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Abstract
Watershed Colonialism and Popular Geographies of North American Rivers examines the convergence of settler colonialism and the spatial transformation of North American Rivers through popular accounts of river regions. I use watershed colonialism to refer to the double process through which Euro-American legal systems, based on the doctrine of discovery, first acquired all the land area that drains to a single river by making claims at the mouth of a river, and second, divided that watershed through political lines on maps, and hydrosocial regimes that ultimately endangered the health and sustainability of what had been an integrated ecosystem.
Through interpretations of river narratives, I examine the development of popular geographies of river regions. As a literary genre, I posit that river geographies began with 19th century narrative accounts of river expeditions produced as part of the imperialist project to map, conquer, and assimilate new territory. In the US, geographies of river regions were popularized in the 1930s with the beginning of the Rivers of America series published from 1937 to 1974. I situate their intervention within and beyond geographical imperatives of the state, showing how Rivers volumes revealed the cultural politics of watershed colonialism. Part of a humanist approach that connected readers to rivers, the series produced a narrative form of settler colonialist ideology and race-based nationalism that was upheld or challenged by individual authors.
By the 1970s the extent to which rivers had been polluted and altered produced new understandings of watershed colonialism as a national concern rather than a formalized imperative. In the decades that followed, writers, poets, and photographers captured the rapid transformation of rivers—offering new interpretations of river geography and of environmentalism more broadly. With the emergence of a global environmental movement popular geographies took on new dominant fotius. Whereas Rivers of America volumes had mapped unique regional histories one river at a time, documentary film captured the transnational and global ideological formations of watershed colonialism. This dissertation ends with an analysis of river documentaries in the early decades of the 21st century as the new dominant form of popular geographies of river systems.
