CARBON SOVEREIGNTY

ANDREW CURLEY

CARBON SOVEREIGNTY
Coal, Development, and Energy Transition
in the Navajo Nation
The University of Arizona Press
www.uapress.arizona.edu

We respectfully acknowledge the University of Arizona is on the land and territories of Indigenous
peoples. Today, Arizona is home to twenty-two federally recognized tribes, with Tucson being home to
the O’odham and the Yaqui. Committed to diversity and inclusion, the University strives to build sus-
tainable relationships with sovereign Native Nations and Indigenous communities through education
offerings, partnerships, and community service.

© 2023 by The Arizona Board of Regents

All rights reserved. Published 2023

ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4866-8 (hardcover)

ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-3960-4 (paperback)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8165-4867-5 (ebook)

Cover design by Leigh McDonald

Cover photo by Cassidy Araiza
Typeset by Leigh McDonald in Adobe Caslon Pro 10/14 and Good Headline Pro (display)

Publication of this book is made possible in part by the proceeds of a permanent endowment created
with the assistance of a Challenge Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal
agency.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Curley, Andrew, 1982– author.
Title: Carbon sovereignty : coal, development, and energy transition in the Navajo Nation / Andrew
Curley.
Description: Tucson : The University of Arizona Press, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and
index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022029643 (print) | LCCN 2022029644 (ebook) | ISBN 9780816548668 (hardcover)
| ISBN 9780816539604 (paperback) | ISBN 9780816548675 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Navajo Indians—Arizona—Government relations. | Coal mines and mining—Navajo
Nation, Arizona, New Mexico & Utah. | Coal mines and mining—Arizona. | Navajo Indians—
Arizona—Politics and government. | Energy transition—Navajo Nation, Arizona, New Mexico &
Utah. | Energy transition—Arizona.
Classification: LCC E99.N3 C87 2023 (print) | LCC E99.N3 (ebook) | DDC 979.1004/9726—dc23/
eng/20220727
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029643
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022029644

Printed in the United States of America

♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).
 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 5
1. Shape-Shifting Colonialism and the Origin of Carbon Sovereignty 31
2. Carbon Sovereignty 60
3. Carbon Treatymaking 92
4. Workers’ Perspectives on Coal 132
5. Toward Energy Transition 154
Conclusion: All That Is Solid Melts into Air 183

Notes 193
References 199
Index 211
 ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES
1. Diné coal workers gathering outside the Navajo Nation Council
chambers in support of the NGS lease, April 29, 2013 8
2. Mother Earth and Father Sky depicting the way the world is
understood in Diné traditional stories, 2002 30
3. Navajo Nation chapter house boundaries 32
4. Gerald Nailor Sr., The History and Progress of the Navajo People,
mural in Navajo Nation Council chambers, 1943 36
5. Raymond Nakai reelection campaign poster, Navajo Times,
November 1970 68
6. Navajo families celebrating Christmas at the Civic Center 69
7. Navajo Council delegates in session at the Navajo Council Chamber 76
8. “Hundred March in Peaceful Protest,” Navajo Times, April 5, 1973 79
9. Former Navajo Nation attorney general Harrison Tsosie addressing
a gathering of coal workers, April 11, 2013 98
10. Former Arizona senator John McCain entering a water rights
meeting with Navajo Nation Council delegates, April 5, 2012 105
11. Navajo Nation Council considering legislation, July 18, 2013 127
12. Unprecedented suspension of debate to negotiate votes on the
NGS lease, July 18, 2013 128
 VIII ILLUSTRATIONS

13. Kayenta Mine workers in front of the Navajo Nation Council

chambers petitioning for the NGS lease renewal, April 11, 2013 150
14. Tom Greyeyes, Inscription House mural depicting the hazards
of NGS, July 2013 177
15. Diné and Tohono O’odham artists painting the Water Is Life
mural in downtown Phoenix, April 28, 2013 179

