The River Calls Me Home: Cold War Diplomacy, US Militarization and Environmental Justice within the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe
2023-08
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The River Calls Me Home: Cold War Diplomacy, US Militarization and Environmental Justice within the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe
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2023-08
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AbstractMy dissertation project is an examination of the militarization of reservation land, the appropriation of water, and the exploitation of tribal sovereignty of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. I argue that acquisition of the tribe’s resources for a military gunnery range and for a national damming project was fundamental to U.S. nation-building between the end of WWII and through the Cold War. My dissertation is an inherently American Studies and American Indian Studies project in regards to the various methodologies and sources I am employing. However, I also draw heavily from the fields of ethnohistory, history, and autoethnography. I have framed my project around four chapters that will move chronological in order. Beginning with a historical overview of the tribe, I shift to examining the air-to-air gunnery range and from there I move to telling the story of the damming of the Missouri River and the effects this damming project had on the land and on the people. From there I turn my attention to the community and focus on an environmental tribal program that spent years and millions of dollars in pursuit of mitigation of the gunnery range and the damming project. I end with an examination of concepts of nationhood, expressions of sovereignty and memory among the Lakota people of Cheyenne River. By placing Indian people at the center of my conversation I am investigating the manner in which American Indian people and resources were fundamental to America’s national identity. By highlighting these moments of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe our understandings of American Indian sovereignty, World War II and Cold War engagement, militarization, identity, mobility and nation to nation race-relations are greatly enhanced. The continued use of Lakota peoples resources, specifically land, on Cheyenne River have greatly influenced the development of the United States as a major player in the larger world and the sustained erasure of these histories of exploitation and disregard for sovereignty in dominant scholarship regarding public and foreign diplomacy perpetuates the misconception that Indigenous Studies is not central to postwar studies.
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University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. August 2023. Major: American Studies. Advisors: Jean O'Brien, Kevin Murphy. 1 computer file (PDF); viii, 214 pages.
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Annis, Amber. (2023). The River Calls Me Home: Cold War Diplomacy, US Militarization and Environmental Justice within the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe. Retrieved from the University Digital Conservancy, https://hdl.handle.net/11299/259615.
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