The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power

Abstract

Megan Black's The Global Interior offers a potent revisionary narrative of the role of the U.S. Department of the Interior (Doi) in extending nineteenth-century practices of settler colonialism onto the world stage—and, in turn, revisiting aspects of foreign intervention upon indigenous nations within the United States. The title's “global interior” functions as a provocation to repudiate the naturalization of both the Doi's and the United States' reach across North America. Black presents a rich catalog of archival sources and historical events from the mid-nineteenth to early twenty-first centuries to show that the Doi's efforts to manage so-called domestic resources such as public lands are of a piece with its interventions (e.g., through its alliances with the U.S. Agency for International Development and with the National Aeronautic and Space Administration's Landsat Program) in foreign territories and nations. “The outer limits [of the Doi's reach] reveal in the seemingly obvious domesticity of the department's authority, from public and submerged lands to indigenous and territorial affairs, an obstinate foreignness that never was and never could be fully vanquished, precisely because the projection of the United States over the continent was just that—a historical projection, not an uncontested, natural occurrence” (p. 249).