This article examines how U.S. federal authorities turned predator control into a centerpiece of sockeye salmon conservation in Bristol Bay during the interwar years and, in doing so, reconfigured the local ecosystem to sustain white-centered salmon fisheries. Industrial salmon fishing began in Bristol Bay in the 1880s, when Anglo-American businessmen built canneries there. Cannery owners transformed the bay into a resource colony serving metropolitan cities on the West Coast through the enclosure of fishing grounds, racially stratified labor regimes, and the integration of production into export markets. Despite intensive salmon fisheries, conservation remained sporadic until 1919 because annual catches fluctuated but rarely collapsed. The severe crash of 1919 triggered a policy turn. The U.S. Bureau of Fisheries launched “scientific management,” grounded in observation and quantification, to preserve the industry by conserving the fish.

Within this new program, predator control emerged as an ambitious attempt to remake the ecosystem around salmon. Treating declines as the outcome of predation, Bureau officer Dennis Winn and his team conducted a 1920 pilot investigation that reduced ecological complexity to stomach-content analyses and visual observations. From these data they elevated Dolly Varden, lake trout, and terns into principal “enemies” and justified mass removals as a cost-effective alternative to hatchery work. Military metaphors—“offensive campaigns” against “marauders”—gave the program moral authority, while estimated fry saved supplied scientific and economic rationales. Annual campaigns expanded in the early 1920s, widened the list of target species, and normalized techniques such as netting fish and shooting terns.

By the late 1920s, the program had been institutionalized through a bounty scheme that reconfigured administration, finance, and labor. To overcome the logistical and budgetary limits of federal crews, the Bureau worked with West Coast canners and the Alaska territorial government. It paid cash bounties for tails that trading posts treated as scrip, thus turning tails into an alternative currency. Indigenous residents became central to this system. For many communities, predator control provided dog food, trap bait, and winter cash; it also exemplified “counter-colonial” practices—the strategic appropriation of colonial instruments to advance Indigenous interests even as participation furthered the federal conservation agenda.

The system’s contradictions soon became evident. As removals intensified, accusations of abuse multiplied—importing fish from outside Bristol Bay and cutting tails from rainbow trout and even young salmon for bounty credit. In 1939 the ichthyologist Carl L. Hubbs documented these practices and challenged the scientific premises that had reduced ecosystem dynamics to a simple predator–prey calculus. On his recommendation, Territorial Governor Ernest Gruening ended bounty funding in 1941, and the program was terminated.

The Bristol Bay case reframes interwar conservation as a project of colonial maintenance: after 1919, federal science did not merely regulate extraction; it actively reorganized environments to keep extraction going. Predator control shows how quantification, metaphors of war, and payment infrastructures translated ecological theory into routine practice, how Indigenous labor was incorporated and constrained, and how a landscape later imagined as pristine was, in fact, historically constructed through administrative, scientific, and economic interventions.

This paper identifies a novel pattern in the second Trump administration’s National Guard deployments. The innovation lies in differentiating deployments along partisan geographic lines while pursuing the same stated objective—preserving federal functions (protecting federal personnel, facilities, and operations)—by selectively invoking the Guard’s dual legal statuses: Title 10 (federal status under presidential command) and Title 32 (state-controlled status with federal funding). Although federal function preservation is not a legally indispensable prerequisite for mobilizing the Guard, the administration nonetheless relied on that rationale in roughly twenty states.

The paper also specifies the enabling conditions. Institutionally, decades of reform in the Guard created a set of legal authorities that presidents can mix and match. Politically, contemporary polarization—especially the intensification of geographically sorted partisanship and affective polarization—made selective use of those authorities both feasible and attractive.

The argument contributes to federalism scholarship by extending accounts that characterize the first Trump administration as practicing “punitive federalism,” i.e., disciplining opposing states and cities through conditionality, cuts, or public shaming. That framework fails to capture the second administration’s deployment strategy because it simultaneously punished adversaries and rewarded allies. Under the rubric of federal function preservation, the President visibly deployed the National Guard in Democratic jurisdictions under Title 10, without state consent, placing forces under federal command. By contrast, in Republican jurisdictions he supported deployments under Title 32, keeping command with governors while covering costs with federal funds. This paper calls this coexistence and selective use of patronage and punishment “patronage-punitive federalism,” and identifies the institutional and political conditions that made it operable.

