Want to create an interactive transcript for this episode?
Podcast: New Books in Economic and Business History
Episode: Jennifer Bess, "Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin" (U Colorado Press, 2021)
Description: Where the Red-Winged Blackbirds Sing: The Akimel O'odham and Cycles of Agricultural Transformation in the Phoenix Basin (UP of Colorado, 2021) is not a simple story of environmental decline and colonial imposion. In this brilliantly interdisciplinary book, Goucher College peace studies professor Jennifer Bess instead weaves a complicated narrative of change, stability, autonomy, and adaptation, focusing on Indigenous ways of understanding the land and its beings, and how the people who were created in the desert southwest have always shown resilience by adapting to changes. Even in the face fo changes including Spanish colonization, American industrialized agriculture, and today, climate cha...