Description
In the midst of what is to be a ‘green industrial revolution’, this paper places the current impetus to invest in hydroelectric dams worldwide, and particularly in the US, as a ‘green technology’ under historical interrogation. As a primary case study of their problematic nature, this papers frames hydroelectric dams in the United States as examples of ‘settler ethnogeographies’, or lands where Indigenous ontological relations are not only erased but are shaped to reflect settler relations with land (Reibold 2022). The paper further locates that large dams and reservoirs in particular, which have come to be associated with settler colonial ingenuity, modernity, and manifest destiny in the US, have effectively waged a continuous slow, and often hidden violence against both disposable bodies (human and non-human) and lands. As many communities scramble to fight for the liberation and restoration of their rivers, and of cultural lifeways, the green energy paradigm has reframed historical violence as necessary means to a low-carbon end in a world that is increasingly impacted by climate-exacerbated natural disasters.