Notably, this coexistence and selective use of patronage and punishment was not confined to National Guard policy. During the first Trump administration, allocations in the Department of Transportation’s transportation-infrastructure grant programs were substantially reduced for Democratic states and cities and redirected toward Republican states and counties. In disaster response, the administration repeatedly threatened to cut off FEMA assistance to Democratic jurisdictions while touting swift support for Republican ones. Taken together, these patterns indicate that the scope of patronage-punitive federalism extends well beyond National Guard policy.

This matters because the National Guard sits at the intersection of vertical and horizontal separation of powers—federalism and the presidency—and has historically served as a guardrail against the domestic misuse of military force. Deploying it along partisan geographic lines risks instrumentalizing force for political ends and straining constitutional checks even when courts intervene only after the fact. At the same time, the Guard is a locally rooted institution, descended from community-based militias; using it as leverage to preempt or pressure state and local discretion, and to chill citizens’ freedoms, undermines community trust and the Guard’s identity. In this light, the second Trump administration’s approach amounts to a stress test of the Guard’s institutional resilience.

This article examines land repatriation efforts by urban Native Americans in Denver, Colorado, focusing on two initiatives that sought to restore access to their ancestral land. Unlike tribal land claims against the federal government, in these efforts, urban Native communities without a land base negotiated with municipal authorities, state governments, and religious institutions.

The first case concerns the establishment of the Tall Bull Memorial Grounds in Daniels Park. Beginning in 1974, Richard Tallbull(Southern Cheyenne), president of Denver’s oldest Native American organization, the White Buffalo Council of American Indians(WBC), established in 1955 spearheaded efforts to create powwow grounds commemorating the bicentennial of the United States and Colorado’s centennial in 1976. Completed in 1979, the Tall Bull Memorial Grounds are a vital space for local Natives’ cultural, religious, and educational activities. As well as granting local Native Americans exclusive use of the grounds, in 2018, the City of Denver began donating buffaloes raised in Daniels Park to support tribes’ efforts to restore buffalo herds, symbolically addressing historical losses of the land and buffaloes sacred to them.

The second case involves the transfer of ownership of the land and church building from the Lutheran Church to the Four Winds American Indian Council(henceforth, “Four Winds”). Since the mid-1980s, the building served as a social, cultural, and political gathering place for Denver’s Native community. In 2014, Four Winds gained official ownership of the land, which commemorated the 150th anniversary of the Sand Creek Massacre. Over time, the place became a primary center of support for unhoused Native Americans, reflecting the community’s adaptive responses to contemporary challenges.

The COVID-19 pandemic and citywide sweeps of homeless encampments in 2021 disproportionately affected Native populations, forcing many unhoused Natives into precarious conditions. In response, Four Winds provided for assistance to unhoused Native Americans at the “Denver Indigenous Refugee Camp” framing their displacement as homelessness within their own homeland. Community-based provision of necessities and support with healing practices, such as talking circles organized by the Lakota Way Healing Center, were critical support during this crisis.

These cases exemplify how local urban Native Americans have reclaimed access to their ancestral land for social, cultural, and spiritual purposes while confronting ongoing settler-colonialism and underscore commitments by state and local governments, non-Native residents, and institutions to acknowledge historical injustices against indigenous peoples while fostering new relationships with urban Native residents and the tribes once lived in the Denver area and throughout Colorado. The creation of the Tall Bull Memorial Grounds and transfer of the land and church building to Four Winds exemplify indigenous people’s efforts toward decolonization and the recovery of their homeland in a settler-colonial state. These initiatives also demonstrate that urban land repatriation is not merely symbolic but constitutes a vital strategy for cultural survival, social justice, and the reassertion of indigenous presence in a metropolitan context.

This article analyzes the enactment of Texas Senate Bill 4 (SB4) in 2017, a law requiring cooperation between local law enforcement agencies and federal immigration authorities, within the context of contemporary Texas political history. Since the mid-2000s, the boundary between federal and local authority over immigration enforcement in the United States has become increasingly fluid, as states and local governments have expanded their role amid federal legislative deadlock. Focusing on the concept of “sanctuary” as a foundation of local membership for undocumented immigrants, this study examines how sanctuary regulation emerged as a contested political issue in Texas. Unlike much existing scholarship that centers on conflicts between the Trump administration and liberal jurisdictions, this article highlights a distinct configuration in which a Republican-dominated state government sought to regulate Democratic-leaning cities and counties. Through an analysis of Austin and Travis County, it demonstrates how interactions among municipal, state, and federal actors—particularly during the Obama administration—shaped the politicization and institutionalization of sanctuary regulation, revealing the multilayered nature of immigration governance in Texas.

