The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau PDF
Preview The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau
the foundations of glen canyon dam the foundations of glen ca n yon da m Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau erika marie bsumek university of texas press Austin Support for this book comes from an endowment for environmental studies made possible by generous contributions from Richard C. Bartlett, Susan Aspinall Block, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Copyright © 2023 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2023 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713- 7819 utpress.utexas.edu/rp- form Th e paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48- 1992 (r1997) (Permanence of Paper). Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress isbn 978-1-4773-0381-8 (hardcover) isbn 978-1-4773-2658-9 (PDF) isbn 978-1-4773-2659-6 (ePub) doi:10.7560/303818 contents preface vii Family Foundations a note on terminology xiii introduction 1 Th e Many Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam 1. religious expansion 21 Latter- day Settlers, Dispossession, and Indentured Servitude, 1840–1880 2. instruments of dispossession 54 Th e Infl uence of Science and Scholarship, 1869–1920 3. structures of erasure 90 Engineering, Education, and Ecology, 1910–1960 4. political maneuvering 126 Reclamation and Termination in Diné Bikéyah, 1947–1980 5. legal paradigms and dispossession 156 Navajos, Environmentalists, and the Law, 1969–1980 epilogue. dispossession and possession 189 Th e Continued Fight over Sacred Land and Water on the Colorado Plateau acknowledgments 196 notes 200 bibliography 240 illustration credits 259 index 262 preface Family Foundations I am a reluctant settler. I would rather not be existing on someone else’s stolen land. But the fact of the matter is that I wouldn’t have had a university job if indigenous people hadn’t had their land stolen from them in Australia. patrick wolfe, “settler colonialism then and now: a conversation between j. khaulani kauanui and patrick wolfe,” in politica and societa, february 2012, 237 Th ere are many diff erent histories that can be told about the building of Glen Canyon Dam. Th is book traces the growth of the Latter-d ay Saint population across the Colorado Plateau. It uncovers the development of sci- ence, scholarship, technology, and law in the region. It also focuses on dis- possession of the Indigenous people who inhabited the region where the dam was built, especially the Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos, who despite being dispossessed of the majority of their former lands continue to live in the re- gion today. It is a history of people, ideas, and actions as much as it is a story about a place and the construction of a dam because the dam could not be built until a social infrastructure existed to justify its existence. Th at social infrastructure was built on the dispossession of Indigenous people. How that was done by settlers, scientists, engineers, ecologists, the courts, and the state is the main focus of this book. My personal history is connected to the history that unfolds in what fol- lows in ways that are complicated but also completely predictable if you know about the history of the US West. My personal ancestors did not participate in massacres or in the removal of Indigenous people from their lands. But I—and my family members—are settlers on Indigenous lands. We, and millions of others like us, are the benefi ciaries of the dispossession vii preface of Ute, Paiute, Navajo, Hopi, and Puebloan people from their lands on the Colorado Plateau. I begin with that acknowledgment. Over the course of writing this book, I learned that the Navajo Nation (NN) made it possible for the government to build Glen Canyon Dam because they provided the land that became Page, Arizona—where work- ers lived and materials could be stored and manufactured—to the United States in a land swap. As a historian who has previously explored the history of how non- Indigenous people consumed Navajo material culture, I found myself considering how the government and white residents of the West consumed Indigenous resources on a massive scale. With that perspective in mind, the enormous impact of Glen Canyon Dam came into sharp re- lief. It is so much more than a concrete mega- structure, engineering marvel, or environmental abomination. Th e more I found out about the history of the region and dam, the more it came to embody all the diff erent kinds of infrastructures that have been consciously layered throughout the region to shape the social and political contours of the American West. Archival doc- uments, interviews, and intensive research revealed the dam, and the his- tory behind it, manifested from all the diff erent kinds of physical and so- cial infrastructures that have been shored up by dispossessing Indigenous people of their knowledge as well as their land, their water, and other natu- ral resources. Th e dam, as such, represents the “promise” of the region that settlers saw as well as the destructive processes of colonialization that oc- curred there. It may also now represent the hubris of those who built it. It, along with other settler infrastructure projects that preceded it, supported the growth of the non-I ndigenous population across, and beyond, the re- gion. But, as the book also shows, Glen Canyon Dam was also built with a degree of Indigenous support and labor. As I dug deeper into the history of engineering and the dam, it became apparent that I could not write an- other history of the dam without exploring the ways that the building of it was connected to the history of the Navajo Nation, Diné Bikéyah, other In- digenous peoples of the region, and to the longer history of the coloniza- tion and development of the West related to Utah’s own history—and, as it turns out, to that of my own family. As I conducted my research, I discovered that Glen Canyon Dam was the fi rst engineering project my grandfather worked on as an immigrant seeking refuge in the United States after World War II. My paternal grand- father, Edwin Franz Bsumek (1909–1984), was born in Schwarzenberg, Ger- many. He was a civil engineer by training prior to WWII. His wife, Ella Bier wald Bsumek (1913–1991), was raised by her grandmother in Elbing and was an early convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-d ay Saints viii preface (LDS) in Germany in the 1920s.¹ Edwin and Ella met in the early 1930s and married in 1935 after Edwin converted to Mormonism. Th ey had four chil- dren, one of whom, Peter (1939–), is my father. Edwin applied for a visa to come to the United States in 1949, and the family immigrated to Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1952. Th ey arrived with only what the family of six could carry in four suitcases. Th ey had also amassed a debt of $1,000 to the LDS family who sponsored their trip. Th at meant my grandfather, who spoke very little English, needed to fi nd work and learn English as soon as possi- ble. After a series of odd jobs, Edwin found work as an engineer for West- ern Steel in the mid- 1950s. His fi rst real task was to engineer the rebar for a portion of Glen Canyon Dam. Th is sparked a lifelong love of the arid West, infrastructure, and the natural environment. Several times a year, he and Ella took their small camper on long road trips throughout the region. While Ella remained a devout member of the LDS Church for her entire life, Franz remained somewhat ambivalent about religion and their son, my father, left the Church in the 1960s. My mother’s family links my history to the story of the settlement of the region and dispossession—the second major theme of this book. None of my ancestors took part in any of the brutal massacres that loom so large in accounts of Native American dispossession. Th eir—our—involvement was less obvious and thus easier to deny, and in that regard it is emblem- atic of the ways that most white Americans are implicated in disposses- sion. My mother’s family, the Collabella-C uglietta clan, also called Utah home, though they immigrated from Southern Italy in the early 1910s and were not LDS. Looking for a better life, they were laborers who settled in east- central Utah with hopes of taking advantage of the “free land” off ered via the Homestead Act. Th e men initially worked as wagon masters, on the railroad, or in the coal mines of Carbon County, Utah, while the women did whatever they could do to contribute to the household economy. For instance, my maternal great- great-g randmother, Mary Teresa Biofora Tan- garo (1882–1965) and her daughter, Mary Tangaro (1902–1983), came to the United States from San Giovanni in Fiore, Italy, in 1911 to join my great- great-g randfather, Nicola Tangaro (1880–1920), who had arrived the de- cade before. When Nicola died in 1920, my great grandmother, Mary, her mother, and her young siblings were left to fend for themselves. Mary mar- ried Beneditto Colobella (1887–1965) in 1920, and the two had a daugh- ter and a son in quick succession, Vera (1921–2016) and Sam (1922–1993). Vera was my grandmother. Shortly after Sam’s birth, Beneditto abandoned the family. Mary Teresa and Mary raised young Vera and Sam along with Mary’s signifi cantly younger siblings, Louise (1912–1989), Katherine (1913– ix
The list of books you might like
