Climate change and population growth is creating a new appreciation — and anxiety — around water infrastructure, both in the western United States and around the world. We’re joined today by Professor Erika Bsumek, whose new book, The Foundations of Glen Canyon, focuses on America’s second highest concrete-arch dam. Not simply a massive piece of physical infrastructure it is also what Professor Bsumek calls an infrastructure of dispossession whose history shows us how cultural structures, power relations and indigenous knowledge and labor interacted in the 19th and 20th centuries — and gives us a window into how the might interact moving forward as the fight for western water intensifies in an age of climate change.
Guests
Erika BsumekAssociate Professor of History at the University of Texas at Austin
Hosts
Benjamin WrightResearcher and Writer within the UT community
[00:00:00] Ben Wright: This is 15 Minute History, a podcast for educators, students, and anyone interested in history, featuring the minds and voices of the University of Texas at Austin.
The storage and conveyance of freshwater is the hidden foundation of modern life. Climate change and population growth is creating a new appreciation and anxiety around water infrastructure, both in the western United States and around the world. Professor Erika Busumik’s new book, The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam, focuses on America’s second highest concrete arch dam.
Built to control the flow of the Colorado River, it was completed in 1966, and today provides millions of Americans with both water and power. For There’s just one problem. The water isn’t there like it used to be. Not simply a massive piece of physical infrastructure, it is also what Professor Episoumetre calls an infrastructure of dispossession.
And more than just another damn history book, she shows us how cultural structures, political Power relations and indigenous knowledge and labor interacted in the 19th and 20th centuries. That gives us a window into how they might interact moving forward as the fight for Western water intensifies in an age of climate change.
Erika, welcome to 15 Minute History.
[00:01:29] Erika Bsumek: Thanks so much.
[00:01:30] Ben Wright: Well, I think the first question I’d have for you, Erika, is what got you thinking about water?
[00:01:35] Erika Bsumek: I think part of it is where I’m from. And so I actually grew up in Utah. Right. And it is a kind of you know, it’s an arid state. Water is often on the minds of people.
But then when I was doing research on my first book, I spent a lot of time on the Navajo Reservation in the Four Corners region doing interviews, and I kept driving past Glen Canyon Dam. So the dam kind of loomed large when I was University student in the 1990s, Edward Abbey wrote this book called The Monkey Wrench Gang, and people talked about the dam all the time, and how it was kind of an environmental abomination.
So that plus my own family’s history, my grandfather, when he immigrated to the United States in 1953, Glen Canyon Dam was the first project that he worked on. So water history has been part of my family history, it was part of my sort of, you know, You know, thinking about water in the West is actually pretty common because there’s so little of it.
So people are kind of hyper attuned to it. And then spending time on the Navajo reservation and driving past the dam made me often think about the intersection of Native history. western history and water history.
[00:02:46] Ben Wright: So when is the dam finished? How long does it take to build it? I want to get a few basics for our
[00:02:51] Erika Bsumek: audience.
So the dam sits right on the Utah Arizona border. It is the second tallest gravity arch dam in the United States. It resembles Hoover Dam. So if people sort of have an image of Hoover Dam, Glencairn Dam is just sort of a bigger version of Hoover Dam. It was proposed In terms of legislation in the 1940s, legislation was approved in the 1950s and the dam was finished, completed in 1966.
Though one of the things I’m interested in the book is sort of taking the history, sort of writing the long history of Glen Canyon Dam, sort of pushing back the timeline, as it were, to think about when initial ideas about plotting a dam or having multiple dams on the Colorado River kind of came into the American imagination.
[00:03:35] Ben Wright: So I’m assuming this is tied up with Western history because, you know, my understanding is the West is called the Great American Desert, right? Yeah. And then windmills and dams come along and now it’s suburbia. Yeah. So
[00:03:45] Erika Bsumek: that’s, that’s true. That’s not wrong.
[00:03:48] Ben Wright: So obviously, yeah, there’s a, they don’t just start building the dam, right?
They don’t throw a dart in the map and say that. What’s that story of how the site gets chosen?
[00:03:59] Erika Bsumek: Yeah. So the site gets chosen. Well, so, Yeah. When they’re trying to think about where to build the Bureau of Reclamation is founded in 1902 and almost immediately they send sort of a team of engineers across the American West to think about reclamation, sort of reclaiming water, how water could be reclaimed and put to make the, put to use to make the desert bloom, is the sort of tagline there.
By the 1920s, the Bureau of Reclamation and the USGS has sent teams of engineers and surveyors along the Colorado River, along the tributaries of the Colorado River, to think about where dams could be built. And out of that first push, we get Hoover Dam, essentially at Boulder Canyon, so initially called Boulder Dam, now renamed to Hoover Dam.
