| dc.description.abstract | This thesis examines a little-studied moment in Oklahoma’s environmental and Indigenous history: the era of the New Deal, Second World War, and early days of the Cold War. From the 1930s to the late 1940s, as Oklahoma reeled from twin economic and environmental catastrophes, local people, Native and non-Native, attempted to harness the revolutionary possibilities of the New Deal to improve their economic and ecological condition. Rising from the study of one specific area, the Cookson Hills in eastern Muskogee and western Cherokee County, this thesis examines how everyone in Oklahoma tied their future to the transformation of the land. Tying these developments to broader national trends during the New Deal, including rural land use adjustment and increasing urban federal investment, as well as the rise of an incipient national security state, this thesis argues principally for the continuity of two key themes in Oklahoma’s Native American history. First, the ongoing efforts by local, state, and federal actors to transform the state’s land through the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, and second, the incredible resilience and political activism of Indigenous peoples within the state, who have fought off decades of efforts by the state to eradicate their political autonomy, to emerge by the late twentieth century as some of Oklahoma’s most significant political and economic actors. Nonetheless, threats to Indigenous land remain constant, even as Native nations continue to rebuild in the early twenty-first century. | en_US |
