Whitson, Joseph2022-08-292022-08-292020-04https://hdl.handle.net/11299/241344University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. April 2020. Major: American Studies. Advisors: Jean O'Brien, Kevin Murphy. 1 computer file (PDF); vii, 253 pages.“#Explore: Outdoor Retailers, Indigenous Activists, and the Digital Battle over Public Land in the United States,” uses digital marketing, activism, and representations of public land to analyze the impacts of the outdoor retail industry on Indigenous sovereignty and Indigenous response to and engagement with the industry. Drawing conceptually and methodologically from Indigenous studies, new media studies, and environmental history, this project interrogates the ramifications of commercially driven conservation and public land policy for American Indian treaty rights, resource sovereignty, and cultural preservation. It positions social media as a space of ambiguity, revealing how Indigenous people challenge these representations and respond to these companies. I pay special attention to how Indigenous people unite western and traditional forms of activism and knowledge production to construct alternative narratives, adapting tools historically used against their communities - including corporation structures, social media, and political lobbying - to work for positive change. I argue that through their digital marketing and advocacy, the outdoor retail industry is complicit in settler colonialism, using social media to claim space in ways that erase Indigenous presence and invalidate their legal, cultural, and historical rights to land, while at the same time creating space for dissent.enActivismMarketingPhotographyPolitical EcologyPublic LandsSocial MediaThesis or Dissertation