The Foundations Of Glen Canyon Dam

"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 and to generate 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 also exposes the cultural structures and complex regional power relations that both 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. Delving into the role that each of these groups played in the establishment of the Glen Canyon Dam exposes the dynamics of settler colonialism in the building of the dam as well as the layers of the ongoing, systematic dispossession of Indigenous people. 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. The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam is a provocative and essential piece of modern history, particularly as water in the West becomes increasingly scarce and fights over access to it unfold"--