Description
The second highest concrete-arch dam in the United States, Glen Canyon Dam was built to control the flow of the Colorado River throughout the Western United States. Completed in 1966, the dam continues to serve as a water storage facility for residents, industries, and agricultural use across the American West. The dam also generates hydroelectric power for residents in Colorado, Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and Nebraska. More than a massive piece of physical infrastructure and an engineering feat, the dam exposes the cultural structures and complex regional power relations that relied on Indigenous knowledge and labor while simultaneously dispossessing the Indigenous communities of their land and resources across the Colorado Plateau.
Erika Marie Bsumek reorients the story of the dam to reveal a pattern of Indigenous erasure by weaving together the stories of religious settlers and Indigenous peoples, engineers and biologists, and politicians and spiritual leaders. Infrastructures of dispossession teach us that we cannot tell the stories of religious colonization, scientific exploration, regional engineering, environmental transformation, or political deal-making as disconnected from Indigenous history. This book is a provocative and essential piece of modern history, particularly as water in the West becomes increasingly scarce and fights over access to it continue to unfold.
Author: Erika Marie Bsumek
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 01/02/2023
Pages: 336
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.35lbs
Size: 9.06h x 6.14w x 1.18d
ISBN13: 9781477303818
ISBN10: 1477303812
BISAC Categories:
- History | United States | 20th Century
- Social Science | Ethnic Studies | American | Native American Studies
- Nature | Environmental Conservation & Protection | General
About the Author
Erika Marie Bsumek is an associate professor of history at UT Austin. She is the author of the award-winning Indian-made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1848-1940 and the coeditor of Nation States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History.