MAPS
1. Current Navajo Reservation boundaries 2
2. Traditional Diné territory 3

TABLES
1. Tribal government interviews, 2013 93
2. Kayenta resident and coal worker interviews 133
3. Diné environmental organizer interviews 169
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

E
VERY BOOK ACKNOWLEDGMENT says something profound about the writing process.
I don’t have anything to say except I’m glad it’s done. The work of this book
was difficult and remains flawed in ways that are now hard to fix. However, I
think I’m telling a story that is important and I want to get out there. So, thank
you to everyone who has helped me do this!
This is not the truth on Diné experience with coal and development over
the past half century but a perspective informed by systematic fieldwork. My
greatest fear is the inevitable, that people will disagree with what I write here.
Yet this is a healthy response from you, the reader, and I need to welcome and
encourage it. Thank you, critics, now and in the future!
It’s my name on the book, but a lot of people helped me think through the
ideas discussed here. I will miss some important people. Sorry if I didn’t include
you; it was an oversight from fatigue. This is the last part of the book I’m doing.
First, I couldn’t have done any of this without the graciousness and indul-
gence of the people who let me interview them. I really wish I could have
represented your stories better. I thought more was possible during the process
of research. I had grand ambitions of writing something definitive or clever, but
it turns out the world is full of limitations—many of which I didn’t anticipate
nearly a decade ago when I did the research.
My fondest memories are waking up in Kayenta, running along the side of
the road, or riding my bike on the nice federally funded road that takes you to
 X ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Navajo National Monument. It was luxury on the rez. The evening brought stray
dogs and incredible sunsets. During the summer months, I experienced some
brilliant thunderstorms. Living in that part of the reservation, all too briefly,
gave me a greater appreciation for the stories people were telling me. Why it
was important to be there. To save the land, culture, and prospects of our people.
I couldn’t have found a place in Kayenta without the help of Amber Crotty
and Nathaniel Brown, now honorable council delegates. Thanks to our room-
mate Brandon Begay for sharing space and time for me to develop my research.
Thanks to my Flagstaff friends, roommates, and some people I got to know:
Natasha Hale, Jordan Hale, Sheena Hale, David Porinchok, and others.
Thank you, Allyson Carter, for seeing this project through, finding reviewers,
and talking me through difficult parts of the process. Thank you, reviewers, who
gave me helpful criticism or motivated me because I hated your comments.
Thank you, Wenner-Gren Foundation, for funding the research. This book lit-
erally couldn’t be this book without this funding.
I want to thank my good friends Alastair Bitsoi and Arlyssa Becenti, the best
journalists and my companions during council sessions. Thanks to those work-
ing in the tribal government who would let me talk to them or hang out in the
chambers when I was obviously taking notes. Thanks to Anthony Peterman for
sharing your thoughts on Navajo energy in real time and allowing a degree of
transparency during the process. I learned a lot from our conversations. Thanks
to Brandon Benallie, Radmilla Cody, Shandiin Yazzie, Dana Eldridge, and the
members of the K’é Infoshop for the work you do to hold our government
accountable.
Thanks to my friends and mentors over the years, Moroni Benally, Enei
Begaye, Tony Skrelunas, Ethel Branch, Wahleah Johns, Janene Yazzie, Wendy
Greyeyes, Nick Estes, Melanie Yazzie, Jennifer Denetdale, Lloyd Lee, Dana
Powell, Chee Brossy, and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. Thank you, Teresa Montoya
and Traci Voyles, for helping me come up with the book title! I need to thank
my mentors at Cornell, Angela Gonzales, Paul Nadasdy, Charles Geisler. All
of them saw much cruder drafts of these chapters. They did a lot of work. I
especially want to thank my advisor, Wendy Wolford.
Thanks to my friends and colleagues from the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill. First, I need to express gratitude to the Carolina Postdoctoral
Program for Faculty Diversity. This program provided the initial time needed
to turn this into a book. Thank you, Gaby Valdivia, for helping me during my
postdoc. Thank you to my colleagues at the UNC–Chapel Hill Department of
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS XI

