U.S. colonial settlement in the Pueblo homelands following the construction of the railroads in the 1880s generated social and environmental insecurities in the form of dispossession, soil erosion and devastating floods. By the early twentieth century, confronting the ecological and social damage caused by settler expansion potentially called the U.S. colonial project into question, giving rise to a vibrant array of Native and settler critiques of colonialism. This dissertation demonstrates how these criticisms animated the Indian New Deal, which was connected to wide-ranging efforts to reckon with the insecurities generated by capitalism and colonialism. Pueblo Indian and non-Native leaders and reformers sought to craft policies that respected tribal sovereignty and returned land and water to Pueblo tribes to ensure their security and well-being, while also creating new relations between people, land and water in the form of ecologically sound watershed governance intended to secure the well-being of Native and non-Native communities.

However, even as these critical alternatives emerged, dominant settler colonial forms of infrastructure engineering and social and environmental exploitation continued. While these dominant infrastructural formations, tethered to the rising national security state, emerged as the victors of this mid-century struggle, the history recounted here helps us to understand how that victory can be understood as both pyrrhic and incomplete. The costly social and environmental fallout from industrial, and now nuclear-powered, settler colonization accumulates and generates new and intensified insecurities in the region. By returning to the archives and debates of these watershed moments, this dissertation develops through lines from the past that shape our present moment of planetary insecurity.