How was frontier expansion rationalized in the Americas during the late nineteenth century? As new states fleshed out expanded national maps, how did they represent their advances? Were there any distinct pan-American patterns? The renowned anthropologist and human rights advocate David Maybury-Lewis saw the Latin American frontiers as relatively unknown physical spaces as well as unexplored academic “territory.” He invited eight specialists to explore public narratives of the expansion of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the western regions of Canada and the United States during the late nineteenth century, a time when those who then identified as “Americans” claimed territories in which indigenous peoples, who were now seen as economic and political obstacles, lived. The authors examine the narrative forms that stirred or rationalized expansion, and emphasize their impact on the native residents.

The authors illustrate the variety and the similarities of these nationalist ideas and experiences, which were generally expressed in symbolic and cultural terms rather than on simple materialist or essentialist grounds. The cases also point out that civic nationalism, often seem as inclusive and more benign than ethnic nationalism, can produce similarly destructive human and cultural ends. The essays thus suggest a view of nationalism as a theoretical concept, and of frontier expansion as a historical phenomenon.

How outdoor industry marketing promotes an image of “the wilderness” as an unpeopled haven

Marketing the Wilderness analyzes the relationship between the outdoor recreation industry, public lands in the United States, and Indigenous sovereignty and representation in recreational spaces. Combining social media analysis, digital ethnography, and historical research, Joseph Whitson offers nuanced insights into more than a century of the outdoor recreation industry’s marketing strategies, unraveling its complicity in settler colonialism.

Complicating the narrative of outdoor recreation as a universal good, Whitson introduces the concept of “wildernessing” to describe the physical, legal, and rhetorical production of pristine, empty lands that undergirds the outdoor recreation industry, a process that further disenfranchises Indigenous people from whom these lands were stolen. He demonstrates how companies such as Patagonia and REI align with the mining and drilling industries in their need to remove Indigenous peoples and histories from valuable lands. And he describes the ways Indigenous and decolonial activists are subverting and resisting corporate marketing strategies to introduce new narratives of place.

Through the lens of environmental justice activism, Marketing the Wilderness reconsiders the ethics of recreational land use, advocating for engagement with issues of cultural representation and appropriation informed by Indigenous perspectives. As he discusses contemporary public land advocacy around places such as Bears Ears National Monument, Whitson focuses on the deeply fraught relationship between the outdoor recreation industry and Indigenous communities. Emphasizing the power of the corporate system and its treatment of land as a commodity under capitalism, he shows how these tensions shape the American idea of “wilderness” and what it means to fight for its preservation.

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The Medicine Wheel built by Indigenous people acknowledges that ecosystems experience unpredictable recurring cycles and that people and the environment are  interconnected. The Western science knowledge framework is incomplete unless localized intergenerational knowledge is respected and becomes part of the problem-definition and solution process. The goal of this book is to lay the context for how to connect Western science and Indigenous knowledge frameworks to form a holistic and ethical decision process for the environment. What is different about this book is that it not only describes the problems inherent to each knowledge framework but also offers new insights for how to connect culture and art to science knowledge frameworks. Read this book and learn how you can move beyond stereotypes to connect with nature.

Considers the Native American abandonment of the South Carolina coast
 
A prevailing enigma in American archaeology is why vast swaths of land in the Southeast and Southwest were abandoned between AD 1200 and 1500. The most well-known abandonments occurred in the Four Corners and Mimbres areas of the Southwest and the central Mississippi valley in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and in southern Arizona and the Ohio Valley during the fifteenth century. In Megadrought in the Carolinas: The Archaeology of Mississippian Collapse, Abandonment, and Coalescence, John S. Cable demonstrates through the application of innovative ceramic analysis that yet another fifteenth-century abandonment event took place across an area of some 34.5 million acres centered on the South Carolina coast.
 
Most would agree that these sweeping changes were at least in part the consequence of prolonged droughts associated with a period of global warming known as the Medieval Climatic Anomaly. Cable strengthens this inference by showing that these events correspond exactly with the timing of two different geographic patterns of megadrought as defined by modern climate models.
 
Cable extends his study by testing the proposition that the former residents of the coastal zone migrated to surrounding interior regions where the effects of drought were less severe. Abundant support for this expectation is found in the archaeology of these regions, including evidence of accelerated population growth, crowding, and increased regional hostilities. Another important implication of immigration is the eventual coalescence of ethnic and/or culturally different social groups and the ultimate transformation of societies into new cultural syntheses. Evidence for this process is not yet well documented in the Southeast, but Cable draws on his familiarity with the drought-related Puebloan intrusions into the Hohokam Core Area of southern Arizona during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to suggest strategies for examining coalescence in the Southeast. The narrative concludes by addressing the broad implications of late prehistoric societal collapse for today’s human-propelled global warming era that portends similar but much more long-lasting consequences.