Our second panel focuses on North America’s waterscapes. Presenters will discuss the role of indigenous knowledge in facilitating irrigation projects in the southwestern borderlands, how the benefits of these projects, as well as those erected on the U.S.-Canadian border, were shared with neighboring countries, and how New Deals murals promoted agricultural identities that helped settlers lay claim to the land. These papers will discuss the ways in which water was essential to the growth of the United States and its relationships with its neighbors.
Chair: Rina Faletti (University of California, Merced) is Project Researcher and Exhibition Curator in UC Merced's Global Art Studies Program. The current focus of Dr. Faletti's work is hydraulic aesthetics in California and the American West.
Commentator: Dagomar Degroot (Georgetown) is a professor of environmental history. His forthcoming book, The Frigid Golden Age (Cambridge University Press), explains how Dutch society thrived when many others faltered during the Little Ice Age's coldest period. Professor Degroot is the founder and director of HistoricalClimatology.com, and the co-founder and co-director of the Climate History Network.
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Daniel Grant (University of Wisconsin-Madison) |
"The Germ of Civilization has Just Been Planted": The Civilizing Efforts of Reclamation in the California Borderlands, 1910-1920
As the 20th century opened on the newly irrigated California borderlands, the U.S. Reclamation Service set its sights on cultivating agriculture at the Fort Yuma Indian School located on a bluff above the Colorado River. The school and its 160-acre farm, overseen by the agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), operated by paid Indian workers, and attended by Indian children, would serve as a model for irrigation districts nationwide. But reclamation was as much a project of social engineering as it was one of infrastructure development. It is no accident that assimilation—the cultivation and regulation of “civilized” behavior on the reservation, including baptisms, western medical care, and strict drinking laws—both enabled and were enabled by irrigation. By 1920 8,000 acres of productive land on the reservation, watered by irrigation ditches, had been allotted to individual Indian families, who were expected to claim and work it as their own as Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. But such expectations could not be fully realized because the agencies placed them in an impossibly contradictory position: to assimilate into western society productively only insofar as their irrigated land demonstrated to the federal government the “civilizing” effects of irrigation, but nothing more. From reports written by BIA field agents between 1910 and 1920, I argue in this paper that the daily politics of the reservation was a crucial forum for understanding the social intents and effects of reclamation.
As the 20th century opened on the newly irrigated California borderlands, the U.S. Reclamation Service set its sights on cultivating agriculture at the Fort Yuma Indian School located on a bluff above the Colorado River. The school and its 160-acre farm, overseen by the agents of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), operated by paid Indian workers, and attended by Indian children, would serve as a model for irrigation districts nationwide. But reclamation was as much a project of social engineering as it was one of infrastructure development. It is no accident that assimilation—the cultivation and regulation of “civilized” behavior on the reservation, including baptisms, western medical care, and strict drinking laws—both enabled and were enabled by irrigation. By 1920 8,000 acres of productive land on the reservation, watered by irrigation ditches, had been allotted to individual Indian families, who were expected to claim and work it as their own as Jeffersonian yeoman farmers. But such expectations could not be fully realized because the agencies placed them in an impossibly contradictory position: to assimilate into western society productively only insofar as their irrigated land demonstrated to the federal government the “civilizing” effects of irrigation, but nothing more. From reports written by BIA field agents between 1910 and 1920, I argue in this paper that the daily politics of the reservation was a crucial forum for understanding the social intents and effects of reclamation.
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Meredith Denning and Hillar Schwertner (Georgetown University) |
Dividing the Spoils: North American Responses to Inequality of Access in Changing Border Waterscapes
In North America during the first decades of the twentieth century, the waterscapes of the border zones between Mexico and the United States, and between Canada and the United States, changed dramatically. Major infrastructure projects in boundary watersheds were executed with both public and private funds. By the 1920s, groups within all three countries were debating whether or not the benefits of these investments were equitably divided, and each initiated policies aimed at redressing the balance. In the Colorado River watershed, California successfully lobbied the American federal government to build the Hoover Dam and to supply water to its Imperial Valley farmers through an All-American Canal running parallel to the Mexican border. These projects reduced flooding on the Colorado River below the Hoover dam, incidentally creating new areas of arable land in Mexico, with tremendously productive soils. Responding to this new waterscape, and also to decades of indifference from American investors and hypocritical, unilateral adjustments to the border hydrology from American policymakers, President Cárdenas decided to expropriate American-held properties and to “colonize” the former floodplains of Baja California with Mexican farmers. This initiative was, in part, a response to the changing hydrology—it was an effort to address the inequality of access to the “improved” international waterscape. In the Great Lakes watershed, Canadians and Americans worked together to adapt Niagara Falls and the St. Lawrence River for hydroelectricity, changing hydrography through private investment with public support. In Ontario, opponents of hydroelectric exports argued that by sending power to the United States, private utility companies hindered domestic industrial development and rural electrification. They successfully lobbied the Ontario provincial government to take ownership of electricity generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure in 1928. In New York State during the same period, Governor Roosevelt argued for public ownership of utilities for many of the same reasons. His administration created the Power Authority of the State of New York, which took over the task of providing electricity from private companies.
