Review: The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism, by Traci Brynne Voyles

Abstract

In Traci Brynne Voyles’s new work on the largest body of water in California, paradoxes abound. The Salton Sea, she shows in this profound and compelling book, is a difficult entity to define and narrativize. Is it a man-made entity or part of a centuries-old ecological rhythm? An environmental disaster, or the heart of a thrumming ecosystem? A consequence of settler colonialism’s disastrous designs, or evidence of its pervasive failures? In The Settler Sea, the answer to all of the above, and more, is both.The Settler Sea builds on the familiar narrative of the Salton Sea, a body of water created in 1905 in the middle of the desert when rain-swollen Colorado River water jumped a canal headgate and flowed unimpeded into the below-sea-level basin for two years. This resulted in a highly saline lake that has served as an irrigation runoff catch, a short-lived resort and boating hub, an avian nesting ground along the Pacific flyway, a bomb testing site, a center of massive bird and fish die-offs, and a cause of toxic pollution.Voyles adds to the already well-documented history of the Sea by combining approaches from settler colonial studies and environmental history. This method is particularly potent not only because the Salton Sea is a shared epicenter of white settlers’ totalizing dreams (familiar to all students of settler colonialism) but also because of the manifold unintended consequences of their environmental tinkering (a common theme among environmental historians). Following from these fields, The Settler Sea largely focuses its analysis on the relationship between social inequality and environmental problems. “The functions of social power built into settler colonial processes—racism, sexism, classism, heteropatriarchy, ableism,” Voyles argues, “are themselves environmentally ruinous” (p. 7). In showing how social and environmental issues intertwine in the settler process, the narrative centers the experiences of desert Indigenous groups, especially the Cahuilla and Kumeyaay peoples. It is, however, no mere tale of destruction, but a complex weave of survival, paradox, and change within the wider settler project.Like floodwater carving its way through the sand of the Colorado Desert, Voyles’s narrative is anything but straightforward. The book’s three sections respectively deal with the Salton Sea’s creation, its rise to political, cultural, and economic prominence, and its role in various environmental disasters. But with titles ranging from Birds to Bodies to Bombs, its chapters meander and twist across time, space, and subject, all ultimately returning to the sea at its heart. While this method yields powerful results in tracking the wide scope of histories tied to the Salton Sea, it sometimes obscures the more basic flow of causality and narrative, especially for readers unfamiliar with the history of the region.The Settler Sea is, nonetheless, delightfully written. So often dismissed as a wasteland, the desert blooms under Voyles’s pen. In capturing the many stories of the Salton Sea’s precariousness—“the way it sits uncomfortably between worlds, existing always in the interstices of human and natural influences” (p. 267)—this book is an important new entry, useful to scholars of settler colonialism, environmental history, Indigenous studies, and the American West writ large.