First Advisor
Jennifer Tappan
Term of Graduation
January 2026
Date of Publication
6-1-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Language
English
Subjects
Colonialism, Kenya, Oregon, Pastoralism, Underdevelopment, White supremacy
Physical Description
1 online resource ( pages)
Abstract
In January 2016, protestors occupied Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and destroyed fences that kept cattle ranchers from water sources they had historically used. To them, fences like these imposed an unfair burden on people in the U.S. West by reducing their sovereignty over land use compared to people in other regions. Later that year, in Kenya’s former “White Highlands,” Samburu drove their cattle herds onto privately-owned reserves that had been their ancestors’ grazing territories. They considered fences they cut to be relics of colonialism, continuing White settler monopolies over important resources. This thesis considers the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century land use conflicts that both sets of protestors pointed toward. It roots those histories in transnational intellectual exchange between English-speaking colonizers who applied White supremacist ideologies to land use policy. They overlaid constructions of fixed racial hierarchies with an adjustable definition of “civilized,” which permitted the appearance of reform while perpetuating racist logics. They used the resulting ideology to answer: Who can use which land for which purposes, considering how “civilized” they and their location were deemed at the time? Because colonizers’ definition of “civilized” land use coded pastoralism as a prelude to—not part of—civilization, their consistent use of this ideology produced inconsistent experiences for different pastoralists, and these experiences changed over time. Chapter One focuses on British colonial efforts to move pastoralist wealth from Black to White people in the early twentieth century. It does this by following the Samburu from their place in East Africa’s Indigenous economy in the 1860s, through Great Britain’s imposition of the East African Protectorate and the subsequent Kenya Colony. The 1932-1934 Kenya Land Commission is examined as part of British efforts to re-interpret evidence of their economic destruction as evidence of their supremacy. Chapter Two takes place in the Northern Great Basin of the U.S. West, where European-American settlers endeavored to displace the Wädatika—a Northern Paiute band—in the 1860s. The settlers’ efforts, including the pastoralist economy they introduced, intermittently complimented and contradicted policymakers’ definitions of progress. The debates Senators had on the day they passed 1934’s Taylor Grazing Act and Indian Reorganization Act serve as a snapshot of legislators’ ideologies of “civilized” land use. This study complicates common binaries such as victim and villain, or privilege and dispossession. It starts from White supremacist ideologies shared by British and U.S. settler colonial processes, and compares Black Indigenous pastoralists who were subjects of colonization with White settler pastoralists who were agents of colonization. This technique amplifies the importance of their contexts, which in both cases included wealthy monopolists and land use rules written by faraway legislators. It is an analysis that forces us to reconsider the value of economic policies that fall apart without fenced zones of inclusion and exclusion.
Keywords: White supremacy, civilizing mission, comparative colonialism, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, underdevelopment, dispossession, sovereignty, pastoralism, rangelands, grazing rights, public lands, Oregon, Kenya, Samburu, Paiute, nineteenth century, twentieth century
Rights
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Recommended Citation
Wilson, Trenna, "When Bad Fences Make Bad Neighbors: “Civilization” v. Pastoralism in Kenya and Oregon 1860s-1930s" (2026). Dissertations and Theses. Paper 7131.