In North America during the first decades of the twentieth century, the waterscapes of the border zones between Mexico and the United States, and between Canada and the United States, changed dramatically. Major infrastructure projects in boundary watersheds were executed with both public and private funds. By the 1920s, groups within all three countries were debating whether or not the benefits of these investments were equitably divided, and each initiated policies aimed at redressing the balance. In the Colorado River watershed, California successfully lobbied the American federal government to build the Hoover Dam and to supply water to its Imperial Valley farmers through an All-American Canal running parallel to the Mexican border. These projects reduced flooding on the Colorado River below the Hoover dam, incidentally creating new areas of arable land in Mexico, with tremendously productive soils. Responding to this new waterscape, and also to decades of indifference from American investors and hypocritical, unilateral adjustments to the border hydrology from American policymakers, President Cárdenas decided to expropriate American-held properties and to “colonize” the former floodplains of Baja California with Mexican farmers. This initiative was, in part, a response to the changing hydrology—it was an effort to address the inequality of access to the “improved” international waterscape. In the Great Lakes watershed, Canadians and Americans worked together to adapt Niagara Falls and the St. Lawrence River for hydroelectricity, changing hydrography through private investment with public support. In Ontario, opponents of hydroelectric exports argued that by sending power to the United States, private utility companies hindered domestic industrial development and rural electrification. They successfully lobbied the Ontario provincial government to take ownership of electricity generation, transmission and distribution infrastructure in 1928. In New York State during the same period, Governor Roosevelt argued for public ownership of utilities for many of the same reasons. His administration created the Power Authority of the State of New York, which took over the task of providing electricity from private companies.
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Michaela Rife (University of Toronto) |
Reclamation and Representation: Irrigation and Identity in New Deal Murals
In 1910 a group of homesteads in northwest Wyoming, which had grown up around a federal irrigation project, became a town bearing the surname of the “father of reclamation,” John Wesley Powell. Thirty years later another government project reminded residents of their debt to irrigation technology, in the form of Verona Burkhard’s New Deal post office mural, simply titled: “Powell’s Agriculture Resulting from the Shoshone Irrigation Project.” This paper will draw from my dissertation research on land use depictions in New Deal murals to argue that water from irrigation, whether visible in depictions of a canal, or “invisible” in a painting of a fertile field, was a key visual symbol in promoting agricultural identity in the American West. Burkhard’s mural, for example, depicts a quaint white farming family standing before a collection of healthy livestock and rows of crops irrigated by canals cut into the naturally arid earth. References to the town’s irrigation identity can still be found throughout Powell’s visual and material culture. These visual sources point to the ways that water, in the form of irrigation, was instrumentalized by settlers to lay claim to arid Native land, both physically and conceptually. New Deal murals also occupy an interesting hinge moment, between the historical memory of Euro-American settlement and the boom of thirsty industrial agriculture, all during a period characterized by drought and crop failure. Furthermore, as optimistic images during the Great Depression, these murals can tell environmental histories both through what they depicted, as well as what they chose to omit. I argue that when these sources are viewed as more than simply illustrative they can provide a window on the history of water and land use in the arid West, while also offering historical perspective on persistent agricultural identity.
In 1910 a group of homesteads in northwest Wyoming, which had grown up around a federal irrigation project, became a town bearing the surname of the “father of reclamation,” John Wesley Powell. Thirty years later another government project reminded residents of their debt to irrigation technology, in the form of Verona Burkhard’s New Deal post office mural, simply titled: “Powell’s Agriculture Resulting from the Shoshone Irrigation Project.” This paper will draw from my dissertation research on land use depictions in New Deal murals to argue that water from irrigation, whether visible in depictions of a canal, or “invisible” in a painting of a fertile field, was a key visual symbol in promoting agricultural identity in the American West. Burkhard’s mural, for example, depicts a quaint white farming family standing before a collection of healthy livestock and rows of crops irrigated by canals cut into the naturally arid earth. References to the town’s irrigation identity can still be found throughout Powell’s visual and material culture. These visual sources point to the ways that water, in the form of irrigation, was instrumentalized by settlers to lay claim to arid Native land, both physically and conceptually. New Deal murals also occupy an interesting hinge moment, between the historical memory of Euro-American settlement and the boom of thirsty industrial agriculture, all during a period characterized by drought and crop failure. Furthermore, as optimistic images during the Great Depression, these murals can tell environmental histories both through what they depicted, as well as what they chose to omit. I argue that when these sources are viewed as more than simply illustrative they can provide a window on the history of water and land use in the arid West, while also offering historical perspective on persistent agricultural identity.