Geography for giving me a chance. I am grateful to all of you who showed con-
fidence in me, and I have fond memories from my time there. I want to thank
Banu Gökariksel, Lilly Nguyen, Maya Berry, Danielle Purifoy, and Annette
Rodriguez for reading this and other things as part of our writing group, Dan-
gerous Playground.
Thank you, Valerie Lambert, Jean Dennison, and Meagan Ybarra for reading
second and third drafts of the book and giving me some of the most important
feedback I’ve received. This new version is largely a result of our workshop and
I hope we can celebrate it when it’s a tangible thing I can’t edit anymore.
Thanks to my colleagues in American Indian studies at UNC–Chapel Hill,
a program the university shamefully neglects. These are Daniel Cobb, Keith
Richotte, Ben Frey, and Jenny Tone-Pah-Hote. Jenny read early drafts of this
and helped me on some critical areas in understanding tribal law and gover-
nance. Thank you, Sara Smith, for continued mentorship and friendship. It has
been invaluable.
Thank you, University of Arizona geography people. Thank you, Karletta
Chief ! I look forward to working with you more in the future! Thanks to my
wonderful graduate student Majerle Lister and his partner Tatiana Benally.
Majerle spent a lot of time listening to us talk about things that would eventu-
ally become facets of this book. Thank you, Majerle!
I want to thank my parents, Paula Hale and Lorenzo Curley. They gave me
the teachings and discipline needed to complete this. My father worked a lot for
our community during the time of this writing and I admire the dedication he’s
shown to making our nation a better place. My mother was always there to hear
out my frustration or give me some valuable insights from her time working on
the Navajo Nation. All of this was tremendously helpful.
Thank you to my sisters, Lindsay Curley and Sara Curley, and my nephews,
Gabe, Anthony, and Austin. I want to thank the Beck family of Piñon, who
have become family to me. Their leadership has moved that community and
our nation over the years. I am lucky to know them. I want to thank the Begay
family too; they are always there to share a meal and host us. They embody k’é.
I am always happy to see them. Thank you, K’éhazbah Beck, Victor Beck Jr.,
Nathaniel Benzie, my family-in-law, but really my family. Thank you to my core
support, my love, Nanibaa Beck—whose contributions to my work and life are
immeasurable.
Finally, I want to dedicate this to family we’ve lost, Albert Hale, Victor Beck
Sr., and Eleanor Beck. You gave us wisdom, ceremony, knowledge, and faith.
 XII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Albert taught me about government reform and traditional leadership. Victor

was there to encourage me, to tell me about his days as a council delegate, and
his years growing up in Piñon. Eleanor taught me the most important lesson,
dedication to family, a lesson I try to apply every day.
 INTRODUCTION

E
NERGY TRANSITION IS not simply an ideal for the future; it is also empirically a
series of past events. Included in energy transition are the marginalization
of tribal places, the expansion of unsustainable cities, and the slow violence
of toxic spaces. Transition is not just a political rhetoric or rallying point; it is
made violent by its implementation on already existing colonial landscapes.
While some proposals try to mitigate colonial harm, especially energy proposals
that promote green energy technology, the history of energy development on
tribal lands is little more than a continuation of colonial violence in new forms.
In this book, I document recent events regarding the Navajo Nation’s long
participation in the coal industry and argue that we’ve been at the forefront of
energy transition for more than fifty years and with dire consequences.1
My intent is not to harm the workers or their understandings of prosperity
that coal brought to their families and communities. It is to highlight the larger
political context of energy development in the Navajo Nation and to show,
once again, how the welfare and well-being of Indigenous peoples were the last
considerations among colonial lawmakers and industry types who determined
the ultimate fate of our participation in energy production. This book focuses
on the attempted renewal of a coal lease and power plant, one that supplied
energy to critical water infrastructure for Arizona. The plant and mine operated
for years, but energy prices shifted against the fortunes of coal, and Arizona’s
utilities wanted to reduce costs.
 6 INTRODUCTION

