UC Berkeley

This dissertation argues that inland salt resources shaped processes of Indigenous place-making, settler colonization, and socioecological transformation across North America. It focuses on and features three areas of the continental interior—the Ohio River Valley, the western Mississippi River Valley, and the continental southwest—to demonstrate how salt’s deeper environmental and more recent human history structured patterns of interspecies and international consolidation, coalescence, and conflict through the settler colonial present. Indigenous nations, prospective empires, and settler colonizers alike long understood that salt—naturally manifest in the form of licks, springs, brine seeps, rivers, and lakes—was critical to their futures on the continent. For over 10,000 years, humans and animals throughout the North American interior have sought out salt resources for sustenance. Successive generations of salt-makers transformed inland salt resources into ecologically central, culturally significant, and economically productive nodes of power. Euro-American colonization did not introduce industrious ideas about salt use. Colonization did, however, initiate an unprecedented transformation of the many modes of relation tethering salt resources to their surrounding environments and the people who relied upon them for sustenance, income, and livelihood. For over a thousand years, from the start of manual salt production to the consolidation of the U.S. settler state, inland salt resources transformed and were transformed by a plurality of Indigenous nations, colonial polities, and settlers who sought to use local salt resources to secure their futures.