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

One might expect that a book focused on a dam's foundations, as indicated by its title, would be about engineering, geology, or even the legislative history of the structure's creation. Not so in Erika Marie Bsumek's history concerning the 710-foot-tall dam completed in 1966 as part of the Colorado River Storage Project. Instead, The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam probes deeper to examine the layered history of the land on which the barrier rests and which its reservoir, Lake Powell, touches and drowns.Reaching back to 1840, the infrastructures that Bsumek describes as leading to dispossession are both social and physical. She focuses on the multiple conceptual layers overlain on Indigenous lands and peoples resulting in their losing possession of and access to homelands and sacred sites. As such, this book is a bridge between canonical texts on western water history and recently written studies of Native American dispossession. Bsumek extends and adds a new angle to the plentiful Glen Canyon Dam and Colorado River history books, as well as the growing literature examining Indigenous dispossession.Bsumek explains the dispossession of Navajos, Paiutes, and Utes of their lands on the Colorado Plateau by describing the history of colonial settlement there through a chronological approach broken into chapters by theme. Three of the five chapters precede the conception of the dam, as Bsumek lays the groundwork for an understanding of who was doing what in the area. In the 1840s, members of the Latter-Day Saints settled in the region, beginning the exploitation of the land and people already there, then government scientists explored the land, often with Indigenous guides, to gain a better understanding of it. By the 1920s, engineers began conceiving plans for massive water infrastructure projects. Bsumek presents evidence through case studies that Native American knowledge and place names were overwritten, appropriated, or ignored in these quests.The final two chapters address the politics surrounding the dam as well as the immediate aftermath of its construction as court cases played out. Here, Bsumek carefully navigates Navajo leaders' varied attitudes and actions toward the dam, at times in alignment and supportive and later diverging. She concludes the book with an epilogue highlighting the current issues of the Colorado River and Colorado Plateau and stressing the importance of understanding the history of Native American dispossession, in part as a means of clarifying the choices for the future of the West.These selected case studies of instances where the clash of two incompatible worldviews resulted in turning points to the benefit of some and the harm of others through loss of their lands and sacred spaces provide much needed robust context to the western water story. One issue readers will want to watch out for is that the isolated case studies can seem to be a continuous story, each building deliberately on the other. Bsumek inserts the conciliatory phrase "while not exactly coordinated" in her strong conclusion (190).For her evidence of how ignoring important parts of history can do harm, Bsumek mined numerous archival collections and made extensive use of endnotes to thoroughly cite sources. The book includes nearly twenty historical photographs as well as a color gallery section with a map of Bears Ears National Monument. Readers could have benefited from additional maps of the Colorado Plateau locating the places described in the book.The major contribution of the book to western water history is the shift in focus to considering how the land and its native residents factor into the story, not just in the beginning but across the decades. Additionally, the thorough information about the 1950s federal policies of termination and reclamation being connected via western Mormon politicians is enlightening.Glen Canyon Dam and its Lake Powell have long been a place of controversy that at present evidences a dramatically changed western environment. With books like Bsumek's paving the way for an improved understanding of the lands and peoples at the heart of western water issues, we can better appreciate the complexity involved in today's decision-making. Some readers may find the work unsettling, but that is one of the goals.