Energy transition shut down a coal-fired power plant and coal mine that
operated for decades within the Navajo Nation, ending an important source of
revenue and jobs for the tribe. Powerful institutions in Arizona that created the
coal economy for Diné people blamed “market forces” when they pulled the rug
from under the feet of the Navajo Nation.
In this text, I consider how these economic forces were presented to Diné
activists, coal workers, and tribal officials. Years after its closure, we can see
clearly how price trends, climate discourse, and shifting energy practices cre-
ate the impression of an inevitability—that the coal plant was destined to
close as an artifact of history. But in 2013 this inevitability was far from cer-
tain. Diné people with opposite political objectives struggled to make their
vision of the future a reality, leading to either the closure and transition of
the Navajo coal economy or its continuation for decades more. What Arizona
lawmakers presented to the Diné people in 2013 was an opportunity to renew
a fifty-year lease between the tribe and the state’s most important utility, the
Salt River Project (SRP), until 2044. The renewal contained the elements of
past colonial arrangements, including the forfeiture of thirty-four thousand
acre-feet of Colorado River water for another twenty-five years after the 2019
lease expiration.
During this time, Diné people expressed a sense of carbon sovereignty in
their mobilization for or against the renewal of a coal-fired power plant lease.
This was a desire for increased control and self-determination over Diné lands,
air, and waters conscripted into energy production. Although carbon sover-
eignty might sound like a corny title to some readers, it does the work of com-
bining scholarship on energy history and tribal sovereignty in a way that I
find productive. The concept takes its understanding from Timothy Mitchell’s
(2009) provocative retort to a resource curse thesis, carbon democracy, arguing
effectively that state building in the Gulf was built on carbon resources. Oil in
the gulf made modern state building possible.
Carbon stands in as reference for fossil fuels. It’s not literal carbon but literal
carbon is part of it. It’s about both the conversion of things like oil and coal into
energy but more importantly the social and political relations that emerge and
are shaped by these processes. For “energy rich” tribes, carbon has been a source
of nation building, of assertions of sovereignty, of moving out of the paternal
control of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and controlling fate of nations. Carbon
as nation building for tribes, in the form of oil, coal, natural gas, and other fossil
fuels, is of critical importance. You can’t fully understand modern Indigenous
 INTRODUCTION 7

life in North America without accounting for carbon sovereignty. This text
begins in 2013 but explores the brief history of a mine, a power plant, and how
these infrastructures and networks of energy production shaped sovereignty in
the Navajo Nation for more than fifty years.

A 2013 COAL RENEWAL, AS IT HAPPENED

In the early morning hours of April 29, 2013, a chartered bus pulled into a largely
empty Bashas’ parking lot in Kayenta and loaded between twenty and thirty
Diné workers who worked at the nearby Kayenta Mine—a 44,073-acre coal
mine located on the edge of nearby Black Mesa.
Kayenta is on the northern boundary of the Navajo Reservation—near the
picturesque Monument Valley, which has served as the backdrop for many Hol-
lywood movies. The Diné mine workers were members of a union, affiliated
with the United Mine Workers, and it was their union that paid for the bus.
They got in the bus to travel to the tribe’s capital, Window Rock, 133 miles to
the southeast.
On their way to Window Rock, the workers trekked across a two-lane road
in some of the most remote parts of the continent. Diné families have lived here
since before Europeans even knew about this side of the world. Anasazi, the
ancestors of Diné and Pueblo peoples, built complicated and elaborate cliffside
communities not too far from Kayenta and the mine site.
Six hundred years ago, the people who lived in a slot canyon had luxuries
Europeans could only imagine: regular food, clean water, fresh air, and beautiful
country. They were free from most viruses and diseases that would later plague
generations of Indigenous peoples. They didn’t live in fear of neighboring king-
doms or as people without rights and bound to someone else’s land like the
ancestors of today’s white people, whose families escaped to our country from
the oppressiveness of European feudalism.
In April 2013, the workers were en route to a Navajo Nation Council session
(figure 1). The council was considering legislation that would renew a lease
between the tribe and one of Arizona’s most important utilities, the SRP, over
the Navajo Generating Station (NGS)—a 2,250-megawatt (MW) coal-fired
power plant that consumed Kayenta’s coal.
Although the mine had operated for decades in the heart of the Navajo
Nation, on Black Mesa, the lease between the power plant and tribe was set to
 8 INTRODUCTION