At that time, an engineer named Eugene C. LaRue actually wants a dam to be built at Glen Canyon and not at Hoover. So he’s the first person to sort of plot that dam and think about why that dam should be in that location and make a case for it.
[00:05:00] Ben Wright: That’s interesting to me that There was this argument about Hoover versus Glen Canyon back then because that’s an argument right now.
I hear there are conversations in the press about demolishing Glen Canyon Dam.
[00:05:12] Erika Bsumek: So there has long been a controversy about how many dams we needed on the Colorado River. In that 1956 legislation, They had initially proposed nine dams, uh, nine additional dams in addition to Hoover be built on the Colorado River.
There was a huge environmental controversy about a dam that they proposed in Dinosaur National Monument at a place called Echo Park. Environmentalists fight that dam, and as part of that fight, they agree to let a dam be built at Glen Canyon, although nobody had visited Glen Canyon. Since that moment in time, when environmentalists eventually visit the dam, they begin to think that it was kind of a disaster, that they shouldn’t have approved that dam or let the legislation go forward for a dam to be built there.
And almost immediately they begin to attempt to undo the legislation, stop the dam, the reservoir from filling Lake Powell from physi I’m really excited about this book, because I think it’s really great for the heart of the book. I mean, there’s a lot of good stuff in here. I mean, this is the book that I really, really like.
I’m a big fan of the book. I mean, I’ve been reading it for a long time, and I’m not sure if I have a chance of feeling like I have. It’s going to be a great book. So I’m going to be reading it. There’s almost from the minute the dam is completed, there’s a group who wants to get rid of the dam in terms of environmentalists.
Now the stakes are a little bit different. In 1922, something called the Colorado River Compact was signed. And the lower basin states and the upper basin states actually got together, seven states, got together and they allocated the water of the Colorado River. That allocation was based on a couple of what years and not necessarily the best hydrological science.
So they over allocate, they overestimate the amount of water that’s in the river, and then they over allocate that to the states, they partition it out. That over allocation now has caused a huge controversy as there’s a kind of paradox here, like that you mentioned, More water in the West and electricity, these are hydroelectric dams, more water and electricity meant more people could move to the region, more people moving into the region has essentially exacerbated climate change.
So now a couple of climate change with drought or drought with climate change and we see. Lower levels even lower levels of the Colorado River. So how many dams will even be possible? How much water is even possible to store in these particular dams? So now the debate is maybe we don’t need two dams.
Maybe we just need one and maybe it should be Hoover, right? So most people sort of Flip to the, it should be Hoover and Knockling Canyon Dam, um, for a variety of reasons.
[00:07:50] Ben Wright: Yeah, this is, sounds like arguments over MOPAC to, you know, make a very trivial metaphor about induced demand. Yeah, exactly. Um, a non historical question, a couple of non historical questions.
One is, how long does the dam take to fill up? And then, how quickly do people notice environmental, um, detriment. And what sort of detrimental effects are we talking about? And if you remove the dam, do those go away?
[00:08:15] Erika Bsumek: So there is a lot of, there is a sort of dam removal movement happening right now. It’s covered really well in a wonderful documentary called Damnation, which I highly recommend.
Um, it sounds like it’s going to be really boring, but plug to the filmmakers there. And it’s been pretty well documented that when you remove dams, the whole river ecology is restored. And so, in terms of when Glen Canyon filled to capacity, it was completed in 1966. I think by 1980, the dam is filled to capacity.
Today, the dam, because of drought and climate change, is only at 32 percent of its total capacity. When the dam reaches about 25%, Let me between 20 and 25. I need to check the records. It will no longer be able to produce hydroelectricity and right now about 40 million people from California to Nebraska depend on the electricity from the dam as well as water for irrigation projects.
Those are mostly in Arizona and California. So the whole sort of This is why climate change actually really matters. And that’s why that debate about do we really need all these dams? Because what happens when the dam can no longer produce hydroelectricity if it continues to, if the water level continues to drop?
[00:09:31] Ben Wright: So we’ve got this really complex intersection of environmental history, climate history. the populating of the American West, though, of course, it wasn’t empty. So can you maybe to perhaps talk us through how Indigenous history intersects in all this?
[00:09:46] Erika Bsumek: Yeah. So, I mean, to go back to your first question about how I became interested in the dam, about two, 200 miles of Lake Powell shoreline abut the Navajo reservation.
And when I was So, um, doing the research for my first book, I, you know, spent some time on the Navajo reservation, and I kept sort of driving by the dam and thinking about the proximity of the reservation to the dam, and I kept thinking, like, what is the story here? How do these, how does the dam relate to the population of Native people?
