The Settler Sea: California’s Salton Sea and the Consequences of Colonialism

Throughout the book, Voyles powerfully suggests that finding solutions to the glaring problems call for a decolonization and restructuring in the environmental movement. She makes it clear that there is far more about the Indigenous diaspora as related to the life and legacy of the region than has previously been presented in much of the literature and public image-making about the Salton Sea. This book does much to establish the depth and complexity of these deep eco-cultural relationships that have shimmered across the desert as beautifully and invitingly as the sparkly sea itself under a hot desert sun, a true mirage come to life.

Voyles outlines how the ongoing environmental and social justice crisis at the Salton Sea has arisen from a colonial mentality which assumes that everything, absolutely everything in the desert, was placed there for short-term economic gain of the new arrivals at the expense of both the environment itself and the cultures and involvement of the Native people. This marginalization has not only displaced Native communities, but has also failed to include Native people in the conversation at all.

As Voyles says, “The questions of whose environmentalism we follow when it comes to the Salton Sea – as well as when it comes to myriad other environmental challenges – matters.” This urgent call for a re-structuring, even decolonization of how we approach environmental problems, may be the most important message in the book (p. 264)

Such “decolonized” approaches to solving the Salton Sea crisis and creating an ongoing existence in more sustainable ways – ways that directly involve the voices and the lives of the Native and other non-Anglo communities (particularly those of Latinx people) who live here – can also be implemented in addressing the severe environmental and social justice disasters playing out across adjacent parts of eastern Riverside and Imperial counties as well as huge swaths of the Mojave deserts subject to the construction of massive large-scale renewable energy projects on once-pristine wildlands.

The voices and amplified presence of Native people – including Shoshone, Serrano, Mojave, Cahuilla and others whose homelands these have been for at least 10,000 years – are essential in a landscape of decolonized environmental activism.

In eloquent detail and with an inviting narrative style, Voyles shares stories of the region’s Cahuilla and other Native people. Once a vast inland sea much larger than today’s present-day incarnation, Ancient Lake Cahuilla was a temporal body of water shaped and formed by changes in weather, rain and flood, as well as by periods of extended drought.

In her book, Voyles also goes far beyond presenting another chronology of the Salton Sea and its presence, formed by mishaps in irrigation efforts by Anglo settlers and coupled with epic Colorado River flooding. She extensively examines the heavy impacts of settler colonialism on the formation and the shrinking of the Salton Sea that have steadily been creating a massive environmental disaster and furthered “Indigenous dispossession and racial capitalism” in this region.

Today, the Sea exists in a precarious conundrum between degradation, dispossession, beauty, life and abundance – a shadow but also a mirror of its former come-and-go, ancient lake-self in one of its many historically changing incarnations. This is a book that savors the richness of the magical and miraculous world of the Salton Sea and Ancient Lake Cahuilla, as it has existed and been a deep and critical part of the fabric of a relational and adaptive way of life for the Cahuilla and other Indigenous people. This book also starkly outlines the influences that western settlement and colonial-capital influences have had in radically altering this harmonious eco-human balance in the past several hundred years.

For example, in the section titled “In the Lowlands of Southern California,” Voyles writes that “the state’s inland body of water teeters between worlds…Every year less water flows in to replenish that which the sun dries up. The shoreline recedes….mudflats dry and crack.... (but) it would be a mistake to see only the dead fish, dusty shoreline, and a flat slate of water stretched toward a hazy horizon. Turn around. Creosote bush and salt brush thrive in thin, alkaline soil…An impressive range of legume trees furnish valuable protein for human and nonhuman dwellers: blue palo verde, ironwood, honey and screwbean mesquite, and catclaw, among others….Notice the birds. They are everywhere. Eared grebes, white and brown pelicans, terns, cormorants, herons and egrets all congregate here, splashing in the shallows and hunting for food.” (p. 1-2).

The table of contents clearly outlines the over-arching scope of this book and its purpose in serving as an anthem call for a revision of decolonization and re-structuring of the contemporary environmental movement and also as a beautiful evocation of the stories and cultures of the Cahuilla and other people living near the Salton Sea and Ancient Lake Cahuilla.

In part 1 has two sections: Desert and Flood. Part 2 contains the sections Birds, Concrete, and Bodies. Finally, Part 3 - Bombs, Chains, and Toxins - bringing us into the mid 20th and early 21st centuries. Voyles’s conclusion packs a compelling and urgent punch: “A How-to Guide to Saving the Salton Sea.”