Infrastructures as colonial beachheads: The Central Arizona Project and the taking of Navajo resources

Abstract

Colonial difference is a story of national infrastructures. To understand how colonialism works across Indigenous lands, we need to appreciate the physical, legal, and political factors involved in the building and expanding of national infrastructures in different historical contexts; infrastructures that arrive in some places while denied in others. Using archival documents, this article accounts for the colonial politics necessary to bring Colorado River water into Phoenix and Tucson. It highlights how the following moments worked to enlarge Arizona’s population and power while denying Diné water claims: the 1922 Colorado Compact, Arizona’s 1960s campaign for the Central Arizona Project, and recent Indian water settlements between Arizona and Navajo Nation. The infrastructures that emerged from these events formed a coal–energy–water nexus reliant on Navajo coal while constructing Arizona’s water network. In sum, these projects served as colonial beachheads—temporal encroachments on Indigenous lands and livelihoods that augment material and political difference over time and exacerbate inequalities.

Embedded Bordering

“…In this sense we are also contributing to the ongoing discussion (see : Mitchell 2011;Malm 2016;Boyer 2019aBoyer , 2019bDaggett 2019;Barak 2020;Stephens 2020;Baker 2021) concerning the important role that energy, and power over it, plays in shaping social and political economic relations, with clean energy infrastructure and decolonial configurations of power potentially offering transformative potential. It is our contention that not only does the exploration of Indigenous energy development and struggle for control over utility governance provide for a greater understanding of the political and social effects of energy utilities and infrastructure, but that it serves to orient us to their relation to coloniality and its potential undoing-as demonstrated in the recent work of Salem (2020), Curley (2021), Cowen (2020), and LaDuke and Cowen (2020).…”

Dams, Development, and Racialised Internal Peripheries: Hydraulic Imaginaries as Hegemonic Strategy in Pakistan

“…Critical geographers are increasingly attuned to the technological politics of water infrastructures such as dams, canals, drains, desalination plants, toilets, meters, and pipes (Akhter 2015b, 2017; Curley 2021; Loftus 2006; Meehan 2014; Ranganathan 2014; Sneddon 2015; Usher 2019). One strand of this rich literature is focused on the historical and political role of statist hydraulic imaginaries—also sometimes referred to as “rhetorical legitimations” or as “discursive justifications” (Menga 2015; Rusca et al.…”

The settler colonial city in three movements

“…Simpson (2022) demonstrates how fossil fuel infrastructures in Vancouver are being reoriented to accommodate shifting geographies and political economies of oil, and how this infrastructural realignment extends settler colonial logics in the city while nevertheless offering strategic opportunities to resist these logics and bring about structural transformations of a different kind. Curley (2021) demonstrates how Phoenix and Tucson were built and sustained by dams, power plants, pumping stations, and cannels which diverted water from the Colorado River to those urban regions to the determent of the Navajo Nation and its own rights to that water. Collectively, these case studies reveal not only how infrastructures of commodity mobility connect the city to outlying regions metabolically, but also contribute to ongoing production and reproduction of the settler colonial city itself, thereby challenging ideas of colonization as something that happens at a geographical and temporal distance from the city (Tomiak et al, 2019).…”