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Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo
land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the
peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate
exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the
Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and
energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main
source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the
Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium
sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health
and lives of former miners and nonminers alike. Traci Brynne Voyles
argues that the presence of uranium mining on Dine (Navajo) land
constitutes a clear case of environmental racism. Looking at
discursive constructions of landscapes, she explores how
environmental racism develops over time. For Voyles, the
"wasteland," where toxic materials are excavated, exploited, and
dumped, is both a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an
environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. Because
environmental inequality is inherent in the way industrialism
operates, the wasteland is the "other" through which modern
industrialism is established. In examining the history of
wastelanding in Navajo country, Voyles provides "an environmental
justice history" of uranium mining, revealing how just as
"civilization" has been defined on and through "savagery,"
environmental privilege is produced by portraying other landscapes
as marginal, worthless, and pollutable.
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.
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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