'Strangers on their own land'1: Ideology, Policy, and Rational Landscapes in the United States, 1825-1934.

During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Native Americans were increasingly excluded from the American social body and from national space. This article explores that exclusion from three perspectives: through dominant national ideologies that represented tribal groups as 'Other' and inferior to European Americans; through federal policies - including removal, reservation, and allotment - that increasingly confined 'Indians' to specific parts of the national landscape; and through the cartographic delineation of the national territory, which produced a Cartesian gridded landscape alien to Native understandings of land. This latter focus includes a case study of Indian Territory, which was incorporated into the state of Oklahoma in 1907. These three strands are explored through a theoretical framework that combines ideas about governmentality and territory, discourses of otherness and exclusion, and the power of maps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]