Routing the Scenic: technologies of occupation and environmental culture in the Columbia River Gorge

This dissertation analyzes the changing relationships between science, technology, and scenery under conditions of ongoing U.S. settler colonial occupation in the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. Based on over fourteen months of multi-sited fieldwork, I examine the cultural and scientific making of the largest scenic area in the U.S.: the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area. The 1986 passage of the National Scenic Area Act (NSAA), a highly contested model of multi-state environmental governance, marked a national first for scenic preservation in Oregon and Washington. The NSAA formed a joint commission charged with land use planning and economic development across 292,000 acres of rural, urban, and forest service land. The Gorge is now globally renowned as an eco-playground, re-made by tourism and tech sectors after decades of reconfiguration to accommodate hydropower and industry. Columbia River Treaty Tribes and Columbia River Indians continue to live, fish, govern, and hold ceremony in a landscape materially and geopolitically (re)spatialized by U.S. government territorializing projects of occupation and extraction. In the Gorge, the scientific charting of wildlife and geology, legal and physical enclosure of land, and channelization and damming of river rapids have served as instrumental projects of settlement and capitalist expansion. I argue that late 19th and early 20th century colonial scientific and cultural visions of the Gorge persist in everyday politics, still dispossessing Columbia River Treaty Tribes by enclosing their homelands and political economies./nMy objective is to demonstrate how sciences and technologies have enabled and obscured U.S. colonial structures of land control from the nineteenth century into the present. I analyze an archive documenting cartographic practices, scientific and commercial reports, cultural texts and images, and natural resource management plans through which the Gorge has been constructed as a national scenic site, all the while enacting and masking these mechanisms of colonial control. I read this archive against the grain to denaturalize U.S. claims to land sovereignty to facilitate seeing beyond its imperial claims to political power. I foreground Indigenous persistence by analyzing oral historical texts, legal testimonies, letters, and cultural texts produced by Columbia River Treaty Tribe members and Columbia River Indians. I show how mutually constitutive processes of aestheticization, scientization, and recreation have figured prominently in making the Gorge’s “scene,” arguing that scenery has emerged as a historical category that is both cultural and material. “Routing the Scenic” offers a critical, anti-colonial history of the present wherein the politics of “seeing” and “scene” are revealed as mobile practices of settler territorialization./nIn Chapter One, I examine visual representations of landscape produced in and through the expansion of U.S. industry, and railroads in particular, through the Gorge. By simultaneously analyzing cartographic land surveys, the historic landscape photos by Carleton Watkins, and railroad boosterist brochures, I argue that the construction of what comes to be known as “Scenic Value” predates the passage of the National Scenic Area Act (1986). My analysis exposes layers of repeated violence, sanctioned by the U.S. government, against Columbia River Indigenous communities. In Chapter Two, I analyze selected archeological narratives, a natural history museum proposal, and a government guide to scenic accounting. Beyond the spectacular scenery, the Gorge became a site of salvage and national heritage in natural history and archeology. Chapter Three turns to the inundated Wy’am (Celilo Falls) and the ways that a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sonar survey of the riverbed was variably enrolled in both bolstering settler innocence and imagining Indigenous futurities. I show that “seeing with sound"—from state sonic cartography to a poem by Elizabeth Woody—is a fraught political process with the potential to both obfuscate and assist Indigenous claims to land. Chapter Four engages with the Bonneville Fish Hatchery and its living mascot, Herman the Sturgeon. Using archives from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife and news stories about sturgeon and “stings,” I show how seeing-underwater renders technical the deeply political questions surrounding river management, with Herman himself occluding the ecological devastation of the hydropower infrastructure on the Columbia. Chapter Five focuses on the design and use of the ScanEagle’s thermal imaging capacities, shifting between infrared aerial surveillance for fighting fires, “terrorists,” and wildlife poachers. The ScanEagle case demonstrates the reinforcement, reconfiguration and rupturing of settler ocularcentrism, extending from the Gorge and reaching well beyond the National Scenic Area.

Advisor: Peluso, Nancy L