Episode 48: The Salton Sea(s)
“The Salton Sea is best understood as part of the Colorado River Watershed—its fate has been tied to the fate of the Colorado River always.”
A conversation with Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles (University of Oklahoma) about the environmental history of The Salton Sea as well as current and future challenges. Released April 14, 2023.
guests on the show
Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles
Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles is Professor and Chair of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma (OU), and Affiliate Faculty in the OU Departments of History and Native American Studies. She is a historian of colonialism, race, gender, and environment, with a focus on North America from the nineteenth through the twentieth century. Voyles earned her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from the University of California San Diego and completed a Mellon Environments & Societies postdoctoral fellowship in History at the University of California Davis.
Voyles is the author of The Settler Sea: California's Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism (Many Wests book series, University of Nebraska Press, 2021), winner of the 2022 Caughey Prize from the Western History Association for most distinguished work on the American West and a 2022 Choice Outstanding Academic Title. She is also the author of Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (University of Minnesota Press, 2015) as well as many peer-reviewed journal articles, book chapters, review essays, and public history projects. Voyles's current book project, Natural Childbirth: An Environmental History, explores the history of natural childbirth in the US, examining ideological and material conditions that shape birth as they have changed over time.
Voyles' work has been featured in a range of venues, including The Nation, The Atlantic, The American Prospect, Boston Review, ARTnews, KCET | PBS SoCal, and Edge Effects.
Learn more about Dr. Traci Brynne Voyles here and connect here.
TRANSCRIPT
Faith Kearns
Welcome to Water Talk. In today's episode, we're going to be talking with historian Traci Brynne Voyles, Professor and Chair in Women's and Gender Studies at the University of Oklahoma, and author of the recent award-winning book the 'Settler Sea, California Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism'. Traci has also written a book about the history of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation, as well as many peer reviewed articles and essays. Her work has been covered by The Nation, The Atlantic and many other popular outlets.
So, I'm really looking forward to talking with Traci, partly just because I love talking about the Salton Sea. And I feel like we haven't spent enough episodes really talking about it yet. We touched on it a little bit when we were talking with Jairo. And it comes up here and there. But I think it's just such an important issue, particularly when the Colorado River is in the news and the fate and the future of the Salton Sea is so tied to what happens on the Colorado River, and in and of itself it's just a super interesting place with a lot of really critical environmental justice issues happening around it. So, Sam and Mallika, what are you looking forward to talking about today with Traci.
Mallika Nocco
I'm just really looking forward to learning more about the Salton Sea, I still, rather shamefully, have not made it to visit the Salton Sea yet. It's on my list of places in California that I want to travel to just get a feel for it. Because as a water place, I think it's a very important place. So I'm excited to just talk to somebody and learn more about it. And then there's this idea or concept of it having been many different seas, and it being kind of this constantly changing sea. And I'm really interested in that concept,
Sam Sandoval
In my case, I have like two or three different entry points. I think my first entry point to the Salton Sea is back when I was trying to understand how water functions between United States and Mexico, and I was highly surprised that actually the Imperial County, or Imperial Valley, before it was called Valle de los Muertos value of the Dead. And then the second part is that for an important amount of time, between between the 1900s-1928, water received by the Imperial Irrigation District was actually diverted in Mexico.
So the Colorado River went into Mexican territory, and then they built a diversion dam, put it into a creek that actually moved it North back into the states. Along those periods, that channel got blocked for a year and a half, two years, and then we have the Salton Sea. When I started traveling here, when I started reading history, it was a man made error, then later became the sea that we now have to sustain. In geological eras it has changed quite a lot.
