Bureaucratizing Settler Colonialism: Race, Labor, and the Origins of the Bureau of Reclamation

​Abstract: This presentation examines
global imperial processes in the spaces of the “local”  to critically analyze US Bureau of Reclamation policy. As a mammoth government agency charged with “reclaiming” and “rehabilitating” landscapes coded as the “waste lands of the American West”
at the turn of the 20th century, the Bureau ushered in a new regime of continental capitalist enclosure modeled explicitly from imperial modernization campaigns abroad. To tell the history of the Bureau, I focus on a single Reclamation project
located in the northwest corner of California, called Tule Lake: the historical site of the Modoc War, a Depression-Era Civilian Conservation Corp Camp, a World War II Japanese American Internment Camp, a short-term Bracero Labor Camp, and, ultimately, a postwar Homesteading Project open exclusively to veterans.  Through a survey of the site’s uses between 1903 and 1990, I center the landscape
as its own material witness—a palimpsest of overlapping  imperial hauntings—in order to isolate, and then define, the overlapping social imaginaries that fueled settler-colonial projects well into the late 20th century.  Unlike most state-centered histories
of Reclamation that privilege the optics of the national over that of the local, I offer instead an analysis of the ways imperialist and settler colonial ideologies are materialized at the scale of the everyday, and inscribed on laboring bodies and laboring landscapes, alike.

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