The last decade alone has witnessed the emergence of literary, postcolonial, and other theoretical perspectives in studies of space and place. Other geographers now study maps and contemporary geographic information systems and how both have been used by Natives and non-Natives to represent Indian and Inuit places. Still others engage directly in advocacy on behalf of Indian economic development and land claims. In what follows, however, readers also will find direct links to Sauerian-Boasian geographies of American Indians via cultural ecology, diffusion studies, and regional-historical geography. Recently geographers have contributed significantly to revisionist movements within North American cultural ecology, illuminating the sophistication of American Indian environmental management and the degree to which people intentionally modified environments for their own purposes prior to European contact. For example, two geographers identified pre-contact plant cultivation practices and agricultural land forms that had been overlooked by many archaeologists and anthropologists, namely the identification of ridged agricultural fields and other evidence of intensive environmental management in the upper Midwest. Others have expanded our understanding of human modification of environments in the American southwestern deserts, Alaska, Wisconsin, and central California. Also, Douglas Deur has demonstrated the presence of low-intensity plant cultivation in garden plots on the west coast of Canada, a region usually depicted as non-agricultural. Janet Gritzner and Sandra Peacock, working just east of Deur in the semi-arid interior plateaus of both the United States and Canada, have shown that the peoples of this region managed plants intensively through prescribed burning, selective harvesting, and the transporting and transplanting of plant materials. Karl Butzer and William Denevan have produced syntheses summarizing Indian impacts on the land throughout North America, drainage pot and have demonstrated the value of this environmental modification to later European occupation of the continent.

These studies often integrate bio-geography, or the study of plant and animal distributions and movement, analysis of settlement patterns and archaeological features, and conventional ethnographic methods, thereby shedding light on related topics such as pre-contact Native settlement distribution, population size, and cultural complexity. For the post-contact period, interpretations of the fur trade and other similar networks have been overhauled by a new focus on Indians as active trade agents, modifiers of landscapes, and manipulators of markets and geopolitics. Returning to the continental scale once again, historical geographer Donald Meinig has reinterpreted the shaping of the United States by synthesizing trade research and other information on Indian networks with research on US religious, corporate, and military interests aiming to secure a continent-wide economic and cultural empire. Another persisting theme associated with Berkeley geography entails explaining the origins and diffusion pattern of specific elements of the material cultural landscape. For example, the following have appeared in recent years: a regional analysis of material landscapes in the Four Corners area; a typology of Canadian Metis houses and farmsteads; a comparative study of gravesites and outdoor funerary practices among the Navajo, Mormons, and Zuni; examinations of Mescalero Apache settlement and housing; analyses of architecture and its geographical context; a study of conflicting cultural landscapes at Santa Clara Pueblo by a member of that pueblo; and a diffusion study supporting the thesis that there was early Asian contact with Indians in the pre-Columbian Americas, an idea still not widely accepted in geography. In another materialist study, Terry Jordan and Matti Kaups argued that early New Sweden produced a successful mix of Finnish and Delaware Indian forest cultures in the Delaware Bay area that then expanded into the Upland South, becoming the most successful frontier society in early America. However, one critic was chagrined that the authors had handled questions of backwoods relationships, intermarriage, and other social customs only from the European perspective.

The material elements of the biosphere normally termed resources might also be worth considering simply as sources. So many issues associated with the biosphere, like water quality and quantity, are deeply intertwined with sovereignty, land dispossession and restoration, planning and development, sacredness, and even gambling and tourism. All these topics are sources of physical, economic, political, and spiritual livelihoods. While this manipulation of language may seem thoroughly postmodern, it is not our intention to be playful. We employ ambiguity as a linguistic element expressing the intellectual richness of this subject by acknowledging the inter-penetration of its subtopics. In this section then, we seek to dissolve the traditional human-nature dichotomy by grouping these ideas together and employing resource and source as one word. Since 1980 the capacity of tribal governments as sovereign managers of sources and environmental quality has increased modestly in some cases, dramatically in others. Individual tribal members working as attorneys for or leaders of tribal governments or pan-Indian organizations such as the Native American Rights Fund and the Council of Energy Resource Tribes frequently raise their voices to characterize human-environment relations from an Indian perspective. Geographers studying tribal source management are responding to the same contemporary Native issues raised in these settings. Water has been of special interest to those working in the and and semiarid western United States. In this area, water not only is physically and economically crucial, but also is an agent of social cohesion and cultural reaffirmation. Kate Berry demonstrated this in two recent publications comparing the role of water for two Paiute communities and one non-Indian community in northwestern Nevada, and the role of water in the historical geography of California. Berry and Joanne Endter also examined the significance of different cultural values in the actions, policies, and court decisions affecting water allocation for tribes.