And for me, the second entry point is the first time that I understand the environmental conundrum, the environmental issues that we have in California. First time that I was walking towards the body of the Salton Sea, I started hearing my shoes crumbling, cracking. And as I was walking towards the shoreline with my shoes cracking, I realized that the cracking was because of all the carcasses of all the fish around it. And then I looked to the right, and it was an infinite line or the entire perimeter of the Salton Sea with fish carcasses. And then to the left, and I saw the same. For the first time I actually thought, where am I? What happened here? And that experience actually kind of helped me to think more of the Salton Sea. Also glad that we are not just always looking forward so we can have a more informed perspective looking forward because sometimes we, unfortunately, repeat history and it's not always the good history.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, I think this will be the second historian we've had on Water Talk and both of them have been this season. So that'll be really interesting. And you know, I also have had such tangible experiences at the Salton Sea of the smell and the crunching. Also watching all the birds you know, there's always pelicans and tons of burrowing owls and all sorts of really interesting wildlife there. And then it comes up against things like some of the settlements that have happened there over time. And so it's just a super interesting place. And I really look forward to hearing from Traci all about sort of the deep time perspective to our contemporary issues that we have with the sea. So without further ado, let's welcome Traci to the show.
Faith Kearns
So welcome, Traci, we are so excited to have you on Water Talk, and particularly to talk with you about your book on the Salton Sea. But before we delve into that, can you talk to us just a little bit more about the path you took to where you are now and the broad array of topics that you work on?
Traci Brynne Voyles
Yeah, thank you. And thank you for having me. I've been really looking forward to this conversation and really appreciate all of the conversations that you've been hosting on this podcast, I think they're great. So I came to this project as a environmental justice scholar who's also working in the field of environmental history.
So environmental justice scholars study the ways that environmental harms disproportionately impact marginalized communities, or how marginalized communities are targeted for environmental harm through a number of different kinds of processes. And that's a field that's generated lots of scholarship that helps scholars and policymakers and community members as well understand the parameters of the ways in which environmental harms are organized along different kinds of lines of social oppression, like racism, classism, settler colonialism, hetero patriarchy, those kinds of things.
What I was interested in doing as someone who works primarily in the field of environmental history, is tracking the ways that environmental injustices unfold over time. And what are the kinds of historical contexts that really shaped some of the cases of environmental racism that I was studying. And when I was thinking about energy injustice in Southern California, I was looking mostly at the beginnings of kind of conceptualizing a second book project. I was looking at green energy production in desert California.
I was really interested in solar farms and wind farms and where they were located in desert California. And the more I looked into kind of the politics and environmental realities for tribal communities in desert California and other kinds of populations of color in those parts of California, the more I just came across the Salton Sea over and over again. This massive body of water in the desert. It's kind of confounding in multiple kinds of ways. But everything I read about it struck me as a bit unsatisfying of an explanation for why it was there, what the current realities of the Salton Sea were.
Sam Sandoval
Thank you, Traci. I mean, this is the perfect segue to start talking about the Salton Sea. You have studied the history of the Salton Sea. As you mentioned, part of it might be with the Indigenous communities, all the way to the Hollywood get away and Frank Sinatra. Could you explain to our audience who might not be familiar with the history of the Salton Sea, can you give us a tour of the Salton Sea over time?
Traci Brynne Voyles
Yeah, thanks. That's a great question. So the Salton Sea is what we call the current stand of this vast body of water that has flooded this part of the desert for a long time. It's in the central part of the current day state of California and Imperial and Riverside Counties, in this vast depression in the earth in the northern part of the Sonoran Desert ecoregion. The Salton Sea, or what we currently call the Salton Sea, these bodies of water have formed in this depression in the earth over the course of 1000s of years from flooding from the Colorado River, which flows down to either it's delta in the Gulf of California, or it flows northward into this big sink in the desert. And it's done that really forever. It's done that throughout history, in the environmental history and the memory of Indigenous nations in that area.
The Colorado River had flooded that area several times during the really abbreviated settler history of occupation and colonization or exploration in that part of California settlers were are always noticing either that evidence that it had been flooded in the past, or actual floodings that happened that were much smaller than the flooding that created the Salton Sea. So, in that kind of timescale, and that scale of grand time, bodies of water have existed here since time immemorial, and had been a really important part of Indigenous Environmental histories and all sorts of different kinds of Indigenous uses of the environment. In the book I look mostly at the relationships of the Cauhilla nation and the Kumeyaay nation to this water that has occupied the desert.
