Theses and Dissertations at Montana State University (MSU)
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Item A black spot on the narcotics map drug policy in twentieth century Montana(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2024) McLain, Kathryn Kohn; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Molly ToddThis research examines cycles of drug policy from the federal down to the local level in Montana. I show how drug policy, and the people and organizations that influence that policy, are part of a broader historical and geographical process. If drug use and drug policy are cyclical, as so many policy makers point out, then using a historical methodology to examine them can offer stronger and more nuanced policy analysis. This scholarship is important in understanding past practices to improve our future relationship with drugs in our communities. Specific case studies show the influence of women's clubs on public opinion and policy in Montana in the 1930s. I unpack the long history of methamphetamine leading to the rise of a graphic prevention campaign in Montana at the turn of the twenty-first century. This work addresses the intersections of federal and local drug policies, drawing on professional expertise from my work with the federal government as well as my scholarly research in the field.Item Rainfall and the resettlement of the Pacific Northwest(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2023) Griffis, Corey Lane Rowlett; Co-chairs, Graduate Committee: Catherine Dunlop and Mark FiegeThe Pacific Northwest has a reputation for rainfall. The region's relationship with that reputation is not uniform: some love it, some hate it, some deny that it should even exist. But this reputation -- and the role of rainfall in regional identity and everyday life -- has historical roots. This thesis considers rainfall as a powerful environmental force with profound impacts on the history of the Pacific Northwest. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, diaries, letters, advertisements, promotional pamphlets, newspaper articles, travelogues, and other primary source documents, this thesis reframes the imperial and colonial history of the Pacific Northwest through the lens of rainfall. I cover the period between 1543 and about 1900. My argument is that rainfall has had visceral, embodied impacts on how Euro-Americans encountered, perceived, and experienced the Pacific Northwest for almost five centuries. Rainfall played a key role in discouraging almost all interest in permanent colonial settlement from 1543 through around 1830, and the rainy season profoundly shaped the rhythms of both the maritime and overland fur trade. Throughout this period, Indigenous knowledge of rainfall formed a point of leverage against imperial power. Beginning in the 1830s, American promoters flipped the script, emphasizing rainfall in narratives of the Northwest's potential as a haven for white agrarianism. Just like early navigators and fur traders, however, settlers struggled to adapt to the rhythms of the rainy season, which created new forms of isolation and inequality. The response of settler society to rainfall's power has been to terraform the environment to try and control how rainfall manifests upon the landscape. As climate change fundamentally alters human-environment entanglements and reinforces structural inequities in how people experience weather and climate, it is also challenging our senses of place, of home. Rather than seeking new ways to dominate our changing environments and insulate ourselves further from the elements, we need to imagine new ways of living with weather and climate that are resilient, equitable, and grounded in the everyday dignities and indignities of being human. By learning to live with rainfall, we can redefine what it means to call the Northwest home.Item American crops for American people: statist agriculture, race, and environment on the Northern Plains(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2023) Chang, Micah TianFong; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mark FiegeMy dissertation, "American Crops for American People: Statist Agriculture, Race, and Environment on the Northern Great Plains," argues that U.S. federal agronomy and standardized field crop agriculture driven by larger and larger corporate farms eliminated a diversity of ethno-agricultural practices and, ultimately, communities of Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican farmers. During the 20th century, the region was developed to produce massive staple surpluses, accumulate capital, and cement federal and corporate power in this extractive hinterland. Using documents from federal and local agricultural archives, I argue that the USDA and its corresponding outreach organization, the Cooperative Extension Service, defined the archetypal "American" farmer and simultaneously homogenized white European immigrants into American patriots, while ostracizing communities of color that fell outside this definition. Wheat and sugar beets represented an imagined and whitened national agrarian identity on the northern grasslands. While regional case studies on the intersection of agriculture and race exist, my work is the first to posit the consequences of USDA and land grant college agronomic practice as a reason for ethnic and