Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country

2011-11-15
Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country

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  • Author: Marsha Weisiger
  • Publisher: University of Washington Press
  • ISBN: 0295803193
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 423

Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country offers a fresh interpretation of the history of Navajo (Diné) pastoralism. The dramatic reduction of livestock on the Navajo Reservation in the 1930s -- when hundreds of thousands of sheep, goats, and horses were killed -- was an ambitious attempt by the federal government to eliminate overgrazing on an arid landscape and to better the lives of the people who lived there. Instead, the policy was a disaster, resulting in the loss of livelihood for Navajos -- especially women, the primary owners and tenders of the animals -- without significant improvement of the grazing lands. Livestock on the reservation increased exponentially after the late 1860s as more and more people and animals, hemmed in on all sides by Anglo and Hispanic ranchers, tried to feed themselves on an increasingly barren landscape. At the beginning of the twentieth century, grazing lands were showing signs of distress. As soil conditions worsened, weeds unpalatable for livestock pushed out nutritious native grasses, until by the 1930s federal officials believed conditions had reached a critical point. Well-intentioned New Dealers made serious errors in anticipating the human and environmental consequences of removing or killing tens of thousands of animals. Environmental historian Marsha Weisiger examines the factors that led to the poor condition of the range and explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Navajos, and climate change contributed to it. Using archival sources and oral accounts, she describes the importance of land and stock animals in Navajo culture. By positioning women at the center of the story, she demonstrates the place they hold as significant actors in Native American and environmental history. Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country is a compelling and important story that looks at the people and conditions that contributed to a botched policy whose legacy is still felt by the Navajos and their lands today.

Crimes Against Nature

2014-02-22
Crimes Against Nature

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  • Author: Karl Jacoby
  • Publisher: Univ of California Press
  • ISBN: 0520282299
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 348

"This Study of the Early American conservation movement reveals the hidden history of three of the nation's first parks: the Adirondacks, Yellowstone, and the Grand Canyon. Karl Jacoby traces the effects that the criminalization of such traditional rural practices as hunting, fishing, and foraging had on country people in these areas. Despite the presence of new environmental regulations, poaching arson, and timber stealing became widespread among the Native Americans, poor whites, and others who had long relied on the natural resources now contained within conservation areas. Jacoby reassesses the nature of these "crimes," providing a rich and multifaceted portrayal of rural people and their relationship with the natural world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries." "Crimes against Nature includes previously unpublished historical photographs depicting such subjects as poachers in Yellowstone and a Native American "squatters' camp" at the Grand Canyon. This study demonstrates the importance of considering class for understanding environmental history and opens a new perspective on the social history of rural and poor people a century age."--Jacket of 2001 edition

Nature at War

2020-04-02
Nature at War

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  • Author: Thomas Robertson
  • Publisher: Cambridge University Press
  • ISBN: 1108419763
  • Category : Business & Economics
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 399

"World War II was the largest and most destructive conflict in human history. It was an existential struggle that pitted irreconcilable political systems and ideologies against one another across the globe in a decade of violence unlike any other. There is little doubt today that the United States had to engage in the fighting, especially after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The conflict was, in the words of historians Allan Millett and Williamson Murray, "a war to be won." As the world's largest industrial power, the United States put forth a supreme effort to produce the weapons, munitions, and military formations essential to achieving victory. When the war finally ended, the finale signaled by atomic mushroom clouds over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, upwards of 60 million people had perished in the inferno. Of course, the human toll represented only part of the devastation; global environments also suffered greatly. The growth and devastation of the Second World War significantly changed American landscapes as well. The war created or significantly expanded a number of industries, put land to new uses, spurred urbanization, and left a legacy of pollution that would in time create a new term: Superfund site"--

The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam

2023-01-02
The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam

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  • Author: Erika Marie Bsumek
  • Publisher: University of Texas Press
  • ISBN: 1477326596
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 294

2024 Best Indigenous Studies Award, The Mormon History Association 2024 Southwest Book of the Year, Pima County Public Library A history of how the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam was built and sustained by social inequalities The second highest concrete-arch dam in the United States, Glen Canyon Dam was built to control the flow of the Colorado River throughout the Western United States. Completed in 1966, the dam continues to serve as a water storage facility for residents, industries, and agricultural use across the American West. The dam also generates hydroelectric power for residents in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Nebraska. More than a massive piece of physical infrastructure and an engineering feat, the dam exposes the cultural structures and complex regional power relations that relied on Indigenous knowledge and labor while simultaneously dispossessing the Indigenous communities of their land and resources across the Colorado Plateau. Erika Marie Bsumek reorients the story of the dam to reveal a pattern of Indigenous erasure by weaving together the stories of religious settlers and Indigenous peoples, engineers and biologists, and politicians and spiritual leaders. Infrastructures of dispossession teach us that we cannot tell the stories of religious colonization, scientific exploration, regional engineering, environmental transformation, or political deal-making as disconnected from Indigenous history. This book is a provocative and essential piece of modern history, particularly as water in the West becomes increasingly scarce and fights over access to it continue to unfold.

