| This study examines the ways in which stewardship has been applied in the Judith Basin over time by different groups of people, from the Piegan Blackfeet through New Deal era farmers. In the case of the Judith Basin, notions of proper stewardship were manifested in distinctive identities among Indians, fur traders, ranchers, boosters, agricultural experts, and farmers. One can get a sense of the connections between stewardship and identity by looking at stewardship narratives that validate certain means and ends of land use and help provide identity by “placing” people and their activities in a narrative framework. For example, in the Judith Basin one can trace the rise and fall of a progressive settlement narrative where Indian stewardship was dismissed, ranching was seen as a temporary activity, and a Judith Basin filled with family farms in a Jeffersonian vision was the desired end. Boosters, agricultural scientists, and settlers saw themselves all playing important roles in fulfilling the telos of this story. When ecological and economic realities literally blew this narrative away after 1919, locals created a new story which repositioned themselves and their stewardship in a more conservative narrative that allowed them to argue that they are indeed “native” to the place that is the Judith Basin against perceived “outsiders” that questioned the means and ends of their land-use practices. Individual chapters are dedicated to the Judith Basin as a bioregion, Indian occupancy of the area, the open-range livestock industry, the dryland homesteading boom, the disastrous years of the 1920s and 1930s, and the post-Depression era that has seen the rise of agribusiness and a new stewardship narrative stressing nativity and place. |
