Andrew Curley

Andrew Curley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona. His research focuses on the everyday incorporation of Indigenous nations into colonial economies. Building on ethnographic research, my publications speak to how Indigenous communities understand coal, energy, land, water, infrastructure, and development in an era of energy transition and climate change.

Title and abstract:

TBD

For 100 years, the Colorado Compact established the law of the river. Yet, as many have noted, the compact was designed around agricultural interests, built on mining logics, and fundamentally in the interest of crude notions of progress and modernization. This paper argues that Euromerican understandings of water, measurement, and modernization not only dispossessed Indigenous nations in the southwest from access and rights to water, but also created the conditions for drought. 

The dams, reservoirs, and water systems depleted ground water, created erosion, and damaged ecosystems. Colonization rerouted rivers, erected concrete barriers, and moved water against its natural directionality. The hubris of city making in the southwest is reaching critical limitations, but our political imagination is bound to dated logics, racist laws, and aging infrastructure. To decolonize the Colorado River requires critically challenging the Colorado Compact, taking down dams, and ending exploitation over survivability.