Table Of Contentthe foundations of glen canyon dam
the foundations of
glen ca n yon da m
Infrastructures of Dispossession
on the Colorado Plateau
erika marie bsumek
university of texas press
Austin
Support for this book comes from an endowment for
environmental studies made possible by generous contributions
from Richard C. Bartlett, Susan Aspinall Block, and
the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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First edition, 2023
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contents
preface vii
Family Foundations
a note on terminology xiii
introduction 1
Th e Many Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam
1. religious expansion 21
Latter- day Settlers, Dispossession, and Indentured Servitude, 1840–1880
2. instruments of dispossession 54
Th e Infl uence of Science and Scholarship, 1869–1920
3. structures of erasure 90
Engineering, Education, and Ecology, 1910–1960
4. political maneuvering 126
Reclamation and Termination in Diné Bikéyah, 1947–1980
5. legal paradigms and dispossession 156
Navajos, Environmentalists, and the Law, 1969–1980
epilogue. dispossession and possession 189
Th e Continued Fight over Sacred Land and Water
on the Colorado Plateau
acknowledgments 196
notes 200
bibliography 240
illustration credits 259
index 262
preface
Family Foundations
I am a reluctant settler. I would rather not be existing on
someone else’s stolen land. But the fact of the matter is that
I wouldn’t have had a university job if indigenous people
hadn’t had their land stolen from them in Australia.
patrick wolfe, “settler colonialism then and now:
a conversation between j. khaulani kauanui
and patrick wolfe,” in politica and
societa, february 2012, 237
Th ere are many diff erent histories that can be told about the building of
Glen Canyon Dam. Th is book traces the growth of the Latter-d ay Saint
population across the Colorado Plateau. It uncovers the development of sci-
ence, scholarship, technology, and law in the region. It also focuses on dis-
possession of the Indigenous people who inhabited the region where the
dam was built, especially the Utes, Paiutes, and Navajos, who despite being
dispossessed of the majority of their former lands continue to live in the re-
gion today. It is a history of people, ideas, and actions as much as it is a story
about a place and the construction of a dam because the dam could not be
built until a social infrastructure existed to justify its existence. Th at social
infrastructure was built on the dispossession of Indigenous people. How
that was done by settlers, scientists, engineers, ecologists, the courts, and
the state is the main focus of this book.
My personal history is connected to the history that unfolds in what fol-
lows in ways that are complicated but also completely predictable if you
know about the history of the US West. My personal ancestors did not
participate in massacres or in the removal of Indigenous people from their
lands. But I—and my family members—are settlers on Indigenous lands.
We, and millions of others like us, are the benefi ciaries of the dispossession
vii
preface
of Ute, Paiute, Navajo, Hopi, and Puebloan people from their lands on the
Colorado Plateau. I begin with that acknowledgment.
Over the course of writing this book, I learned that the Navajo Nation
(NN) made it possible for the government to build Glen Canyon Dam
because they provided the land that became Page, Arizona—where work-
ers lived and materials could be stored and manufactured—to the United
States in a land swap. As a historian who has previously explored the history
of how non- Indigenous people consumed Navajo material culture, I found
myself considering how the government and white residents of the West
consumed Indigenous resources on a massive scale. With that perspective
in mind, the enormous impact of Glen Canyon Dam came into sharp re-
lief. It is so much more than a concrete mega- structure, engineering marvel,
or environmental abomination. Th e more I found out about the history of
the region and dam, the more it came to embody all the diff erent kinds of
infrastructures that have been consciously layered throughout the region to
shape the social and political contours of the American West. Archival doc-
uments, interviews, and intensive research revealed the dam, and the his-
tory behind it, manifested from all the diff erent kinds of physical and so-
cial infrastructures that have been shored up by dispossessing Indigenous
people of their knowledge as well as their land, their water, and other natu-
ral resources. Th e dam, as such, represents the “promise” of the region that
settlers saw as well as the destructive processes of colonialization that oc-
curred there. It may also now represent the hubris of those who built it. It,
along with other settler infrastructure projects that preceded it, supported
the growth of the non-I ndigenous population across, and beyond, the re-
gion. But, as the book also shows, Glen Canyon Dam was also built with
a degree of Indigenous support and labor. As I dug deeper into the history
of engineering and the dam, it became apparent that I could not write an-
other history of the dam without exploring the ways that the building of it
was connected to the history of the Navajo Nation, Diné Bikéyah, other In-
digenous peoples of the region, and to the longer history of the coloniza-
tion and development of the West related to Utah’s own history—and, as it
turns out, to that of my own family.
