New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies

12. White Mountain Apache Boundary-Work as an Instrument of Ecopolitical Liberation and Landscape Change

179 White Mountain Apache Boundary-Work as an Instrument of Ecopolitical Liberation and Landscape Change David Tomblin In 1960 D’Arcy McNickle—the famous Salish scholar, activist, and writer—predicted that American Indians will “probably use the white man’s technical skills for Indian purposes” and that “Indians are going to remain Indian . . . a way of looking at things and a way of acting which will be original , which will be a compound of these different influences.”1 This prediction came true. Perhaps one of the best-kept secrets in American history is the political resurgence of some Native American nations in the latter half of the twentieth century.2 Some nations have demonstrated more success than others, but one key aspect of many of the relatively successful cases is the assertion of control over natural resource management science and technologies on tribal lands, a phenomenon that remains relatively unexamined.3 A historical case study of the White Mountain Apache tribe’s institutional struggle to control and restore their ecocultural resources affords an excellent opportunity to explore the significance of this appropriation process as a mode of resistance to federal cultural assimilation and land dispossession policies.4 The main argument of this chapter is that the Apache institutional appropriation of Western restoration and land-management techniques provided a political platform for a liberatory form of boundary-work that proved Chapter 12 180 David Tomblin necessary to maintain cultural identity, protect tribal resources, resist paternalistic knowledge production practices, and reassert tribal sovereignty. At the same time, because of the tribe’s imposed dependence on Euro-American society, boundary-work supplied tools necessary to integrate Apache traditions with Western traditions as a strategy for persisting in the context of a twentieth-century capitalist society. This institutional appropriation process played a powerful role in reasserting a mediating influence over knowledge production practices and control over ecocultural resources on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation, redirecting them toward the benefit of the tribal community rather than Euro-American interests. Furthermore, this shift in knowledge-production practices toward developing partnerships based on politically equivalent terms with non-Apache management organizations had some positive consequences for the ecological productivity and health of the Apachean landscape. Boundary-Work and Social Justice In the second half of the twentieth century White Mountain Apaches incrementally combined elements from both Apache and Euro-American traditions to reimagine not only their ecocultural landscapes but also their political and economic systems. In this quest, Apache political and environmental organizations regulated, traversed, defended, and established four types of boundaries: political, cultural, epistemological, and geographic. Ever since the Fort Apache Indian Reservation’s political boundary was dictated to them in 1870, they have attempted to police it from the intrusion of outside interests that wished to exploit Apache resources.5 With the inception of the Indian New Deal in 1933, Apache ecological restoration and land-management efforts began to figure into the maintenance of all four boundary types. Because political, cultural, epistemological, and geographic boundaries are inherently fluid and porous, these technosciences became mediation devices between Apaches and a whole host of non-Indian interests (federal and state land-management agencies, environmentalists, academics, NGOs, and industry). Thomas Gieryn’s boundary-work concept helps frame this mediation process. Gieryn originally applied the boundary-work concept as a model to explain the self-preservation strategies of scientists. As science grew in stature , scientists developed “an ideological style” that demarcated science as superior to other forms of knowledge production. He identified three basic areas of political discourse that scientists employed to achieve that end: expansion of authority and expertise into other professional domains, monopolization of resources, and autonomy from responsibility for the unintended consequences of research.6 Subsequently, the boundary-work concept has become a very useful analytical tool for investigating the interactions be- White Mountain Apache Boundary-Work 181 tween science and society (e.g., who gets to do science); power relations that inform the disciplinary formation process (e.g., restoration ecology, wildlife management, forestry); and defining what is “normal” (e.g., baselines for restoration, sustained yield, healthy wildlife populations, the existence of a species, ecological integrity, etc.).7 However, this conceptual tool has yet to be employed to understand socially unjust distributions, applications, and consequences of science and technology. Just as boundary-work is useful for explaining the political maneuvers of scientists defending disciplinary turf, acquiring resources, or claiming autonomy, it can also be...