LAND and WATER BACK: A brief and partial history of Mormon water (ab)use

Hi friends, I've heard of some organizing going on around the Salt Lake which my people have been killing for generations.

I'm not from this part of so-called Utah and this region is not the focus of my studies.

That said, here is some history of Mormon water use in so-called Utah and a lil on the devastation my People have caused Indigenous Peoples of this land.

This doesn’t address the many many species of Indigenous non-human animals for whom these waters have been life for thousands of years. nor the water (ab)use projects enacted throughout Deseret.

Within 170 years my people have overgrazed, overused, and deser(e)tified these lands.

My thoughts: give it back. (along with hefty reparation$).

Indigenous Peoples globally care for 80% of the planet’s remaining biodiversity on ~25% of the land and as only 5% of the human population.

As Pueblo Action Alliance writes, “We can’t have LandBack without WaterBack.” 

From the day Brigham Young and Co. entered Timpanogos land in the Salt Lake valley and were told by Timpanogos Chief Wakara that he and his people weren’t welcome to settle this land, Mormons have been Deseret-ifying and desertifying it.

Even before my People, Euro fur-trappers drove beavers to near extinction radically altering the land’s hydrology, beginning the desertification process. (the white top hat Joseph Smith put his seer stone in to translate the book of Mormon was most likely made of beaver).

When John Welsey Powell surveyed these lands he advised against settling because of the inaccessible water. But Mormons were avid irrigationists.  

In Tonaquint lands Mormon committed genocide by diverted Tonaquint waters for Mormon irrigation. In 2012, the area’s major river, the Virgin, was among the “top 10 most endangered river systems in the U.S”

In Kaibab lands Mormons committed genocide by building a fort over an ancestral Kaibab spring and cattle overgrazing Kaibab grasses.

By the 1880’s Mormons had dried out Sevier Lake through overuse. Along the Sevier River is where Mormons massacred an entire Paiute Village in the Circleville Massacre. 

The Glen Canyon Dam was, for Mormons, part of their sacred assimilation project to make the Lamanites and the desert “blossom as the rose.” Simultaneously with this dam, Tribal Termination and the Lamanite Placement Program were being pushed and created by Mormons. 

Now, Lake Powell, named after the man who told the U.S. not to settle here because of its hydrology, is at 42% capacity and has been in a “historic drought” for the last 2 decades. 

As @redhivecollective writes, “As the (Great Salt) Lake dries up, decades worth of pesticides, arsenic, and industry chemicals will be released from the dust on the lakebed” in a sick form of colonial reciprocity. 

This lake is not “ours”. It is stolen and now destroyed. The lake is not our kin. It has its own Peoples and our People have been trying to wipe them out through predation, destruction, and assimilation. 

Fighting to protect “our lake” is a settler-move-to-innocence, centers settler-futurity, and doesn’t radically challenge the histories that brought this lake, this land, and our bodies to this point of possible no return. Fight to return the land and water to its Indigenous Peoples.

Sources and suggested reading:

• “Eager: The Surprising, Secret Life of Beavers and Why They Matter” by Ben Goldfarb 
• “On Zion’s Mount: Mormons, Indians, and the American Landscape” by Jared Farmer
• Circleville Massacre
• Black Hawk War; Timpanogos Nation of the Wasatch
• Pipe Spring National Monument
• “Decolonization is not a Metaphor” by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang
• ​Virgin River Makes National List of Top 10 Ecosystems Threatened by Water Development