The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau

Erika Bsumek's compelling book sheds new light on one of the most controversial public works projects on the planet. The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau builds on previous scholarship by Jared Farmer, Andrew Needham, and other historians. Interpreting a wealth of archival sources by adapting critical frameworks from the field of Native American and Indigenous Studies, especially from the cutting-edge Diné scholars Farina King, Andrew Curley, Jennifer Nez Denetdale, and Melanie Yazzie, Bsumek convincingly argues that “Glen Canyon Dam rests on the processes through which white settlers laid claim” to present-day southeastern Utah and northwestern Arizona (5). Bsumek's work deserves a wide readership for the important contributions it makes to environmental, southwestern, Indigenous, Utah, and Latter-day Saint history.In a concisely argued yet deeply informed introduction, Bsumek helpfully defines settler colonialism as “a form of colonialism that aims to transfer territory and resources from Indigenous people to the dominant society in order to foster permanent settler societies” (5). Chapter 1 of Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam begins to explore how settler colonialism reshaped the Colorado Plateau by recounting Mormons’ expansion into the ancestral territories of Southern Paiutes, Utes, Diné, and other Native nations. Bsumek rightly places the interplay between Native servitude/enslavement and Indigenous displacement at the center of her analysis. The book's second and third chapters, which focus heavily on a succession of scientific explorers ranging from Yale geologist Herbert E. Gregory to University of Utah ecologist and zoologist Angus Woodbury, trace subsequent stages of Anglo settlement and scientific exploration in the northern Colorado Plateau. Bsumek shows that by the twentieth century, Native peoples not only played unacknowledged roles in producing knowledge about the Colorado Plateau but also found themselves increasingly erased from settler-scientists’ depictions of the Four Corners landscape.Having examined the development of what she calls the “social infrastructure” on which the Glen Canyon Dam would eventually be built, Bsumek turns in chapters 4 and 5 to political history. Building upon Charles Wilkinson's Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American Southwest (1999) as well as more recent works, Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam charts the crucial connections between prominent Latter-day Saint figures (especially Utah Senator Arthur Watkins), settler dreams of agricultural and economic development, and post–World War II efforts by federal lawmakers to terminate the “special relationship” between Indigenous nations and the United States Congress. Congress's “attempt to terminate its trust responsibilities toward Native Americans in the 1950s,” she demonstrates, “was directly linked to water reclamation” (129). Bsumek provides a detailed examination of the campaigns through which Watkins and his allies, especially Upper Colorado River Grass Roots, Inc. (nicknamed Aqualante), touted the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP). She asserts that “the religious philosophy of Mormonism . . . influenced regional economic development, governed ideas regarding natural resource use, and shaped federal policy toward Indigenous people in unexpected and sometimes dramatic ways” (129). By “getting water” to the Navajo Nation “and controlling how such waters were used,” powerful Utahns endeavored to “facilitate assimilation and provide a solution to the larger Navajo ‘problem’ of governmental reliance” (149).Initially, Navajo tribal chairman Sam Ahkeah and other prominent Native peoples played along, especially after they prevailed on Watkins to fold the Navajo Dam and the Navajo Indian Irrigation Project back into legislation authorizing the CRSP. “For Navajo leaders,” Bsumek explains, “embracing progress meant being open to economic development plans that would help them strengthen their ability to preserve Navajo cultural and religious traditions as well as help their Navajo constituents feed their families” (155). Yet Indigenous support for Glen Canyon began to waver as Watkins and his supporters increasingly “link[ed] the policies of termination and reclamation in the [settler] public's mind” (155).Native opposition to the dam intensified after governmental promises of jobs, water, and protection for Tsé Naní’ áhígíí (Rainbow Bridge) failed to materialize. By the 1970s, many Diné in Utah were allying with environmentalists after Lake Powell's creation buoyed tourists to the sacred sandstone arch just north of the Arizona line. Diné complaints about the federal government's failure to protect Tsé Naní’ áhígíí came to a head in Badoni v. Higginson. Diné plaintiffs sued the government for violating their religious freedoms by imperiling Rainbow Bridge, but the US district court in Utah dismissed the suit in 1977 in a decision later affirmed by the Tenth Circuit. “By negating Navajos’ religious and cultural practices in favor of non-Native tourism and economic gain,” Bsumek argues, “the courts simultaneously undermined and erased Indigenous claims to their ancestral homelands” (166).Yet Bsumek also highlights the ongoing fight by Diné and other Native peoples “to protect and worship at the arch” (188). Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam concludes by contrasting a proposed pipeline project that would bring water from Lake Powell to the fast-growing southern Utah communities of Saint George and Kanab with political controversies over Bears Ears National Monument. The central role that Indigenous peoples played in the monument's creation, Bsumek claims, “illustrates that an infrastructure of inclusion instead of erasure is possible” (194).The Foundations of Glen Canyon is essential reading for anyone concerned with the past, present, and future of the Colorado Plateau and the West more broadly. This thoroughly researched and engagingly written book sheds fresh light on the social, political, and environmental injustices that underpinned the planning and construction of Glen Canyon. In exposing the dam's ongoing dependence on settler colonialism, Bsumek restores Diné, Southern Paiute, and Ute peoples to their rightful place at the center of their homelands’ history while highlighting the ongoing injuries and insults that dam building and other large infrastructure projects continue to impose on Indigenous peoples and nations.