UC Berkeley

Checkerboarding the Desert is an ethnography of the landownership checkerboard, the spatial technology that defines California’s East Mojave Desert. It elaborates the politics of land through examining contemporary projects of environmental conservation and cultural and historic preservation in eastern San Bernardino County. By pointing to the desert’s checkerboarding, I examine the legal, financial, and cultural processes that make and unmake land into alternately owned, non-contiguous one-mile by one-mile sections. Drawing on more than two and a half years of fieldwork with the Native American Land Conservancy, the Mojave Desert Land Trust, and others involved in contemporary land management in the desert, the study tracks how this checkerboard and its property lines matter.

I argue that the American Dream and its concomitant idea of property failed in the California desert, where a large grant of checkerboarded lands to the transcontinental railroad was intended to promote settlement and profit through sale. The checkerboard was conceived as a project of American Empire that was supposed to erase its tracks as it transformed the desert into a landscape of private property and picket fences. But the checkerboard remained unsold; it persisted for more than a century, even as few marks of the checkerboard appeared on the ground. The mismatch between its lived reality and legal persistence enabled the continued presence of Chemehuevis and Mojaves on its lands, and for the later repossession of Mamápukaib by the Native American Land Conservancy. The checkerboard became the enemy of conservationists and land managers in the late twentieth century as it enabled extraction and destruction in a landscape that some considered a wasteland without value. This study takes the checkerboard as a starting point to understand the East Mojave not only as a wasteland where development failed, but rather as a gameboard that sets the conditions of contemporary environmentalism and historical preservation efforts. Through examining contemporary efforts to save the desert from development, extraction, and the desecration of sacred sites, I examine the complex relationships between Native American peoples and settler society. In so doing, this dissertation aims to contribute to scholarship on the intersections of Native American Studies and settler society, the legal and financial aspects of contemporary environmentalism, and the politics of land in the rural United States.