Dean Michel, Florida State University, Department of History, is the recipient of the 2025 Carter Manny Writing Award.

“A Watery Grave in the Desert: Termination, Survivance, and the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe” analyzes how the United States federal government built the Parker Dam on the Colorado River between Arizona and California in 1938, thereby flooding and knowingly destroying the Chemehuevi’s livable land, including their homes, farms, and cemetery. This massive construction project forced the legal and physical dissolution of the Tribe. The dissertation argues that this radical transformation of the Chemehuevi homeland’s physical landscape forced a reckoning of colonial and tribal perceptions of land, value, and tribal government. Federal Indian policy of the era emphasized tribal sovereignty, unless tribes—like the Chemehuevi—happened to live in the way of valuable natural resources. After decades of diaspora, the Chemehuevi reformed their Tribe as a legal entity in the 1970s, orchestrated the return of their land, reestablished a reservation community, and rebuilt traditions of kinship through a new economy. This dissertation pushes back against models that see a unidirectional path of Indigenous eradication and explores how the federal government enacted policies of termination while simultaneously claiming to support Indigenous sovereignty. Further, it adds to the conversation of environmental and Native policy by highlighting how modern resource management is inherently colonial and extractive to Indigenous peoples and the environment. Finally, it highlights how Indigenous peoples confront living on ancestral land that remains ecologically devastated to emphasize the contingent pathways of survivance.

As an enrolled member of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Dean Michel is drawn to the persistent consequences of past violence through the collective memory of how the Parker Dam destroyed the Tribe’s reservation and village. Familial emphasis on elder wisdom and the importance of remembering the past to create a better present pushed Michel to become a historian, choosing Florida State University in part because of their relationship with the Seminole Tribe. Michel has presented papers at several conferences, including the Western History Association, Native American and Indigenous Studies Association, and American Society for Ethnohistory, and is a 2025–26 Mellon Fellow at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC. Michel received his master’s in history from Florida State University in 2022 and his bachelor’s in history from Chadron State College in Nebraska in 2018.