Overview

Full Product Details

9781496216731

Table of Contents

Reviews

Deeply researched and elegantly written. . . . Through the themes of settler colonialism and border studies, The Settler Sea reveals the ways that the exploitation of the environment in the name of food security through industrial agriculture went hand-in-glove with exploitation of the people and their labor in the Imperial Valley. The result is that the Salton Sea today is both a toxic wasteland from overuse as well as an indispensable natural resource that has endured despite the onslaught. --Maria E. Montoya, author of Translating Property: The Maxwell Land Grant and the Conflict over Land in the American West, 1840-1900 Drawing on deep research, Voyles analyzes her subject matter brilliantly. Moreover, her prose is evocative, giving the reader a deep sense of both place and change over time. Consistently absorbing, The Settler Sea offers a powerful and disturbing history of a place that illuminates the costs of centuries of colonialism and points to the future. The Settler Sea makes an important contribution to Western history, environmental history, and Native American and Indigenous studies. --Christina Snyder, author of Great Crossings: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in the Age of Jackson In this story of the Salton Sea, Voyles paints an unconventional picture of a landscape that has been subject to every kind of abuse the settler state can inflict. It is a cautionary tale that links colonization of people with colonization of nature, refusing to see the two as different. And it reminds us that when we think spatially, centering land in our social narratives, we can more clearly see the inequities imposed by the settler state on racialized others. The Settler Sea is a delight to read, mixing metaphor with fact in a way that reflects the contradictions and ambiguities of the Salton Sea. --Dina Gilio-Whitaker, author of As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice from Colonization to Standing Rock The Salton Sea may seem an odd place to interrogate the history of a settler society that dispossessed Native peoples and transformed the American West, but as Traci Voyles brilliantly shows us, all of the toxic pathologies of the colonial have flowed into and concentrated in this closed desert sink, only to become exposed to view as the shimmering settler dream evaporates. The Settler Sea is what the next generation of environmental history should look like. --Paul S. Sutter, author of Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Providence Canyon and the Soils of the South Traci Brynne Voyles masterfully centers settler colonialism in environmental history, particularly the ways that landscapes and built environments, such as the Salton Sea and its related components, are refigured through settler colonialism to produce settler colonial outcomes. Voyles adeptly draws on many analytical angles to reveal the complexity of the Salton Sea, its complicated ecologies, and its problems. --Joshua L. Reid, author of The Sea Is My Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs

Author Information

Traci Brynne Voyles is an associate professor and chair of women’s and gender studies and the director of the Center for Social Justice at the University of Oklahoma. She is the author of Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available