And then when I started to look into it, I realized there was a an incredibly robust history, which is why this is the long history of Glen Canyon Dam. Because you can’t tell the story of Glen Canyon Dam without telling the history of Indigenous people who lived in the region, who utilized the river.
The river, the Navajo translation for the river is the river of never ending life. That’s what they call the river. The Ute, Paiute, Hopi, and Puebloan peoples also believed that the river gave, gave, gave, And gives them cultural and physical sustenance, um, spiritual sustenance as well, which is a really important part of it.
So when the U. S. United States government, the USGS, the Bureau of Reclamation, John Wesley Powell, when they start exploring the Colorado River, they hire indigenous guides to take them down to the river. Scientists like Herbert Gregory, who’s a geologist who’s hired by the USGS to locate, water irrigation sources in the 1920s.
He not only works with Indigenous guides, he collects their words for water, different kinds of water, indicators of where water can be found. So, Powell and Gregory, just to give two quick examples, really extract Indigenous knowledge in order to help the community. complete their mission, which is large water reclamation projects to bring white settlers to the region.
So in the book, I track not only indigenous uses of the water, how it related to, um, like Navajo culture, Navajo politics, Navajo religion, but also how historians call this erasure, indigenous people were consulted, but Well, consultation is the wrong word. Indigenous people had their knowledge extracted from them to further settle our colonialism, but, um, at no time were they actually consulted about how these water projects would unfold until we get to the 1940s with the Glen Canyon Dam legislation, and then the federal government does reach out to Navajo Nation because they need some land that Navajo Nation Has in order to physically construct the dam.
So they engage in a land swap. Navajo Nation is promised that they’ll get jobs and concessions like pal concessions, recreational concessions. So there’s a group of political leaders who support the construction of Glencairn down because they think it’s going to bring growth to the Navajo reservation.
They’re pretty quickly disillusioned with the government’s actions.
[00:12:40] Ben Wright: So all these things today lend an ear to policy. How do you think the practice of history can inform policy when it comes to the West Water and what happens next with these dams?
[00:12:54] Erika Bsumek: I’m going to quote from Andrew Curley, who is a Navajo geographer.
He teaches at the University of Arizona. And Teresa Montoya, who is a Navajo cultural anthropologist, so both Diné scholars. And both of them make a pretty strong case, and as do others working on the Navajo Reservation, and among others. other indigenous nations that in order to really get to the root problem of water shortages, we need to rethink not just our physical infrastructure, but our cultural infrastructure and indigenous people need to be at the table when those decisions are made.
So just as a quick example, over 30 tribes actually have treaty rights or some form of promise or claim to the Colorado River. It’s Only very recently that the government has started to meet with those 30 tribes to talk about how we could manage Rivers differently and part of that means reckoning with the impact of colonization
[00:13:49] Ben Wright: Well, finally, I’d love to know what happens next with you and you at the project you’re working on
[00:13:54] Erika Bsumek: I have a book project that kind of grows out of this which is a biography of a young Navajo girl Who’s kidnapped by youths and then?
traded to You soldiers at Fort Bridger and then traded or sold to an LDS family. And then she works for, it’s a polygamous family, works for different branches of that family then is married to the patriarch who is then declared an apostate. He takes her to South Dakota to mine gold. They come back and she becomes a kind of renowned farmer.
So I’m really kind of tracking her biography and what it tells us about indigenous enslavement practices, Native American history, LDS colonization of the region, you know, history of allotment policies, et cetera. So her story is a really amazing one. So I’m writing a biography next. Um, but I also, um, I continue to work on some software that I developed for the teaching of history classes, which is called Cleovis, which is a kind of combination of timeline, mind mapping and data visualization software for students.
Because it really helps students kind of see what they’re learning and make connections, make those connections really clearly. So it’s a kind of fun project.
[00:15:04] Ben Wright: Oh, very cool. Yep. I’ve used Cleovis. I think it’s wonderful. So thank you so much for joining us today and damn to be the dams.
[00:15:14] Erika Bsumek: Thank you, Ben, for inviting me and I’ll just end with a funny rhyme that I, my mom used to tell us when we were little, which was, I went to the dam to get some damn water, but the damn man told me I couldn’t have the damn water.
So I told the damn man to keep his damn water. And as a little kid, I thought that was the funniest thing because you could swear without really swearing. And so I think like dams have, you know, I don’t know, for some reason always been part of my family’s history.
[00:15:41] Ben Wright: Thank you so much, Erika. 15 Minute History is produced at the University of Texas at Austin in partnership with Not Even Past and Hemispheres in the College of Liberal Arts.
It is recorded at the Lates Development Studio. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, follow us on social media and visit our website for more information and resources. See y’all next week.