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Beyond the frontier is still settler colonialism: Hisham Bustan, Elia El-Khazen, ‘Between a rock and Israel: how Jordan’s water and energy arrangements advance settler colonialism’, Territory, Politics, Governance, 2026 »

Turquoise settler colonialism: Kristen Barbara Dorsey, From Mines to Native Jewelry Markets: Unravelling the Settler Political Economy of Turquoise, PhD dissertation, UCLA, 2026

08Jun26

Abstract: This thesis is an inquiry into turquoise, a mineral primarily used as a gemstone in jewelry, and one of many different significant materials used in Southwestern Native American cultures and traditions. Despite the diversity of Native jewelry form and materials, jewelry set with turquoise generally overshadows other types of Native-made jewelry as a coveted and collected object for non-Native consumers. This thesis examines settler desires for turquoise mined from Native homelands through time, starting with the territorial New Mexico colonial political economy of turquoise mining in the 19th century in which settler men attempted to construct a narrative that Native turquoise mines had been abandoned. The mineral is also collected for Victorian curio cabinets and displayed on the bodies of white settler women for whom the gem becomes their connection to dead Native sisters of the female settler imaginary. ii The mineral discussed in this thesis has saturated the Southwest Native American jewelry market for over a century. Today, Native jewelers navigate the enduring settler capitalist structure of the turquoise economy, where white mine owners control access to the uncut gem, and where commodified gems as jewelry function as they have since the 19th century as markers of a culture deemed to be of the past. The story of turquoise is the continuing story of Native dispossession: the theft of Native land and resources and the confinement of Natives to anachronistic space and time. It is also the story of refusal and Native contestation of the story of their disappearance and confinement to prehistory. Gender is central to this quintessential story of dispossession and settler capitalism. From the masculine settler subjects who claim the mines, to the white male ethnographers, to the white settler women who narrate and lend content to the imaginary story of the vanishing Indian and her fantasy of dead turquoise-wearing Native sisters, turquoise proves essential to the making of colonial subjectivities. When Native jewelers sell their turquoise creations in the Santa Fe jewelry market, they must navigate a colonial field of white mine owners and the trading post histories that mark Native labor, creativity, and jewelry as colonial commodities. Gender is central to how these colonial fields can be traversed. If the story of turquoise is the quintessential colonial story of theft and extraction in the Americas and elsewhere, in the Southwestern United States, the story reveals how a single mineral is extracted and commodified into an innocent gem that masks the story of conquest and dispossession. Transformed from a sacred object into an aesthetic object, turquoise tells the story of settler colonialism, revealing the specific gendered procedures and mythologies of settler property regimes in the Southwest.


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