So, our 20th century story of the Salton Sea really begins with this epic flooding that took place from 1905 to 1907. And that was at a time when land speculators wanted to sell water rights to settlers in what we now call the Imperial Valley by selling them water rights from water that they wanted to divert from the Colorado River. And in order to do these diversions, they were using these old channels that the Colorado River had created to flood the area and the past. So, there was all this evidence, both built into the land and with Indigenous people, when they talk to them, the bodies of water had flooded this part of the desert many, many times in the past and would probably do so again in the future.
So, these development companies sought to divert some of this water from the Colorado River and used really poorly built irrigation infrastructure. And also, it was right at the time that the Colorado River likely would have flowed north into the sink in the desert, as it had so many times in the past. At any rate, this combination of sort of natural forces and poor settler infrastructure, combined to mean that the entire Colorado river flowed into this area of the desert that they were seeking to settle for almost two years, it took a significant amount of money and effort and labor, and resources to stop the flooding.
And the Salton Sea really came to be what was described as a disaster, or really a history making accident. But very, very quickly, settlers realized that if they wanted to irrigate their farms from the Colorado River, they would need a place for the wastewater to go. So very, very quickly after it was seen as this epic disaster for settlement of the area, it came to be seen as this real boom that could enable long term agriculturalism in the area. And that's that's kind of when settlement of the region really took off.
What I termed the Settler Sea has been a story about this 20th century version of this body of water. But that's certainly not its only identity, right? So, it’s only way of, of kind of existing in this area, or for the people who live around it.
Mallika Nocco
So, when it was a tourist destination, was it also storing runoff? Were people visiting? That's the part that I was having trouble with.
Traci Brynne Voyles
Yeah, so the courses that this history takes in the 20th century are really fascinating. So, all of these different uses. So, the sea's primary use is as a sump for wastewater runoff. And most predictions at the time were that it would have evaporated entirely probably sometime in the late 1920s. If it wasn't being used for that kind of continual inflow from Colorado River, irrigation water. And so, all of these stories, so, so really quickly, settlers sort of looked at this body of water and thought, well, you know, what are the different uses that we can put this to? And certainly, wastewater was the one that really maintained it as it is, and as we currently know it, but almost immediately, tourism came to be seen as this really exciting possibility.
Tourism for recreation, it was seen as a really, you know, the environment and the aridity of the area was really seen as this resource for health and recuperation for people who have respiratory diseases, all that sort of stuff. And by the 50s and 60s, that really morphed into the kind of tourist destination, California's Riviera, it was called for a time. And this destination for folks from Los Angeles who just needed to get away from the smog for a bit.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, there are so many ironies in sort of thinking about the Salton Sea as a place you would go to get away from the smog just in terms where it is now really seen as this place that has a lot of asthma and or asthma-like illnesses going on and things like that.
Mallika Nocco
So, I love that you titled your book, The Settler Sea, and the concept of settler colonialism. It's just a very important frame for how we think about your work. How would you explain this concept of settler colonialism in your work? And how do you see it explaining and helping to contextualize the history of the Salton Sea and what that might mean for its future?
Traci Brynne Voyles
Yeah, that's a great question. Um, so settler colonialism is a framework that folks have used to understand particular kind of forms of colonialism that have come about in countries like the United States. It's differentiated often from extractive colonialism or resource colonialism, where the idea is that a colonial power and is really exerting its power in ways that are designed to extract resources, whether those resources are natural resources or labor from the colonized country to benefit the economies of the metropole, or the settler, or the colonial power.
Settler colonialism works a little bit differently. So, in settler colonialism, settlers dispossessed Indigenous people from their own homelands, in order to clean that territory as settlers own home. And in that process, what happens is an exploitation of racialized laborers to really make that land produce new products for the benefit of settlers. So, it's a more complex formation of the way that colonialism operates. And a huge part of it is that transformation of an Indigenous homeland dispute is dispossession of Indigenous peoples, for settlers' own benefit and the transformation of this same space, the same physical geography, into a new home for settlers that can be then turned to economic benefit.
