During the period between the global Great Depression and the Cold War, popular resistance to laissez-faire capitalist expansion, including natural resource exploitation and race-based territorial dispossession, precipitated radical reform movements across the Americas and the word. For many, the specter of the United States Dust Bowl was the ecological embodiment of the worst threats of unfettered imperialist expansion. In the U.S., these lessons precipitated a new mode of community-based conservation. The programs of US Soil Conservation Service, developed on American Indian tribal land as part of the Indian New Deal, emphasized collective, democratic land-management as a “new frontier” for for sustainable, post-colonial nation-building. Supported by US State Department dollars for hemispheric solidarity, these resource management models were exported around the Americas by bureaucrats, engineers, and social scientists, and in particular by those employed by the Inter-American Indian Institute (IAII). This paper explores the twinned discourses of race and nature that underwrote IAII state-sponsored programs in North and South America, looking in particular at the relationship between scientific soil conservation projects and race-based land reform.
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