For: “Arizona’s Gila & Salt River Water Diversion and the Increased Gap Discrepancies in Agricultural Communities”.
Diana Madril is the first recipient of the new SHOT Redi Prize recognizing outstanding scholarship exploring the multiple intersections and junctures between race/ethnicity and the history of technology. In her original study, Madril details the multi layered history of water technologies in Arizona, foregrounding Native American practices overlooked by more conventional historiographies of irrigation in the West of the US. This is no linear story starting from Hohokan traditional techniques and ending with White American sophisticated water management systems. Keeping Native Americans at the center of her longue durée narrative and making a creative use of disparate archives, Madril offers instead an enticing account of race formation processes through water technologies involving local communities of the Gila River, the Spanish Empire, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and the US Federal State.