Utah Humanities Redd Center Author
Foundational Histories: Indigenous Dispossession and Glen Canyon Dam
There has long been interest second tallest concrete arch-gravity dam in the United States. Observers have explored how teams of engineers and construction workers diverted the river, readied the bedrock and canyon walls, and then poured almost five million cubic yards of concrete into the canyon to make a 710- foot structure rise from the riverbed. Erika Bsumek’s talk will focus the fact that Glen Canyon dam sits on more than its physical foundation; it rests on layers of social and political regional development, including a foundation of settler colonialism and Indigenous dispossession.
Erika Bsumek
Erika Marie Bsumek is an associate professor of history at UT Austin. She has written on Native American history, environmental history/studies, the history of the built environment, and the history of the U.S. West. She is the author of the award-winning Indian-made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1848-1960 (University Press of Kansas, 2008) and the coeditor of a collection of essays on global environmental history titled Nation States and the Global Environment: New Approaches to International Environmental History (Oxford University Press, 2013). Her current research explores the social and environmental history of the area surrounding Glen Canyon on the Utah/Arizona border from the 1840s to the present. The title of her latest book with the University of Texas Press is The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam: Infrastructures of Dispossession on the Colorado Plateau (2023). She is also working on a larger project that examines the impact that large construction projects (dams, highways, cities, and suburbs) had on the American West which is tentatively titled “The Concrete West: Engineering Society and Culture in the Arid West, 1900–1970” and a biography of a Navajo woman who was enslaved by the Utes, sold to LDS settlers, and then who became a well-known figure in the region tentatively titled “Unsettling Narratives: Rose Daniels, Indentured Servitude, and the Creation of an American Symbol.”
Dr. Bsumek has written op-eds for publications such as Time, the Austin American Statesman, Huffington Post, Al Jazeera America, and the Pacific Standard. She has been a Provost's Teaching Fellow and has been named a UT-Austin Academy of Distinguished Teacher and a
UT System Regents Distinguished Teaching Professor.
She is also the creator of a digital timeline and network mapping software platform called ClioVis, which enables students and researchers to create time-aligned network maps of their class/research projects. The platform currently serves over 11,000 students. She is also the lead scholar on the Radical Hope Syllabus Project and the coordinator of the website.
Students in the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences gain Experience Points for attending this lecture. Learn more about Experience Points.