The North American West in the Twenty-First Century

2022
The North American West in the Twenty-First Century

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  • Author: Brenden W. Rensink
  • Publisher: U of Nebraska Press
  • ISBN: 1496230434
  • Category : HISTORY
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 418

This edited volume takes stories from the "modern West" of the late twentieth century and carefully pulls them toward the present--explicitly tracing continuity with and unexpected divergence from trajectories established in the 1980s and 1990s.

Vacationland

2013-08-30
Vacationland

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  • Author: William Philpott
  • Publisher: University of Washington Press
  • ISBN: 0295804610
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 517

Winner of the Western Writers of America 2014 Spur Award for Best Western Nonfiction, Contemporary Mention the Colorado high country today and vacation imagery springs immediately to mind: mountain scenery, camping, hiking, skiing, and world-renowned resorts like Aspen and Vail. But not so long ago, the high country was isolated and little visited. Vacationland tells the story of the region's dramatic transformation in the decades after World War II, when a loose coalition of tourist boosters fashioned alluring images of nature in the high country and a multitude of local, state, and federal actors built the infrastructure for high-volume tourism: ski mountains, stocked trout streams, motels, resort villages, and highway improvements that culminated in an entirely new corridor through the Rockies, Interstate 70. Vacationland is more than just the tale of one tourist region. It is a case study of how the consumerism of the postwar years rearranged landscapes and revolutionized American environmental attitudes. Postwar tourists pioneered new ways of relating to nature, forging surprisingly strong personal connections to their landscapes of leisure and in many cases reinventing their lifestyles and identities to make vacationland their permanent home. They sparked not just a population boom in popular tourist destinations like Colorado but also a new kind of environmental politics, as they demanded protection for the aesthetic and recreational qualities of place that promoters had sold them. Those demands energized the American environmental movement-but also gave it blind spots that still plague it today. Peopled with colorful characters, richly evocative of the Rocky Mountain landscape, Vacationland forces us to consider how profoundly tourism changed Colorado and America and to grapple with both the potential and the problems of our familiar ways of relating to environment, nature, and place.

Three Roads to Magdalena

2016-06-03
Three Roads to Magdalena

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  • Author: David Wallace Adams
  • Publisher: University Press of Kansas
  • ISBN: 0700636714
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 456

“Someday,” Candelaria Garcia said to the author, “you will get all the stories.” It was a tall order, in Magdalena, New Mexico, a once booming frontier town where Navajo, Anglo, and Hispanic people have lived in shifting, sometimes separate, sometimes overlapping worlds for well over a hundred years. But these were the stories, and this was the world, that David Wallace Adams set out to map, in a work that would capture the intimate, complex history of growing up in a Southwest borderland. At the intersection of memory, myth, and history, his book asks what it was like to be a child in a land of ethnic and cultural boundaries. The answer, as close to “all the stories” as one might hope to get, captures the diverse, ever-changing experience of a Southwest community defined by cultural borders—--and the nature and role of children in defending and crossing those borders. In this book, we listen to the voices of elders who knew Magdalena nearly a century ago, and the voices of a younger generation who negotiated the community’s shifting boundaries. Their stories take us to sheep and cattle ranches, Navajo ceremonies, Hispanic fiestas, mining camps, First Communion classes, ranch house dances, Indian boarding school drill fields, high school social activities, and children’s rodeos. Here we learn how class, religion, language, and race influenced the creation of distinct identities and ethnic boundaries, but also provided opportunities for cross-cultural interactions and intimacies. And we see the critical importance of education, in both reinforcing differences and opening a shared space for those differences to be experienced and bridged. In this, Adams’s work offers a close-up view of the transformation of one multicultural community, but also of the transformation of childhood itself over the course of the twentieth century. A unique blend of oral, social, and childhood history, Three Roads to Magdalena is a rare living document of conflict and accommodation across ethnic boundaries in our ever-evolving multicultural society. Published in Cooperation with the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies, Southern Methodist University

Red Power Rising

2012-10-17
Red Power Rising

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  • Author: Bradley G. Shreve
  • Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
  • ISBN: 080618499X
  • Category : History
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 398

During the 1960s, American Indian youth were swept up in a movement called Red Power—a civil rights struggle fueled by intertribal activism. While some define the movement as militant and others see it as peaceful, there is one common assumption about its history: Red Power began with the Indian takeover of Alcatraz in 1969. Or did it? In this groundbreaking book, Bradley G. Shreve sets the record straight by tracing the origins of Red Power further back in time: to the student activism of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), founded in Gallup, New Mexico, in 1961. Unlike other 1960s and ’70s activist groups that challenged the fundamental beliefs of their predecessors, the students who established the NIYC were determined to uphold the cultures and ideals of their elders, building on a tradition of pan-Indian organization dating back to the early twentieth century. Their cornerstone principles of tribal sovereignty, self determination, treaty rights, and cultural preservation helped ensure their survival, for in contrast to other activist groups that came and went, the NIYC is still in operation today. But Shreve also shows that the NIYC was very much a product of 1960s idealistic ferment and its leaders learned tactics from other contemporary leftist movements. By uncovering the origins of Red Power, Shreve writes an important new chapter in the history of American Indian activism. And by revealing the ideology and accomplishments of the NIYC, he ties the Red Power Movement to the larger struggle for human rights that continues to this day both in the United States and across the globe.

