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“Fiesta Immemorial” is a social history of capitalist development in Southern California that excavates the constitutive relations between American settlers and Cahuilla, Cupeño, Serrano, Luiseño, and Kumeyaay peoples during the first half of the 20th century. Addressing the absence of Native politics in histories of US capitalism, it shows how US federal Indian agents, law enforcement, entrepreneurs, boosters, philanthropists, reformers, and residents collaborated to constrain California Native nations’ sovereign practices across sites of labor, leisure, and livelihood in order to naturalize American juridical rule, enforce capitalist market relations, and secure the settler social order. Drawing on booster literature, businessmen’s journals, letters, and memoirs, the ephemera of missionaries and reformers, Bureau of Indian Affairs agents and government officials’ correspondence, Congressional reports, arrest records, hobby ethnographies, and historical newspapers, “Fiesta Immemorial” explores how seemingly mundane sites, such as agricultural fairs, philanthropic programs, New Deal-era works projects, backcountry tourism, and real estate ventures were crucial nodes of conflict. It argues that a specifically colonial apparatus of suspecting, policing, and jailing Native people and the non-Natives who socialized with them accompanied these assimilatory aspirations. At the same time, cultural and knowledge producers enamored with the region circulated narratives that confirmed the apparent inevitability of the capitalist market and the American state’s success, even as these carceral and regulatory campaigns continually failed. Paying particular attention to archival absences, competing notions of time, and ubiquitous surveillance, “Fiesta Immemorial” illustrates the central role of Southern California Indian nations and people in the region’s development, beginning with its turn-of-the-century “picturesque” pastoral land speculation and ending at the post-World War II defense industry boom.

The main argument of this dissertation is that the White Mountain Apache Tribe's appropriation of ecological restoration played a vital role in reinstituting control over knowledge production and eco-cultural resources on the Fort Apache Indian Reservation in the second half of the twentieth century. As a corollary, I argue that the shift in knowledge production practices from a paternalistic foundation to a community-based approach resulted in positive consequences for the ecological health of the Apachean landscape and Apache culture. The democratization of science and technology on the reservation, therefore, proved paramount to the reestablishment of a relatively sustainable Apache society. Beginning with the Indian New Deal, the White Mountain Apache slowly developed the capacity to employ ecological restoration as an eco-political tool to free themselves from a long history of Euro-American cultural oppression and natural resource exploitation. Tribal restoration projects embodied the dual political function of cultural resistance to and cultural exchange with Western-based land management organizations. Apache resistance challenged Euro-American notions of restoration, nature, and sustainability while maintaining cultural identity, reasserting cultural autonomy, and protecting tribal sovereignty. But at the same time, the Apache depended on cultural exchange with federal and state land management agencies to successfully manage their natural resources and build an ecologically knowledgeable tribal workforce. Initially adopting a utilitarian conservation model of land management, restoration projects aided the creation of a relatively strong tribal economy. In addition, early successes with trout, elk, and forest restoration projects eventually granted the Tribe political leverage when they sought to reassume control over reservation resources from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Building on this foundation, Apache restoration work significantly diverged in character from the typical Euro-American restoration project by the 1990s. While striving toward self-sufficiency, the Tribe hybridized tribal cultural values with Western ecological values in their restoration efforts. These projects evolved the tripartite capacity to heal ecologically degraded reservation lands, to establish a degree of economic freedom from the federal government, and to restore cultural traditions. Having reversed their historical relationship of subjugation with government agencies, the Apache currently have almost full decision-making powers over tribal eco-cultural resources. / Ph. D.

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