As I conducted my research, I discovered that Glen Canyon Dam was
the fi rst engineering project my grandfather worked on as an immigrant
seeking refuge in the United States after World War II. My paternal grand-
father, Edwin Franz Bsumek (1909–1984), was born in Schwarzenberg, Ger-
many. He was a civil engineer by training prior to WWII. His wife, Ella
Bier wald Bsumek (1913–1991), was raised by her grandmother in Elbing and
was an early convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-d ay Saints
viii
preface
(LDS) in Germany in the 1920s.¹ Edwin and Ella met in the early 1930s and
married in 1935 after Edwin converted to Mormonism. Th ey had four chil-
dren, one of whom, Peter (1939–), is my father. Edwin applied for a visa to
come to the United States in 1949, and the family immigrated to Salt Lake
City, Utah, in 1952. Th ey arrived with only what the family of six could
carry in four suitcases. Th ey had also amassed a debt of $1,000 to the LDS
family who sponsored their trip. Th at meant my grandfather, who spoke
very little English, needed to fi nd work and learn English as soon as possi-
ble. After a series of odd jobs, Edwin found work as an engineer for West-
ern Steel in the mid- 1950s. His fi rst real task was to engineer the rebar for
a portion of Glen Canyon Dam. Th is sparked a lifelong love of the arid
West, infrastructure, and the natural environment. Several times a year, he
and Ella took their small camper on long road trips throughout the region.
While Ella remained a devout member of the LDS Church for her entire
life, Franz remained somewhat ambivalent about religion and their son, my
father, left the Church in the 1960s.
My mother’s family links my history to the story of the settlement of
the region and dispossession—the second major theme of this book. None
of my ancestors took part in any of the brutal massacres that loom so large
in accounts of Native American dispossession. Th eir—our—involvement
was less obvious and thus easier to deny, and in that regard it is emblem-
atic of the ways that most white Americans are implicated in disposses-
sion. My mother’s family, the Collabella-C uglietta clan, also called Utah
home, though they immigrated from Southern Italy in the early 1910s and
were not LDS. Looking for a better life, they were laborers who settled in
east- central Utah with hopes of taking advantage of the “free land” off ered
via the Homestead Act. Th e men initially worked as wagon masters, on the
railroad, or in the coal mines of Carbon County, Utah, while the women
did whatever they could do to contribute to the household economy. For
instance, my maternal great- great-g randmother, Mary Teresa Biofora Tan-
garo (1882–1965) and her daughter, Mary Tangaro (1902–1983), came to the
United States from San Giovanni in Fiore, Italy, in 1911 to join my great-
great-g randfather, Nicola Tangaro (1880–1920), who had arrived the de-
cade before. When Nicola died in 1920, my great grandmother, Mary, her
mother, and her young siblings were left to fend for themselves. Mary mar-
ried Beneditto Colobella (1887–1965) in 1920, and the two had a daugh-
ter and a son in quick succession, Vera (1921–2016) and Sam (1922–1993).
Vera was my grandmother. Shortly after Sam’s birth, Beneditto abandoned
the family. Mary Teresa and Mary raised young Vera and Sam along with
Mary’s signifi cantly younger siblings, Louise (1912–1989), Katherine (1913–
ix
