Send message to Author

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the 1960 film Land of White Alice sold US civic groups on the colonial logics of conquest and contamination undergirding the construction of the vast Alaskan "White Alice" communication system, and the short-term utility and long term environmental degradation that followed.

Paper long abstract:

In the early 1960s, the film Land of White Alice circulated among U.S. school children and civic groups, promising glimpses of a remote Arctic frontier referred to as "the great land." The film impressed upon viewers the need for "White Alice," the code name for a joint Air Force/Western Electric communications system, to protect the entire nation from its Cold War adversaries. Posited as a solution to what the film called the "communication barriers" of Alaska's environment, Land of White Alice aimed to generate consent and consensus regarding the urgent military-industrial need to envision much of Alaska as terra nullius, a largely empty Arctic space to be conquered in the name of military-industrial communication. "The purpose" of imposing this technology on the environment, White Alice's official literature rationalized to audiences, was "to let Alaska speak."

Drawing on the film as well as the accompanying Western Electric-produced booklet and additional official educational material, this paper explores how the Alaskan environment in this cinematic narrative is wrapped up in the colonial logics of conquest and control that frequently rendered the vast and varied environments of Alaska empty of not just Alaska Natives but often devoid of ecosystems entirely. I conclude by contrasting such narratives with the short term utility of these "White Alice" sites, which were considered obsolete within two decades, and have long since become contentious, litigated centers of significant environmental pollution that disproportionately impacts Alaska Natives.