This study reexamines the origins and development of Hawai‘i’s local plays through the conceptual framework of islandness. While previous scholarship has tended to emphasize its countercultural dimensions, this paper argues that local plays, though institutionally consolidated with the establishment of Kumu Kahua Theatre by Dennis Carroll in 1971, is rooted in the natural and cultural conditions of Hawai‘i as an island. From the 19th century onward, the geographic characteristics of remoteness, smallness, and oceanic have profoundly shaped Hawai‘i’s theatrical culture, fostering an externally dependent economy and a multiethnic, multilingual society. These conditions encouraged local residents to engage in theatrical self-representation at a time when few professional stars and touring companies visited the islands.

By the mid-19th century, amateur theatrical groups had emerged in Honolulu, and by the early 20^th century, their activities reflected the influence of the European Little Theater movement that emphasized artistic integrity and community service. Organizations such as the Honolulu Dramatic Club, the Footlights Club(later the Honolulu Community Theatre), and the University of Hawai‘i Theatre Guild cultivated a theatrical culture based on local subjects and oriented toward local audiences rather than tourists, establishing a foundation for local, community-based performance traditions. The ethnic and cultural diversity of the islands—an outcome of the plantation economy and continuous migration which evolved from islandness —became deeply embedded in the content and language of these performances. Early productions at the University of Hawai‘i, for instance, incorporated Western, Chinese, Japanese and Hawaiian subjects and employed actors of diverse racial backgrounds, enacting a form of multicultural coexistence that prefigured later developments in local plays.

Following World War II, Samoan playwright John Kneubuhl advanced a vision of theater that would allow Hawai‘i’s residents to see plays about themselves, articulating a regional theatrical identity distinct from the imported mainstream. Although community theater activity temporarily declined in the postwar years, the 1970s brought renewed vitality amid growing critiques of mass tourism and environmental degradation. Within this climate, Kumu Kahua Theatre emerged as a consciously local institution that sought to represent the lives, voices, and linguistic realities of Hawai‘i’s people. Its use of Hawaiian Pidgin as a dramatic language symbolized a reclamation of local identity within a postcolonial context.

Subsequent developments, including the creation of the Hawaiian Theater Program by Tammy Haili‘ōpua Baker at the University of Hawai‘i, extended these efforts by staging performances entirely in the Hawaiian language, thereby linking theatrical practice to movements for cultural revitalization and Indigenous sovereignty.

Ultimately, this study proposes that Hawai‘i’s local plays should not be defined solely in binary terms—such as anti-white, anti-commercial, or countercultural— as seen in the conventional American theater history, but understood as a dynamic, historically layered product of islandness. The category of “local,” inherently relational and fluid, signifies a continuing process of negotiation within Hawai‘i’s multicultural and postcolonial society. Local plays, in this sense, functions as both a cultural expression of that process and a living practice that continually rearticulates the complex identities of the islands.

In the 1980s, the United States sought to restrain fiscal spending under neoliberal policies, resulting in cuts to water-resource development budgets. Meanwhile, California’s population growth led to increased demand for urban water as well as rising demand for water dedicated to environmental purposes. In response to calls for changes in California’s water-resource allocation, the Central Valley Project Improvement Act(CVPIA) was enacted in 1992. This law significantly reduced agricultural water use to ensure water for fisheries and the environment and also permitted the resale of agricultural water to urban areas. At the time, California agriculture was lagging behind other industries, such as the information industry, and supplying water for surplus crops(e.g., cotton, alfalfa, irrigated pasture) was considered economically inefficient.

Around the same period, the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed and went into effect, accelerating globalization. Some vegetables and fruits for domestic consumers, as well as California’s surplus crops, faced competition from low-price agricultural products from Latin America. These changes promoted a shift toward internationally competitive, high-value products such as almonds and other nuts. However, rural areas suffered serious economic damage due to the combined effects of the CVPIA and globalization, and poverty emerged in several regions. Moreover, fallowing and land sales prompted by agricultural water reductions did not progress sufficiently. This situation increased dependence on groundwater, lowering groundwater levels and exacerbating environmental problems.

