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The Settler Sea - California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,481
Discovery Miles 14 810
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The Settler Sea - California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (Hardcover)
Series: Many Wests
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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2022 WHA Caughey Western History Prize for the most distinguished
book on the American West Can a sea be a settler? What if it is a
sea that exists only in the form of incongruous, head-scratching
contradictions: a wetland in a desert, a wildlife refuge that
poisons birds, a body of water in which fish suffocate? Traci
Brynne Voyles’s history of the Salton Sea examines how settler
colonialism restructures physical environments in ways that further
Indigenous dispossession, racial capitalism, and degradation of the
natural world. In other words, The Settler Sea asks how settler
colonialism entraps nature to do settlers’ work for them. The
Salton Sea, Southern California’s largest inland body of water,
occupies the space between the lush agricultural farmland of the
Imperial Valley and the austere desert called “America’s
Sahara.” The sea sits near the boundary between the United States
and Mexico and lies at the often-contested intersections of the
sovereign lands of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuillas and the
state of California. Created in 1905, when overflow from the
Colorado River combined with a poorly constructed irrigation system
to cause the whole river to flow into the desert, this
human-maintained body of water is considered a looming
environmental disaster. The Salton Sea’s very
precariousness—existing always in the interstices of human and
natural influences, between desert and wetland, between the skyward
pull of the sun and the constant inflow of polluted water—is both
a symptom and symbol of the larger precariousness of settler
relationships to the environment, in the West and beyond. Voyles
provides an innovative exploration of the Salton Sea, looking to
the ways the sea, its origins, and its role in human life have been
vital to the people who call this region home.
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