And so, it's this kind of almost more intimate formulation of the way that this process unfolds historically, and the way that it unfolds in a place like the United States. And the reason why that's a useful framework in this part of California is not only because California, history unfolds in the context of this settler colonial structure of power relations, that is the United States. But also, because this is a place where all of that unfolded in ways that are very easily observable in the history of the United States.
So, when I think about the Salton Sea as a settler sea, that's in part because it is actually physically dispossessing the native peoples of the area in ways that are very obvious to see. So, the Salton Sea has been inundating more than 40% of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla reservation lands since 1909. And so, it's functioning as a kind of physical settler to dispossess the Torres Martinez people from the land that's federally guaranteed to them.
But settler colonialism in order to do this kind of dispossessive work, it also has to transform landscapes, in ways that facilitate settler institutions and economic relations. And in this case, that's extractivist capitalism. In order to make the land produce in ways that facilitate settler forms of capitalism, especially in a place where the large scale monocropping and large scale agriculturalism that's going on in a place like the Imperial Valley, is not something necessarily that's natural to that desert ecosystem, right? It requires lots of different kinds of manipulations.
Faith Kearns
Thank you so much, Traci. So, you've touched on this a little bit, but I was really intrigued by the way that you talk about the Salton Sea as many seas. And again, we've touched on this, it has all these facets and meanings to different groups of people, and certainly over time. And certainly a lot of people see it as a wasteland. Especially when you sort of drive through and experience the area as it is now it can feel pretty - it's a challenging landscape - I don't have another way to put it really. And others sort of see it as this really crucial environmental justice issue. And then of course, a lot of people just live there, and it really is home for people. And I also find that with the decision-making process, it comes and goes and there does seem to be a lot of ambivalence about anything that can actually be done there to fix the contemporary situation. So, what does it mean to you to have this kaleidoscopic view of the Salton Sea?
Traci Brynne Voyles
Yeah, that's such a great question. And the reason why I will tell you that over the course of years of working on this project, there were times when I was kicking myself, because what drew me to the project was its complexity. I was really, really interested, and how nobody seemed to agree about what the Salton Sea was or is, it is all of the things that you described, it is this really highly polluted, toxic hazard scape. It is a really urgent environmental justice case. It is the site of all of these sorts of countercultural art movements in a way. It is people's home; it is people's homeland. All of those things are true.
And when I set about to write the book, I wanted to do something that would put out my understanding of the way that the sea's history unfolded and what it might mean, but I didn't want to foreclose other ways of looking at or seeing the Salton Sea. There are a number of really great It studies that have told this history in very different kinds of ways and come to different kinds of conclusions. And I actually hope that one of the outcomes of this book is that it might inspire other ways of looking at and seeing this history that can be really productive.
I came to talking about it as many seas, in part because of that complexity and part because there's no one really clear way of reading it, but also to underscore the reality that our perception of our relationships to different environments or the worth, that those environments have, really comes from your social location, your relationship to the history of that place, your relationship to the value of that place, and that there is no inarguably straightforward way of interpreting the worth of different kinds of ecosystems or places.
Sam Sandoval
Thank you for bringing that perspective. Because it really, sometimes our minds are just really entrenched into this specific iteration. But if we see through time it can put it in perspective. Also, there is an important migration of birds throughout North America. And it is interesting to see what are the bodies of water that birds have used and that are suitable for bird migration? So can you talk a bit more about the history of birding in Southern California and how it relates with the Salton Sea?
Traci Brynne Voyles
That was a great question. And it connects also back to the many seas element because it is an absolutely vital wetland, for migrating bird populations. At a time when you know, California has destroyed about 90% of its wetland ecosystems for birds. And so a big part of the Salton Sea's 20th century history, that's actually gone on a lot longer than I anticipated that it would have, was the ideas about human conservation of particular kinds of bird species.