racial homogenization in this part of the country. This scholarship is increasingly important as global agriculture must change and adapt to a warming world. It is my contention that these solutions must at the same time also address the sustainability of diverse peoples and communities that have deep connections to places and lands. If the standardization of crops relied on the homogenization of farmers and agricultural communities, then a more sustainable future must also include peoples that have been left out of myth of rural essentialism in America. I argue that understanding the pivotal moments of American agriculture in the 20th century could point us to a more equitable, diverse, and sustainable future. To accomplish this, I look to the genesis of wheat and sugar beet agronomic and agricultural systems on the Northern Great Plains and their environmental and social development in the late 19th and 20th centuries. My reconceptualization of agricultural history challenges the ideological foundation of a white American heartland mythology, instead revealing that agriculture in this country has always relied on multiethnic bodies and families.Item To hell, heaven, and back again: language, religon, and the varied meanings of Yellowstone(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2024) Taylor, Joshua James; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mark FiegeThis thesis examines the history of language and Yellowstone National Park from the early nineteenth century through the second decade of the twentieth century. I examine how the language used to describe Yellowstone's many features changed over time and how that language reflected the larger culture and the change that took place over time.Item A tangled path to extremism: desperation, resentment, and rebellion in rural Montana(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2023) Dunn, Jennifer Anne; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael ReidyIn the closing decades of the twentieth century, the American West saw an increase in anti-government and white supremacy extremism. Montana had a number of events where residents resisted the federal government culminating in the Montana Freemen, a group who engaged in an 81-day armed standoff with the FBI in the spring and summer of 1996. Why were western residents so angry at the federal government who they believed was, at best, ignoring rural western communities, and at worst, threatening their liberty and their lives? To answer this question, I examined three rural Montana communities - Denton, Jordan and Libby - each of whom clashed with the government at the end of the century. While these conflicts developed for different reasons, residents' responses to the encounters and the regulations imposed on them illustrate a continuum ranging from resigned irritation, to urgent pleas for help, to outright rebellion. In this dissertation, I argue that the study of the 1990s in Montana reveals the development of anti-government extremism. To understand how western residents' frustrations and concerns coalesced into this directed anger, I examine three rural communities in Montana - Libby, Jordan, and Denton - whose residents were frustrated with federal regulation and believed not only that they had been forgotten by the government, unions, academics, and urbanites but that those groups were working against them. The residents of these towns lived and worked in resource communities and supplied the materials that built post-World War II America. They believed that their communities and economies had been sacrificed and forgotten. The residents in these rural town expressed their anger in different ways, but it did not dissipate after the decade ended. Their responses reveal the mounting tension, frustration, and anger that existed in the last decade of the twentieth century and highlight a throughline of connection and historical significance to anti-government extremist groups that continue to threaten democracy today.Item Gichi Bizhiki (Grandfather Buffalo): Anishinaabe sovereignty, the seasonal round, and resistance to the colonization of the web of life, 1780-1890(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2021) Ramaker, Jill Falcon; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Mary MurphyGichi Bizhiki (Grandfather Buffalo): Anishinaabe Sovereignty, the Seasonal Round, and Resistance to the Colonization of the Web of Life is an Indigenous environmental history of the years 1780 through 1890, in which many Anishinaabeg departed the wild rice- centered food system and fanned out across the Northwestern Plains from the Red River Valley to the Rocky Mountains, as they adapted to buffalo culture. The Anishinaabeg practiced the seasonal round, a highly complex pattern of movements on the land to hunt, harvest, cultivate, and trade foods as part of a holistic way of life, patterned on ancestral reciprocal obligations to place. From the 1600s forward, Euro-American colonizers, in support of industrial and capital development in Europe and eastern North America, extracted natural resources from Turtle Island including animal furs and robes, minerals, forests, and overtook land for monocropping. Euro-American colonization of the web of life to which Anishinaabe people belonged rendered the Anishinaabe seasonal round way of life