Water management as a tool for taking land
Last week, I wrote that I wouldn’t visit your inbox until September 10. But I didn’t want to take a break without pointing you toward last week’s conversation with Dr. K. Maria Lane about her new book, Fluid Geographies: Water, Science, and Settler Colonialism in New Mexico.
Lane is Dean of Graduate Studies and Professor of Geography & Environmental Studies at the University of New Mexico. She’s also founding director of the R.H. Mallory Center for Community Geography and was named in 2023 as a UNM Presidential Teaching Fellow. And her latest book, looking at the Territorial Period in New Mexico water history, is timely and important.
“Starting in the late 1800’s and then getting up to the point where my book really focuses — the turn of the century and leading up until Statehood — water management became a tool of taking territory; and taking not just territory, but control of decision-making over resources,” Lane said.
We talked about the analysis in her book, which is based on historical documents and almost 200 court cases involving water — court cases in which judges (like state officials) repeatedly valued the knowledge and expertise of Anglos over people who had lived here for generations.
“The unbelievable thing that’s unrecognized…at least in this time and in the historical record, is that you have land-based people living in this region with generations and generations and generations of knowledge passed down about environmental conditions, environmental change, water flow, water use, water management — and they’re no longer ‘experts’ because the new experts have to have degrees in hydrology or degrees in forestry or degrees in math or whatever,” Lane said.
She noted that in a report to the Governor, the first Territorial Irrigation Engineer (the precursor to the New Mexico State Engineer) wrote about Anglo transplants from the East wasting water and not understanding the arid landscape: “They were writing about how ignorant people were and saying White people alone had the expertise to manage water, which was just how people understood things at that time — without really addressing the racism that lays behind it.”
And if you haven’t read it already, check out Alicia Inez Guzmán’s latest story, about plutonium contamination from the early 1940s that persists in Los Alamos’s Acid Canyon and continues to move downstream.
Here’s an excerpt from her story, “A nuclear legacy in Los Alamos: After three cleanups, independent analysis shows 80-year-old plutonium persists in Acid Canyon and beyond”:
“Using a technology called mass spectrometry, [Michael] Ketterer said this scenario became apparent after he found that several samples from scattered sites in Acid Canyon — whose trailhead is tucked behind the Los Alamos County Aquatic Center — had the same fingerprint, one that dated to the earliest days of the Manhattan Project. He realized just how far that plutonium had traveled when he also collected the identical fingerprint in Los Alamos Canyon, some 12 miles southeast of Acid Canyon, near the Phillips 66 gas station in Totavi — washed downhill by monsoon rains.”
And with that, I’ll be back in September. Take good care.
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