So settler efforts to do state and federal conservation work for particular kinds of bird species have been a part of this history almost since the very beginning of its flooding. And so conserving the Salton Sea as a refuge for migrating birds, and then later in the 20th century for endangered birds, or threatened birds, has been a really important part of the conversation. So that's meant changing the physical realities of the environmental conditions around the southern shore of the Salton Sea, in particular, for the wildlife refuge that's there.
So I got to write about the ways that while we think of wildlife refuges, as just these kind of untouched or pristine wilderness areas that are conserved in that way, and I came to learn that that's not the case at all, and that wildlife refuges are specifically designed and curated for bird populations in really interesting kinds of ways. So I got to write about the labor that goes into that. I got to write about the politics of conservationists and the way that conservationists were thinking about different kinds of bird species and which ones were protectable.
Along with that I got to write about bird hunting, and the way that hunting and gun culture has been really built into settler California politics since the founding of the state itself. And the way that those politics can sometimes manifest in surprising ways in a place like Imperial and Riverside Counties. And then I got to write a lot about the different kinds of relationships that Cahuilla and Kumeyaay peoples have to birds and bird populations. And the different ways that human communities have valued birds and understood the relationships between birds, humans, and the broader ecosystem. Really has these fascinating consequences for people and for the birds and also for different kinds of physical landforms like the Salton Sea.
Sam Sandoval
I was last January in the Salton Sea. And as I was traveling there, I still saw duck hunting with gunfire. And I was like, wow, okay. All that you're mentioning is still kind of moving to the present.
Traci Brynne Voyles
Yeah, they're one of the things that I came across in my research, I thought kind of that can't be true (and which happens all the time when you're a historian) is that they were actually finding measurable levels of lead contamination in the Salton Sea because of the bullet casings from all hunting that was going on in this in the southern area of the of the Salton Sea and the gun clubs that were down by the by the New and the Alamo Rivers.
Mallika Nocco
Wow. Yeah, that definitely can't be true. But then it is.
So I've noticed that the Salton Sea seems to kind of come and go in the news. And, of course, if you are in that community, it's a big part of your life all the time. But recently, it's been in the news, again, in terms of its relationship with the Colorado River. And it's kind of seen as almost a bargaining chip in contemporary water management in the Colorado River Basin. And given its context, what do you think the prospects are for the Salton Sea as the Colorado River is dwindling?
Traci Brynne Voyles
When I think about the history of this relationship between the Colorado River and the Salton Sea, they have always been tied together. The Salton Sea is best understood as part of the Colorado River Watershed, which is not the way that it's often understood. So its fate has been tied to the fate of the Colorado River always. They've always been part of the same kind of limnological systems as well as part of the same conversations around management.
So, one of the things that I wrote about in the book is how the history of the Hoover Dam is really tied very tightly to the Salton Sea because of the political power of Imperial Valley growers, who were very, very concerned in the years and decades after the flooding that created the current state of the Salton Sea, that it would happen again, after all of this infrastructural development, after all of this investment had been put into this farming region.
The idea that the Colorado River would be uncontrolled, and could perhaps flood the area again, and displace all of those farms, again, was simply unacceptable from a certain point of view, in those years after the flooding. And so that lobby became really important in the construction of the Hoover Dam and other kinds of dam technologies that have been controlling the Colorado River ever since.
When I think about the prospects related to the Colorado River, I do think that the health of this entire basin where the Salton Sea sits, has really been built in ways over the course of hundreds and 1000s of years. It's been built in ways that make it reliant on this regular flooding. That used to happen and that has happened right up until 1905. The Colorado River water was what kind of refreshed and replenished all sorts of different kinds of ecological resources in the area like stands of mesquite trees–the flooding would bring in new seeds, and new kinds of plants.
