As part of the Utah Humanities Book Festival we will host authors Erika Bsumek and Andrew Curley to feature their new books The Foundations of Glen Canyon Dam and Carbon Sovereignty Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation. This special event will be a conversation between the authors and our director about their work in understanding these complex stories and histories of environmental justice.

Join us October 6th at the Salt Lake City public library in meeting room B at 4:00pm.

Click here to order Erika’s book, and here to order Andrew’s. 

For questions about this event please email jack@glencanyon.org

More about Erika’s book: “Erika Marie Bsumek reorients the story of the dam to reveal a pattern of Indigenous erasure by weaving together the stories of religious settlers and Indigenous peoples, engineers and biologists, and politicians and spiritual leaders. Infrastructures of dispossession teach us that we cannot tell the stories of religious colonization, scientific exploration, regional engineering, environmental transformation, or political deal-making as disconnected from Indigenous history. This book is a provocative and essential piece of modern history, particularly as water in the West becomes increasingly scarce and fights over access to it continue to unfold.”

More about Andrew’s: “This comprehensive new work offers a deep dive into the complex inner workings of energy shift in the Navajo Nation. Geographer Andrew Curley, a member of the Navajo Nation, examines the history of coal development within the Navajo Nation, including why some Diné supported coal and the consequences of doing so. He explains the Navajo Nation’s strategic choices to use the coal industry to support its sovereignty as a path forward in the face of ongoing colonialism. Carbon Sovereignty demonstrates the mechanism of capitalism through colonialism and the construction of resource sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s embrace and its rejection of a coal economy.”