unsustainable. Further, colonial policies attempted to suppress all aspects of Anishinaabe life including language, knowledge, and spiritual life. In response to colonial persecution, Anishinaabeg 'ran with the archives,' (their ceremonies) as it was unsafe for their children to be identified as Anishinaabeg. Following Anishinaabe western movement, this study tells the story of how Anishinaabe resisted colonization. Research methods included drawing on archival sources from Canada and the United States, and culturally-congruent sources including ceremony, traditional stories, ancestral knowledge of cultural leaders, language, and time spent on the land. This history is presented as one Indigenous view contributing to the field of History. This dissertation concludes that Grandfather Buffalo, the one that has stood for Anishinaabeg and their kin for millennia, is a central source of Anishinaabe sovereignty and the center of the Anishinaabe economy, the kinship network of exchange. Further, the Anishinaabe food system, the seasonal round, was sustainable for millennia because it was critically embedded in the holistic Anishinaabe way of life. Worldview is an essential factor in lifeway sustainability. Finally, by their words, deeds, and movement, Anishinaabeg resisted colonization of the web of life, or what Anishinaabeg refer to as 'all our relations'.Item Patriotic stained-glass windows and the manifestation of American civil religion(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2022) Sward, Sandra Lee; Co-chairs, Graduate Committee: Robert Rydell and David CherryStained-glass windows are a mechanism through which abstract ideas are communicated, often benefitting from their association with European Gothic cathedrals. When church windows include patriotic iconography, the patriotic themes conceivably benefit from this association. Between 1890 and 1950, many stained-glass windows were created for American churches that contain patriotic symbols and images associated with American nationalism. Insufficient research has been published regarding this phenomenon. This dissertation attempts to fill that gap by arguing that these patriotic images represent a manifestation of American civil religion. Over forty churches and cathedrals were surveyed using a methodology based on Erwin Panofsky's framework, which incorporates cultural influences into the analysis of the artistic design. Window themes align with various aspects of America's foundational moments, including those associated with the Pilgrims and Puritans, the War for Independence and the Founding Fathers, America's westward expansion, and the nation's wars. America's civil religion, as discussed by Robert Bellah, includes a set of beliefs, ceremonial rites, and symbols connecting a community that endow a transcendent value on those items. Race, religion, and national identity are foundational elements of that civil religion and are explored here as potential influences in the design process. American civil religion is also typically embraced during times of trial. Therefore, issues of immigration quotas, Indian removal policies, economic turmoil, and military conflicts are considered as well. The windows under consideration here embraced American civil religion, while often whitewashing and sacralizing a view of American history that ignored many of its cultural complexities.Item Western American spectral studies: haunting in film, literature and landscape(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Hanson, Daniel Lee; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Susan KollinThe American Western narrative has historically not had time for ghosts. In its dominant historical form, the Western prescribed a white, male, civilizing discourse while acting as the 'nation-building' narrative for the United States. Especially in the latter context, the genre could not afford to be haunted. Yet, because the Western produced a very narrow race, gender, and ideological spectacle within a West that historically involved a wide range of peoples and experiences, it is, I would argue, an 'exceptionally' haunted American narrative. Additionally, because the West has resisted comparisons with colonialism and notions of Empire--while explicitly functioning as a settler colonial discourse--ghosts of neglect continue to plague this influential cultural expression. So, because ghosts indicate something lost, forgotten, or pathologized by a narrated cultural reality, as recent 'spectral studies' scholarship has shown, understanding how haunting exists and functions within western cultural forms provides insights into American cultural power structures. Combining postwestern theory, spectral studies discussions, and affect theory, I create a 'spectral lens' to understand the functionality of haunting within western film, literature, and landscapes. This study draws attention to both the affective power of cultural expressions and to how haunting expresses hegemonic resistance. Additionally, such a study illuminates the changing power structures of a Western narrative that continues to wrestle with cultural notions of justice and equality while increasingly realizing a destructive settler colonial historical reality of indigenous displacement and eradication. Therefore, through a better 'conversation with ghosts,' I aim to not only theoretically