The White Mountain Recreational Enterprise: Bio-Political Foundations for White Mountain Apache Natural Resource Control, 1945–1960

David Tomblin

doi:10.3390/h5030058

Abstract

Among American Indian nations, the White Mountain Apache Tribe has been at the forefront of a struggle to control natural resource management within reservation boundaries. In 1952, they developed the first comprehensive tribal natural resource management program, the White Mountain Recreational Enterprise (WMRE), which became a cornerstone for fighting legal battles over the tribe’s right to manage cultural and natural resources on the reservation for the benefit of the tribal community rather than outside interests. This article examines how White Mountain Apaches used the WMRE, while embracing both Euro-American and Apache traditions, as an institutional foundation for resistance and exchange with Euro-American society so as to reassert control over tribal eco-cultural resources in east-central Arizona.

Highlights

This is a story about the appropriation of science, technology, and capitalism as tools of liberation, a moment in White Mountain Apache history where the tide began to turn in their resistance to the cultural hegemony of the United States government
Ground and James Merrell’s The Indians New World provide excellent examples of Native American social and political flexibility in the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries to reimagine their societies in the wake of ecological change and cultural disruption. They illustrate that the cultural appropriation and adaptation of Western technology proved key to the long-term survival and reinvention of American Indian culture [3,4]
I argue that the White Mountain Recreational Enterprise (WMRE), an Apache/Euro-American hybrid construct, became an organizational foundation for resistance to and exchange with Euro-American society that impelled the Apache people’s quest to maintain tribal sovereignty and control eco-cultural resources on the reservation

Summary

Introduction

This is a story about the appropriation of science, technology, and capitalism as tools of liberation, a moment in White Mountain Apache history where the tide began to turn in their resistance to the cultural hegemony of the United States government This story is as an opportunity to illustrate a particular way that a local, place-based non-Western community responded to a wave of globalization after World War II. Ground and James Merrell’s The Indians New World provide excellent examples of Native American social and political flexibility in the seventeenth to early twentieth centuries to reimagine their societies in the wake of ecological change and cultural disruption They illustrate that the cultural appropriation and adaptation of Western technology proved key to the long-term survival and reinvention of American Indian culture [3,4]. I argue that the WMRE, an Apache/Euro-American hybrid construct, became an organizational foundation for resistance to and exchange with Euro-American society that impelled the Apache people’s quest to maintain tribal sovereignty and control eco-cultural resources on the reservation

The White Mountain Apache Tribe and the Political Origins of the WMRE

Hawley Lake as a Site of Resistance

Creating Mediated Pathways of Exchange

Foundation for Cultural Autonomy in the Twenty-First Century

Conclusions