California’s industrial sector helped to shape public opinion by emphasizing the economic benefits of the CVPIA in various venues and ultimately succeeded in advancing the policy. At the time, the San Francisco Bay Area made certain compromises and allowed the sale of agricultural water from the Central Valley to Southern California, helping to secure a legislative majority. When the CVPIA was established in the 1990s, the Bay Area was experiencing economic growth and a rapid population increase, with the development of Silicon Valley serving as a symbolic example.

The longstanding conflict between the high-rainfall regions of Northern California and the low-rainfall regions of the South was also easing, partly due to a slowdown in water-infrastructure development. Nonetheless, cities, environmental interests, and rural communities began to compete more directly for limited water resources.

These changes likely influenced residents’ subsequent political choices. In the 2020s, California saw a predominance of Democratic supporters, particularly in urban areas. However, a substantial number of Republican House members were elected in rural areas of inland California. A political movement seeking to restore agricultural water use is now underway there, accompanied by criticism of environmental water allocations. The economic interests of rural communities may also influence the Trump administration’s environmental policies.

This paper examines the economic perspectives of urban stakeholders through detailed interviews in urban areas and analyses of California’s local newspapers. It then demonstrates that these actors promoted the CVPIA with particular emphasis on economic considerations, in alignment with neoliberal policies that have shaped water governance since the 1980s.

This research examines how the Old Order Amish in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, engage with modern consumer culture through the practice of benevolent consumption—consumption in service of mutual aid, religious duty, and community cohesion. Although the Amish are often portrayed as premodern, anti-consumerist, or detached from mainstream American society, I argue that consumption plays a central, rather than marginal, role in sustaining Amish religious and social life. Using an auction that was organized to support an Amish man facing overwhelming medical expenses as a case study, I demonstrate that such events reveal a complex interplay between religious values, local networks, and commercial consumption.

Although charity auctions appear to embody traditional Amish values—volunteerism, humility, thrift, and mutual aid—they also rely heavily on commercial goods purchased from mainstream retailers. Moreover, the events depend on non-Amish labor, such as hired drivers. Rather than seeing this as a contradiction or compromise, I suggest that Amish communities actively reconfigure external resources within a religious framework. Through selective use of modern technology and commercial spaces, the Amish negotiate their social boundaries while simultaneously reinforcing the local network grounded in their geographically spread church districts. Items purchased are not valued for personal utility but for their symbolic contribution to the collective good. Buying, donating, and volunteering constitute acts of devotion that publicly affirm membership, solidarity, and ethical responsibility. Trust-based economic practices—such as self-recorded bids and honor-based payment—further highlight the ethical economy that undergirds Amish sociality.

I can textualize these findings within material culture studies of religion, arguing that scholarly attention has often focused on sacred objects rather than practices. Amish charitable consumption shows that acts of consumption themselves can generate and reproduce religious value. Rather than resisting modern consumer society, the Amish selectively appropriate it, managing the boundary between “the world” and their own community through both conscious and taken-for-granted practices of everyday life. Ultimately, it demonstrates that consumer culture is integral to the maintenance and reproduction of Amish communal life. Benevolent consumption strengthens local mutual-aid networks, reaffirms religious ethics, and reveals the dynamic, evolving nature of Amish engagements with the modern world.

Pastoralism has long served as a foundational framework for conceptualizing locality in American literature. In his influential work, The Machine in the Garden(1964), Leo Marx describes how industrial intrusion disrupts an imagined pre-industrial landscape, shaping critical accounts of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century American writings. Early ecocriticism inherited this paradigm, particularly through nature writing, which Don Sheese defines as a first-person nonfiction narrative of the physical and spiritual movement from civilization to the nonhuman world. This tradition, extending from Henry David Thoreau to John Muir and Aldo Leopold, presupposes a mobile, autonomous subject, inherently carrying gendered and ideological assumptions.