Judith Jacobsen and Mary McNally considered how water project development and marketing of water rights on tribal land has been influenced by congressional actions and negotiated water rights settlements, and John Newton looked at local responses to flood hazard in northern Canada.“ Noteworthy contributions also have been made in the analysis of tribal control over plant and wildlife sources. The Clayoquot Sound Scientific Panel in British Columbia, a group including both Indian and non-Indian researchers, articulated how traditional understandings and uses of forests worked in the pre-European occupation period and demonstrated how such perception and knowledge might be accommodated in current land management practices.“ Steven Silvern studied tribal control of off-reservation fish and wildlife sources guaranteed by treaty by examining the structure of conflict between hunters and fishers and six Chippewa tribes in Wisconsin. The infamous government-ordered Navajo sheep-reduction program of the 1930s may stand alone as the worst example of the government’s willingness to pauperize a population by eliminating its animals. Will Graf and others confirmed that where Indian-white relations are concerned, “a little scientific knowledge [is] a dangerous commodity.” Graf, a physical geographer, states that the Navajo were right in asserting that climate variation was the cause of Colorado River sedimentation, not the number of sheep they grazed. The Bureau of Reclamation and Soil Conservation Service were comfortable nonetheless in recommending the reduction program when they had only incomplete data. In jarring contrast, large pot with drainage co-management agreements for wildlife and other biota are so common across Canada now that an argument has been made for including them as part of the constitutional rights of First Nations. A key element in sovereignty disputes is the relationship of land claims and land rights to contemporary tribal powers and land use decision-making. Sovereignty is also central to the expansion of tribal powers and autonomy within states, provinces, and federal governments. In particular, the recognition of tribal governments as legitimate controlling agents of tribal sources has put the sovereignty issue on center stage among geographers and planners. For example, Dick Winchell described the concept of inherent sovereignty as the basis of tribal powers while also offering ways of incorporating inherent sovereignty into contemporary comprehensive planning models. In addition, David Wishart recognized that sometimes contemporary reservations are good bulwarks against further attacks on sovereignty. Sovereignty issues are implicated in “dispossession research,” which is conducted at all geographic scales. Perhaps no one has summarized in a single map the continent-wide geography of Indian removals during the colonial period better than Elaine Bjorklund. For specific regions, there are Kenneth Brealey’s study of the genesis of British Columbia’s reserve system, Malcolm Comeaux’s description of how water and development economics were used to dispossess the Pima and Maricopa, Florence Shipek’s volume on southern California, where Indians were literally pushed into the rocks, and Wishart’s book detailing the elimination of people from nineteenth-century Nebraska.

The latter two are the culmination of decades of archival research and, in Shipek’s case, ethnographic fieldwork. Dispossession also continues in its classic form today, as Ward Churchill summarized for a number of places, and as Holly Young bear-Tibbetts described in detail for the White Earth Anishinaabeg. Dispossession is more than a physical act, for it occurs in rhetorical strategies that anticipate the action. Randy Bertolas examined such a strategy in the redefinition of Cree places as “wilderness.” He argued that imagining a place as empty of humans, although only a dream, allows the colonizer-dreamer to then separate people from their own socially constructed landscapes, causing seemingly less psychic pain for the colonizer. Robert Bone described essentially the same process for the Canadian North.30 There are newer or less commonly used methods too, including gerrymandering a reservation to reduce electoral rep resentation, and contesting tribal rights to select an electricity provider by going to court to call into question the “Indianness” of a reservation. Imre Sutton, a political geographer, summarized the historical evolution of Indian Country as a site of legal jurisdiction in substantial detail. Dorothy Hallock gave a more abbreviated summary, but recast contemporary Indian Country as the location of numerous aspects of colonizer-colonized relations, not just as the seat of Indian legal claims. She also suggested that Indian Country was a general geographical model for all majority-minority relations. Finally she reported a case study out of her own experience as a planner on the Fort Mojave Reservation, part of which was redesigned as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War Ⅱ. Canadian geographers seem to have given more thought to the basis for land claims and their potential resolution, a matter probably arising out of the contemporary political circumstances in which Canadians find themselves. Taking an economic approach, Frank Duerden looked at land claims in the Yukon as a land location-allocation problem, Evelyn Peters drew lessons from the Cree situation in Quebec, and Peter Usher et al. provided a valuable and detailed diachronic summary of tenure systems, Indian and Inuit concepts of rights, and ongoing claims in British Columbia and the Arctic. Geographers are by no means uniformly aligned in their political sentiments regarding Indian land claims. Political agendas and associated ideologies vary widely and are often evident in what they write and whom they consult. Some in the United States still willfully disregard Indian land rights when staking out their own positions in support of a competing land claim, despite extensive writing on the subject by Linda Parker, Sutton, and others cited above. For example, the January 1999 issue of Political Geography included a debate over the future of the Hanford Plant just across the Rattlesnake Hills from the Yakima Reservation in south central Washington. A respected political geographer wrote that Yakima rights were only those of a “local interest group” that had not exercised these “local customs” in the more than fifty years since Hanford was built. Several critics attempted to set the writer straight, but no acknowledgement of their criticisms was registered in his rejoinder. Out of the claims process can come land restorations, although it is highly uncommon in the United States. Barbara More house recounts the success of the Havasupai in regaining trust over 185,000 acres of Grand Canyon National Park. Five other tribes gained very little, but More house’s analysis suggests that the Havasupai were more successful not because of longevity, occupancy, or other similar evidence, but because they broadened their rhetorical arguments beyond the narrow concerns of the moment to include most of the other Grand Canyon interests, both Indian and non-Indian, involved in that negotiation. More house leaves unanswered the question of whether such rhetoric has an historical basis in Havasupai culture or if it represents a form of “talking back by using one of the colonizer’s own argument strategies. Another aspect of the colonial legacy is the need to document sacred land.