Ihave never seen the Salton Sea with my very own eyes. My experience of the Colorado Desert is restricted to one or two trip to Hand Springs and one more to Las Vegas many years earlier, but you can’t learn much regarding a location from inside a relocating automobile. Exactly How the Salton Sea became, what it was called in the past Americans showed up, or why this body of water bears any value in all are not questions I ever considered, and if you had asked me to identify also one native team from the area I couldn’t have done so. I’m a native Californian and yet what I learn about my home state is overshadowed by my lack of knowledge.
The Salton Sea sits in the lowlands of the Colorado River basin, some 2 hundred feet listed below water level, in the impact of an old body of water known as Lake Cahuilla, home to Indigenous peoples such as the Kumeyaay, Cahuilla, Cocopah, and Quechan, that over millennia learned exactly how to survive durations of flooding and desiccation.At site https://saltonseadoc.com from Our Articles As scholar Traci Brynne Voyles notes in The Inhabitant Sea, the naming of the Salton Sea was itself an arbitrary act of hubris by an American settler. As Voyles describes, the Salton Sea is an eco-friendly quandary and a research study in mysteries, a marsh in a desert; one of California’s last staying water sources for migrating birds, in addition to a contaminated hazardscape; both natural and human-made; an abundant environment and an environmental disaster. If one is seeking a microcosm of the settling of the American West, there might be no better example than the Salton Sea.
As an act of intersectional scholarship, The Settler Sea is a remarkable success. Voyles is a qualified writer with an enviable capacity to build a story from reams of data, oral histories, demographics rolls, newspaper accounts and other resources. She gathers several spindles of string and artfully weaves them so the reader sees the links between previous and existing, the many unintentional repercussions of manifest destiny, including the colonization of the Colorado River which sits at the heart of this tale, along with the social and ecological influences of armed forces bases, corporate farming, tourist, and jails. The picture that emerges by the end of guide is full and complex, but also troubling when one reviews the reasons behind all the damage wrought to the region.
Consider what happened in one twenty-four year duration, from 1846 to 1870, when the population of Native Californians went from around 150,000 people to about 30,000, an incredible 80 percent decline. As happened somewhere else on the continent, Indigenous individuals were dispossessed of their standard lands, water, language and society, pushed to the margins on unwanted systems of land, unseen and mind, other than when required as low-cost labor or employees for America’s battles. The many dams that were built on the Colorado River – from substantial Hoover Dam in Nevada to the Imperial Diversion Dam on the Arizona-California boundary – for the function of producing hydro-electric power or watering for farmland, dispossessed Native people by inundation. While it’s true that these dams were engineering marvels, their unplanned consequences materialize today in dry spell, pollution, agricultural and commercial run-off, and staggering fish and chicken recede.
The Salton Sea and the land and hills that surround it resist easy depiction. Photos can’t capture the enormity or resolve the plant and bird life that exist alongside the inhabitant detritus that litters the shoreline or is revealed as the water vaporizes. It’s a vivid example of the distinction between exploitation and stewardship; of taking what’s required while leaving something for the future, as the Native individuals did, and taking everything as white inhabitants thought was their right. The Settler Sea is a cautionary tale about the consequences of unchecked industrialism, militarism, dryland watering, and white preeminence.
The Inhabitant Sea: The golden state’s Salton Sea and the Repercussions of Manifest Destiny by Traci Brynne Voyles |