As Annette Kolodny demonstrated in the 1970s, the pastoral discourse is structured by masculine-centered metaphors that equate “land” with feminized possession. While later ecocritical scholarship, including Scott Slovic’s emphasis on women writers such as Annie Dillard, Leslie Marmon Silko, Terry Tempest Williams, and Linda Hogan, has significantly revised this framework, the environmental literary imagination of the transitional period between the 1910s and the 1930s remains underexplored. This study addresses this critical gap by reinterpreting Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!(1913) as a central yet undertheorized work in American environmental literature.

Drawing on Cather’s characterization of the novel as an effort to recover “people and places that we thought we had forgotten,” this article argues that O Pioneers! presents a relational model of place that reworks, rather than rejects, the pastoral tradition. Central to this argument is Cather’s conception of a “two-part pastoral,” composed of the paired narratives of Alexandra Bergson’s sustained cultivation of the Midwestern prairie and the tragic attachment between Emil Bergson and the Bohemian immigrant Marie. Together, these narrative strands reveal how the pastoral space in Cather’s fiction is shaped by ecological persistence, affective intimacy, and irreversible loss.

Methodologically, the article advances a conceptual distinction between “land” as an object of ownership and “soil” as an ecological and temporal medium. While “land” in the novel often signifies property, inheritance, and economic calculation, “soil” emerges as both a material foundation embedded in natural-historical processes and a mediating field that carries environmental memory, religious imagination, and intergenerational affect. To capture this multi-dimensional understanding, the article employs “earth” as an inclusive term encompassing both dimensions. By situating O Pioneers! at the intersection of deep ecology and deep time, the article proposes the concept of “deep pastoralism” to describe Cather’s ecological imagination. This framework redefines American pastoralism not as a nostalgic retreat or spatial escape, but as an ethical and temporal commitment to sustaining human–soil relations across generations.

Anne McCaffrey’s fix-up novel, The Ship Who Sang (1969) follows the protagonist Helva, who is born with severe physical disabilities. Her parents must decide whether to discard her life as a “thing” or preserve her by connecting her brain to a “brainship.” They choose the latter option, and Helva survives as a transhuman cyborg known as a “shell person.” Previous research has criticized The Ship Who Sang from the perspective of disability studies, arguing that it implies disabled people can only survive by technologically “overcoming” their disability. From the perspective of gender studies, the novel has also been criticized for rigidly gendering portrayal of Helva as a subordinate woman within heteronormative frameworks.

However, this paper argues that The Ship Who Sang cannot be fully understood in terms of either disability or gender alone. A crucial context for this interpretation is provided by the commentary by Mercedes Lackey, who situates the novel against the backdrop of the thalidomide tragedy of the 1960s. In 1962, the case of Sherri Finkbine, who chose abortion for fear of giving birth to an “abnormal” child after taking thalidomide, sparked a national debate and provided a prime opportunity to build public momentum for abortion rights, culminating in the 1973 case of Roe v. Wade. The 1960s were also marked by the dawn of prenatal diagnosis. Written during this historical time, when women and disabled individuals were caught in a fraught intersection concerning the ethics of reproductive choice, The Ship Who Sang persistently highlights the perspective of the unborn “thing.” From this perspective, the novel illuminates the loss of those “things” that were neither recorded nor commemorated at this intersection.

This paper reinterprets the first three stories of the novel as a narrative of loss shaped by intersecting differences, examining them in relation to contemporary discourses on thalidomide, rubella, and abortion. In the opening of “The Ship Who Sang” (1961), the repeated use of the subjunctive mood and terms such as “if” and “possibility” sustains an ambiguous narrative voice even after Helva’s future appears to have been determined by her parents’ decision. This suspended narration embraces unrealized bodily possibilities—both “normal” and “abnormal”—to continue haunting the text, mirroring the discursive landscape surrounding the thalidomide tragedy. The second installment, “The Ship Who Mourned” (1966), centers on a technology used for the treatment of prenatal disability, presenting an imaginative horizon inseparable from 1960s society. In the third installment, “The Ship Who Killed” (1966), Helva is assigned the task of transporting the fertilized embryos of “superior” selected individuals. The choice of life Helva makes here echoes the choice made by Helva’s parents at the beginning but proceeds in the opposite direction. Across these repeated choices, distinctions between the born and the unborn, the self and the other, and even the locus of agency itself become increasingly unstable around Helva’s embodied existence. These instabilities convey the sense of loss experienced by women in 1960s society as a result of the inevitably eugenic logics of choice.