pCan a sea be a settler What if it is a sea that exists only in the form of incongruous, head-scratching contradictions a wetland in a desert, a wildlife refuge that poisons birds, a body of water in which fish suffocate Traci Brynne Voyles's history of the Salton Sea examines how settler colonialism restructures physical environments in ways that further Indigenous dispossession, racial capitalism, and degradation of the natural world. In other words, emThe Settler Seaem asks how settler colonialism entraps nature to do settlers' work for them. pp The Salton Sea, Southern California's largest inland body of water, occupies the space between the lush agricultural farmland of the Imperial Valley and the austere desert called America's Sahara. The sea sits near the boundary between the United States and Mexico and lies at the often-contested intersections of the sovereign lands of the Torres Martinez Desert Cahuillas and the state of California. Created in 1905, when overflow from the Co