situation has taken hold. I locate these problems of park management in the region's history, tracing the articulations of territory, access, governance, and subjectivity from the precolonial period.

The creation of the Waza protected area was an act of enclosure as well as a form of state territorialization. Before the creation of this reserve, the territory that became Waza was governed by sedentarized village leaders under a larger system of indirect rule by German and French colonials. Before German colonialism, local people had managed the space for farming, pastoralism, fishing, and other subsistence activities. With the French colonial government's creation of the reserve in the 1930s, the space was violently transformed, becoming a strictly governed protected area. Local people's access to and control over land and natural resources were lost and they were evicted from the Waza Protected Area. The reserve was both a symbol of colonial power in the region, and an economic resource for the French administration. Subsistence users and former residents were legally relegated outsiders as squatters, poachers, and thieves within protected area limits. The maintenance of this enclosure was continued by the independent Cameroonian government until the 1990s.

The lines between those the government administrators construed as insiders and outsiders were not as circumscribed in everyday practice as they were in French and Cameroonian law. Though local residents had no formal rights to their former village territories, they maintained access. Locals deployed gender, ethnic, spatial, and political subjectivities to achieve an insider status that afforded them access to park resources. Outsiders, generally users from areas distant to the protected area, were less able to negotiate access and were targets of enforcement and often subjected to violence if they transgressed the park's limits. Alliances were formed, however informally, between locals and park guards, with the effect of protecting the park's resources from certain subjects and not others.

Due to economic crisis, changed presidential priorities, and structural adjustment projects, state-led park management began to wane in the 1990s and NGOs took on park management responsibilities. In the early 2000s as global conservation discourses shifted their focus from biodiversity to global warming, these NGOs left the park and management declined.

Waza National Park became an open access space with all the attendant wildness associated with such a status. Local leaders were unable and unwilling to defend this space and the animals within. Waza National Park's empty and ungoverned territory has also created an ideal spot for criminals to use as a base of operations for kidnapping, murder, and theft causing local people to fear for their physical security.

The case of Waza National Park illustrates the problems that arise when conservation is imposed from the outside without real participation by local people. The promoters of protected areas profess extensive commitment to control of the boundaries, legal and physical, created by the initial enclosures. Without either the institutionalization of more viable long term management structures, or local engagement in and benefit from the process from the start, the goals of both biodiversity preservation and community well-being cannot be guaranteed.

This dissertation analyzes the changing relationships between science, technology, and scenery under conditions of ongoing U.S. settler colonial occupation in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. Based on over fourteen months of multi-sited fieldwork, I examine the cultural and scientific making of the largest scenic area in the U.S.: the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. The 1986 passage of the National Scenic Area Act (NSAA), a highly contested model of multi-state environmental governance, marked a national first for scenic preservation in Oregon and Washington. The NSAA formed a joint commission charged with land use planning and economic development across 292,000 acres of rural, urban, and forest service land. The Gorge is now globally renowned as an eco-playground, re-made by tourism and tech sectors after decades of reconfiguration to accommodate hydropower and industry. Columbia River Treaty Tribes and Columbia River Indians continue to live, fish, govern, and hold ceremony in a landscape materially and geopolitically (re)spatialized by U.S. government territorializing projects of occupation and extraction. In the Gorge, the scientific charting of wildlife and geology, legal and physical enclosure of land, and channelization and damming of river rapids have served as instrumental projects of settlement and capitalist expansion. I argue that late 19th and early 20th century colonial scientific and cultural visions of the Gorge persist in everyday politics, still dispossessing Columbia River Treaty Tribes by enclosing their homelands and political economies.

My objective is to demonstrate how sciences and technologies have enabled and obscured U.S. colonial structures of land control from the nineteenth century into the present. I analyze an archive documenting cartographic practices, scientific and commercial reports, cultural texts and images, and natural resource management plans through which the Gorge has been constructed as a national scenic site, all the while enacting and masking these mechanisms of colonial control. I read this archive against the grain to denaturalize U.S. claims to land sovereignty to facilitate seeing beyond its imperial claims to political power. I foreground Indigenous persistence by analyzing oral historical texts, legal testimonies, letters, and cultural texts produced by Columbia River Treaty Tribe members and Columbia River Indians. I show how mutually constitutive processes of aestheticization, scientization, and recreation have figured prominently in making the Gorge’s “scene,” arguing that scenery has emerged as a historical category that is both cultural and material. “Routing the Scenic” offers a critical, anti-colonial history of the present wherein the politics of “seeing” and “scene” are revealed as mobile practices of settler territorialization.

In Chapter One, I examine visual representations of landscape produced in and through the expansion of U.S. industry, and railroads in particular, through the Gorge. By simultaneously analyzing cartographic land surveys, the historic landscape photos by Carleton Watkins, and railroad boosterist brochures, I argue that the construction of what comes to be known as “Scenic Value” predates the passage of the National Scenic Area Act (1986). My analysis exposes layers of repeated violence, sanctioned by the U.S. government, against Columbia River Indigenous communities. In Chapter Two, I analyze selected archeological narratives, a natural history museum proposal, and a government guide to scenic accounting. Beyond the spectacular scenery, the Gorge became a site of salvage and national heritage in natural history and archeology. Chapter Three turns to the inundated Wy’am (Celilo Falls) and the ways that a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sonar survey of the riverbed was variably enrolled in both bolstering settler innocence and imagining Indigenous futurities. I show that “seeing with sound"—from state sonic cartography to a poem by Elizabeth Woody—is a fraught political process with the potential to both obfuscate and assist Indigenous claims to land. Chapter Four engages with the Bonneville Fish Hatchery and its living mascot, Herman the Sturgeon. Using archives from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and news stories about sturgeon and “stings,” I show how seeing-underwater renders technical the deeply political questions surrounding river management, with Herman himself occluding the ecological devastation of the hydropower infrastructure on the Columbia. Chapter Five focuses on the design and use of the ScanEagle’s thermal imaging capacities, shifting between infrared aerial surveillance for fighting fires, “terrorists,” and wildlife poachers. The ScanEagle case demonstrates the reinforcement, reconfiguration and rupturing of settler ocularcentrism, extending from the Gorge and reaching well beyond the National Scenic Area.