Desert Political Ecologies, Conservation, and Contested Sites of Memory in the Mojave Desert: A Contrapuntal Analysis

Keywords: Conservation, deserts, cultural heritage, political ecology, memory
Abstract Type: Virtual Paper Abstract

Abstract

The past decade has witnessed the loss of a number of historic and sacred sites in the Mojave Desert, a rising threat that demands the scrutiny of settler colonial ecological and cultural conservation practices that shape the landscape. This paper examines the political ecology of sites of memory in relation to Indigenous sovereignty, vernacular knowledges, and settler colonialism in the Mojave. Given the often-competing perspectives on conservation propagated by the various settler entities that (mis)manage the landscape—the National Park System, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the Department of Defense, and private landowners—how do these stakeholders engage with Indigenous and settler sites of memory to project attitudes towards desert conservation? Where do these settler conservation models converge and diverge, and what might these attitudes suggest, more broadly, about the role of memory work in political ecology? I draw from Saidian contrapuntal geographies to interrogate how this memory work produces overlapping and contested eco-imaginaries of the Mojave's past, present, and future. Weaving ethnographic fieldwork, participatory mapping, and critical fabulation, I evaluate the Mojave Memorial Cross, Amboy Crater, and the Oasis of Mara as sites of memory that underscore the settler colonial (mis)management of the Mojave while simultaneously enabling the development of subaltern counterpublics of conservation. Ultimately, this paper seeks to situate sites of memory in Mojave conservation discourses as a departure point for a theory of contrapuntal desert political ecologies.