Settler Answers to Settler Problems: Centering Settler Colonialism in Environmental History

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• Settler Answers to Settler Problems: Centering Settler Colonialism in Environmental History
• Kaitlin Reed (bio)

Traci Brynne Voyles, The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. xiv + 382pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, and index. $30.00.

What do salt, toxic algae, hotel furniture, and fighter jets have in common? All of them can be found in the “ecological conundrum” that is the Salton Sea (p. 2). Paradoxically conceptualized as both an environmental refuge and toxic wasteland, the Salton Sea’s story, in Traci Brynne Voyles’s telling, perfectly illustrates the “precariousness of the settler world, not just settler approaches to environmentalism but settler epistemologies about human relationships to nature and to one another” (pp. 266–7).

In dialogue with other scholars of Indigenous California, Voyles makes two critical interventions in her second book: first, a call for centering settler colonialism within historical discourse of California and the United States, but especially within environmental histories. Voyles and others are pointing out how, “People misunderstand the settler invasion of Indigenous California as California history rather than an unsustainable and disruptive episode in it.”¹ In settler colonial societies, settler colonialism is normalized to the point where it becomes invisibilized—from state-mandated curriculum oriented around the imaginary of Manifest Destiny² to environmental decision making. ³ Voyles argues that the:

Salton Sea served as a microcosm of the twentieth-century West, reflecting back to us—sometimes with the exaggerated distortions of a funhouse mirror—the major forces that have shaped that century’s western environmental history: dryland irrigation, Indigenous dispossession, dam-building, militarization, pesticide-intensive agriculture, labor exploitation, tourism, prisons and policing, and wildlife conservation (p. 268).

Voyles’ second, and related, intervention is oriented around environmental justice—namely, that environmental conditions that are created and maintained by settler colonialism can produce environmental injustices. Fans of [End Page 229] her Wastelanding (2015) will be happy to find a few threads that continue through Voyles’ sophomore manuscript: aridity and nuclearism. At the same time, the prose in The Settler Sea is a pleasure. Powerful imagery throughout transports the reader—from imagining Cahuilla families fishing the shores of the ancient Lake Cahuilla to the hotel furniture afloat in the Salton Sea “succumbed to bloat, mold, and rot” (p. 168). The structure of the book moves chronologically, with each individual chapter exploring the Salton Sea from a particular thematic lens.

Part I—composed of two chapters, Desert and Flood—situates the sea within deep geological time. Chapter 1 offers a history of the sea through Indigenous oral history and ecological knowledge. The journey that Voyles must guide her reader on is a winding one, and fittingly Chapter 1 begins with the Colorado River flowing through dozens of distinct tribal territories before emptying out in the vast desert homelands of the Cahuilla and Kumeyaay peoples. Cahuilla oral history tells us that when the Creators Múkat and Témayawet formed what is now known as the Salton Sink, they “turned up the edges of the earth,” creating a large bowl filled with water from the Colorado River forming Lake Cahuilla (p. 22). It is estimated that full inundations occurred approximately three times in the past millennium and the last time Lake Cahuilla was full, in all her desert glory, was the mid-to-late sixteenth century. Voyles notes that,

A child born when the first trickles of river water collected at the bottom of the sink would be an adult by the time the river turned south again and sought free passage to the sea. Near the end of her life, with great-grandchildren playing at her feet, she would have lived to see the desert laid bare and waterless again by the furious heat of the sun.

(p. 23)

She goes on to explain that Cahuillas, Kumeyaays, and other tribal nations of southern California lived in relation with the water and the desert—in direct contrast to settler colonial worldviews that seek to commodify and control water relatives.

Together, the river, desert, and people constructed a place built around cyclical changes, responding to shifts in the human and nonhuman world in ways that emerged from their history, close...