Indigenous Women and Work

2012-10-23
Indigenous Women and Work

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  • Author: Carol Williams
  • Publisher: University of Illinois Press
  • ISBN: 0252037154
  • Category : Business & Economics
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 323

Cover -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- CONTENTS -- List of Illustrations -- Preface Marlene Brant Castellano -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction Carol Williams -- 1. Aboriginal Women and Work across the 49th Parallel: Historical Antecedents and New Challenges Joa -- 2. Making a Living: Anishinaabe Women in Michigan's Changing Economy Alice Littlefield -- 3. Procuring Passage: Southern Australian Aboriginal Women and the Early Maritime Industry of Sealin -- 4. The Contours of Agency: Women's Work, Race, and Queensland's Indentured Labor Trade Tracey Baniva -- 5. From "Superabundance" to Dependency: Women Agriculturalists and the Negotiation of Colonialism a- -- 6. "We Were Real Skookum Women": The shishalh Economy and the Logging Industry on the Pacific Northw -- 7. Unraveling the Narratives of Nostalgia: Navajo Weavers and Globalization Kathy M'Closkey -- 8. Labor and Leisure in the "Enchanted Summer Land": Anishinaabe Women's Work and the Growth of Wisc -- 9. Nimble Fingers and Strong Backs: First Nations and Métis Women in Fur Trade and Rural Economies S -- 10. Northfork Mono Women's Agricultural Work, "Productive Coexistence," and Social Well-Being in tha -- 11. Diverted Mothering among American Indian Domestic Servants, 1920-1940 Margaret D. Jacobs -- 12. Charity or Industry? American Indian Women and Work Relief in the New Deal Era Colleen O'Neill -- 13. "An Indian Teacher among Indians": Native Women As Federal Employees Cathleen D. Cahill -- 14. "Assaulting the Ears of Government": The Indian Homemakers' Clubs and the Maori Women's Welfare -- 15. Politically Purposeful Work: Ojibwe Women's Labor and Leadership in Postwar Minneapolis Brenda J -- 16. Maori Sovereignty, Black Feminism, and the New Zealand Trade Union Movement Cybèle Locke -- 17. Beading Lesson Beth H. Piatote -- Contributors -- Index.

A Walk in the Park

2024-05-28
A Walk in the Park

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  • Author: Kevin Fedarko
  • Publisher: Simon and Schuster
  • ISBN: 1501183079
  • Category : Travel
  • Languages : en
  • Pages : 512

Two friends, zero preparation, one dream. From the author of the beloved bestseller The Emerald Mile, a rollicking and poignant account of an epic 750-mile odyssey, on foot, through the heart of America’s most magnificent national park and the grandest wilderness on earth. A few years after quitting his job to follow an ill-advised dream of becoming a guide on the Colorado River, Kevin Fedarko was approached by his best friend, the National Geographic photographer Pete McBride, with a vision as bold as it was harebrained. Together, they would embark on an end-to-end traverse of the Grand Canyon, a journey that, McBride promised, would be “a walk in the park.” Against his better judgment, Fedarko agreed to the scheme, unaware that the small cluster of experts who had completed the crossing billed it as “the toughest hike in the world.” The ensuing ordeal, which lasted more than a year, revealed a place that was deeper, richer, and far more complex than anything the two men had imagined—and came within a hair’s breadth of killing them both. They struggled to make their way through the all but impenetrable reaches of its truest wilderness, a vertical labyrinth of thousand-foot cliffs and crumbling ledges where water is measured out by the teaspoon and every step is fraught with peril—and where, even today, there is still no trail along the length of the country’s best-known and most iconic park. Along the way, veteran long-distance hikers ushered them into secret pockets, invisible to the millions of tourists gathered on the rim, where only a handful of humans have ever laid eyes. Members of the canyon’s eleven Native American tribes brought them face-to-face with layers of history that forced them to reconsider myths at the center of our national parks—and exposed them to the impinging threats of commercial tourism. Even Fedarko’s dying father, who had first pointed him toward the canyon more than forty years earlier but had never set foot there himself, opened him to a new way of seeing the landscape. And always, there was the great gorge itself: austere and unforgiving but suffused with magic, drenched in wonder, and redeemed by its own transcendent beauty. A Walk in the Park is a singular portrait of a sublime place, and a deeply moving plea for the preservation of America’s greatest natural treasure.