THE FOUNDATIONS OF GLEN CANYON DAM

2024 Best Indigenous Studies Award The Mormon History Association 2024 Southwest Book of the Year Pima County Public Library A history of how the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam was built and sustained by social inequalities 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 The dam also generates 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 exposes the cultural structures and complex regional power relations that 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 Infrastructures of dispossession teach us that we cannot tell