break down the rigid structures that fortify race, class, and gender hierarchies, but seek a more nuanced approach to heritage. This is a negotiation of what Wallace Stegner realized as the western American divide between the overly critical 'urban intellectual' and the often reactionary 'defensiveness of the native son.' In this manner, I also utilize spectrality to directly engage with the American Studies tradition of searching for a 'useable' American cultural history.Item From lethargy to leadership: America's origins and obligations as an arctic nation(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2021) Kramer, Samuel Charles; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Brett WalkerAt present, temperatures in the Arctic are rising twice as fast as the global average. This drastic increase has been the catalyst for a number of vicious cycles that exacerbate climate change, such as the melting of both permafrost and ice sheets. New waterways, opened due to melting ice, have provided access to once impossible to reach resources and brought competing ambitions of both Arctic and non-Arctic nations to the forefront. The prospect of easily accessible resources such as oil, natural gas, and minerals has amplified the issues of territory and ownership in the Arctic with many nations responding with an increase in nationalism and militarization. Outcomes of this geopolitical competition will have consequences that reach far beyond the Arctic. Equally as important are the effects that these rivalries will have on the indigenous groups that live and subsist in the Arctic --many of which have been victims of systematic disenfranchisement and racism. As a result of the purchase of Alaska in 1867, the United States belongs to an exclusive company of nations that own or oversee territory in the Arctic. These eight nations, the United States, Canada, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Iceland, and Denmark (via Greenland), despite sharing the designation of being an Arctic nation, all possess distinct ambitions and interests in the far North. Cooperation, however, is imperative to address the myriad challenges that the Arctic faces in the twenty-first century. In order for the United States to become, and remain, a responsible Arctic ally, I argue, we must first reexamine our origins as an Arctic nation and recognize the connection between the purchase of Alaska and the conquest of the American West. Acknowledging the continued existence of exploitation and colonialism in Alaska is a necessary step the United States must take on the path towards responsibility in the Arctic.Item Schools of empires: the role of higher education and colonization in the American West and Japan(Montana State University - Bozeman, College of Letters & Science, 2020) Colgrove, Clinton Allen; Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael ReidyThe historical relevance of the role of the university is related to research in both local and global exchanges, the accessibility to forms of higher education, and the decentralization and use of scientific knowledge. Using institutions at Gottingen, Amherst, New York, Bozeman, and Sapporo, this dissertation interrogates how geographical space, settler colonialism, and socio-cultural contexts inform scientific, agricultural, and engineering practices, research, and education from the nineteenth into the twenty-first century. Beginning with Wilhelm von Humboldt's twin pillars of academic freedom and the combination of research and teaching, this dissertation traces the migration of approaches to higher education from German schools to the American East. American conceptions of higher education evolved as educators like Frederick A. P. Barnard called for reform and academics returned from abroad. In the 1860s, the land grant school and the school of mines provided models to reshape the educational and geographical landscape of the country. As settlers colonized the American West, boosters established new schools based on civic or religious interests before state and industrial entities funded other institutions. In Montana, proximity to mining facilitated the establishment of its first school of mines and political interests led to the decentralization of the state schools. After the Meiji Restoration, Japan sought new forms of knowledge to strengthen its imperial rule, and in the colonization of Hokkaido, Kiyotaka Kuroda identified the land grant model displayed under William Smith Clark's leadership in Massachusetts as the ideal example to adopt. Both case studies demonstrate higher education's adaptability and its tenuous relationship with government expectations and funding. As Japan's empire crumbled, evolving geopolitical matters influenced the American government to increase federal funding opportunities leading to the alignment of schools and programs with the Academic-Military-Industrial Complex. Laboratories such as the Electronics Research Laboratory at Montana State University demonstrate how this relationship affected new forms of technology and research. Based on archival research and personal interviews, this dissertation analyzes the historical, multifaceted role of the university, its accessibility, and how Humboldtian ideals, reflected in practice, shape our understanding of the present and future role of higher education.