It was really important to kind of floodplain farming for all sorts of Native nations from the Quechans up to the Kumeyaays and the Cahuilas. And so that regular flooding is really kind of part of what maintains the ecological health and stability of the area. And to have that no longer be a possibility because both the damming of the Colorado River and also the consequences of climate change that are reducing the amount of water that's in the river to begin with all mean, necessarily that the Salton Sea and the kind of ecosystems that rely on it are in a lot of trouble. No small solution will do the trick.
Faith Kearns
Yeah, thank you for stating that so plainly. I hadn't quite gone that far in my mind. But I think that that's a really important way of viewing it is just that their fates are tied together.
I'm curious after developing this intimate understanding of the Salton Sea. If you could wave a magic wand and address the many issues surrounding it, what would you do? Or even where would you start?
Traci Brynne Voyles
It's the right question. The only thing that's harder than solving the problem that is the Salton Sea, is continuing to live with the conditions that made it this way in the first place. If I had a magic wand to wave it would be to have people think in more complex terms about what constitutes environmental action or environmental outcomes.
And what I was doing was trying to think, with a number of especially Indigenous studies scholars, about the need for more creative ways of imagining ourselves out of, or through, these sets of impossible problems that we have ranging from, you know, the Salton Sea, in this case, to global climate change. And situating this story, which is essentially an environmental crisis, situating it in this framework of settler colonialism is my way of suggesting that in order to have workable environmental solutions to these kinds of problems, we have to address the things that we think of as social problems. So oppression organized around racism, classism, heterosexism, and settler colonialism.
And that what we think of as social problems actually have really concrete environmental consequences. And that addressing any kind of environmental crisis necessarily means doing social justice work, those things cannot be divorced from one another. So I think if I had a magic wand, I would say to everybody, what I say to my students in my environmental justice classes, which is that if you're here because you care about environmentalism, and you want to do conservation work, or those kinds of things, you have to come to care about racial justice movements. And then if you're here because you're invested in racial justice movements, and or other social justice kinds of concerns, you have to also care about environmental conditions and the environmental consequences of those forms of oppression. And that that's what my course is designed to do is to get people to see those as interconnected politics.
Sam Sandoval
Yeah, Traci, thank you so much for putting a lot of this in perspective, I don’t think that we should take the blinders, that sometimes these are just guiding us towards a very narrow set of options, that if we take them out and see it in a bigger perspective, this is just one iteration of the many things that that have occurred there. And that might be of many different conditions. Yeah, thank you for sharing that with our audience.
o end our conversations, asking our guest, if there is anything more that you would want to add? And also, how can we help you? How can we support the work that you're doing?
Traci Brynne Voyles
It's such a kind question. I think for listeners in California and Southern California, in particular, find your local environmental justice organization. In California, there's almost no community that doesn't have an EJ org, that's identifying local issues. I could name 100, just off the top of my head that are up and down the length of California doing really urgent on the ground work, and they understand what the local politics are. So I'd say that that's certainly true in the area around the Salton Sea.
I would also say that understanding and investing the different struggles that Indigenous communities in your area are working on in regard to asserting their sovereignty, doing land back campaigns, that kind of work is again happening in any community you happen to be living in or listening from. There's that work going on, that you can do research on and participate in.
In terms of my own work. I am just plugging along. I'm just sitting here in my office reading and writing books. That's what I'm doing. So I love to be a part of these kinds of conversations. And I think that it's wonderful. I think, especially again, for Californians, paying close attention to the story of lithium mining that's playing out in and around the Salton Sea is important. Thinking about our own responsibility, as constituents of a particular kind of government in a particular kind of political economy.
Whether or not lithium mining is your idea of an environmental outcome, fleets of electric vehicles, all of those kinds of things. Listening to local community members about those kinds of extractivist campaigns, I think really, really matters. There's been really good local journalism about that issue, particularly in The Desert Sun. And so paying close attention to that, I think could be really valuable, especially when we're making decisions at the ballot box and with our consumer dollars and all that kind of stuff. Thank you so much. This has been great.