FIGURE 1 . Diné coal workers gathering outside the Navajo Nation Council chambers in
support of the NGS lease, April 29, 2013. Photograph by Andrew Curley.

expire in 2019. If it was not renewed, the mine would also close, and the workers
at both the mine and the power plant would be out of a job.
The lease was first signed in 1969 for a fifty-year term. The Salt River Project,
one of the most important and powerful utilities in Arizona, was the operat-
ing manager of the plant and its second-largest shareholder—the Bureau of
Reclamation being the first. For SRP, in its crude colonial calculation, coal
was cheaper than other energy sources. Committing to the plant and mine for
another twenty-five years made the most fiscal sense. But to do this, the utility
needed the Navajo council’s endorsement.
Although 2019 was six years away, SRP figured it would take time for the
Department of the Interior and other federal regulators to sign off on the lease.
Getting the Navajo Nation’s endorsement early would ensure the process was
complete by 2019.
Much had changed since the original lease was signed in 1969. In the 1960s,
climate change was not well understood. Coal was the environmentally friend-
lier alternative to large hydroelectric dams. At the time, conservation groups
advocated for coal over dams. This is something hard for modern environmen-
talists to imagine.
But by 2013, we were aware of greenhouse gases and coal’s contribution to
climate change. This book asks, “How would this new political landscape impact
 INTRODUCTION 9

existing approaches to tribal sovereignty? What would be the fate of the coal
workers who spent decades in the mines generating wealth for the tribe while
sustaining a good living for them and their families?”
I had been in the field for nearly a year by this point. I had returned to the
Navajo Nation the previous spring to study the political and cultural questions
of coal in the reservation and identify what I presumed were underappreciated
social consequences of the industry on our people. I was looking for Diné coal
workers’ understandings of coal and how it might help us appreciate the indus-
try’s long-term presence on our lands.
What I found were the raw experiences that contributed to the broader
social phenomena we call colonialism and capitalism. It isn’t enough to use these
words to describe what I witnessed or the experiences of people on the ground.
What this renewal entailed was contested meaning and high political stakes.
The renewal was about continued work for people at the mine and plant. It
was about substantial revenues for the tribe and the future of life on the planet.
Four years earlier, in 2009, I witnessed the same Navajo Nation Council
pass “green jobs” legislation that was meant to start the transition from coal to
alternative energy investment in the reservation. The tribe was aware of climate
change and its threat to the planet. But more fundamental to tribal lawmakers
was the fate of workers and revenues.
The original leases were signed during a time of profound social change
among Diné people, during the 1960s. Coal spurred some of these changes. It
helped move a subsistence workforce into industrialized labor. The coal mines
provided wage-labor jobs in a place defined by what you could grow and graze
on the land. For those who participated in the industry, coal ushered in a capi-
talist work week. Coal mining cut families from their homesites, displaced res-
idents, and made life in some sections of the reservation hard to sustain. Since
coal leases were signed and the first shovel plowed into Black Mesa, community
members in and around the mine sites have resisted the coal industry. This
resistance has taken many forms over the years. It regularly shows itself in quiet
disapproval, a petition of grievances with elected leaders, or outright agitation.
What I learned during this fieldwork was that time, land, and life were under
constant negotiation in the reservation—between settler designs and Indige-
nous needs. At the time of the lease renewal, the State of Arizona was also
asking the Diné people to relinquish our claims to the Colorado River and its
tributaries—forever—in exchange for limited “rights” to waters that reach the
reservation.
 10 INTRODUCTION

Language going backward and forward in time, from forever and to time
immemorial, are the temporal markers of treaties and water settlements. The
lease for the Navajo Generating Station was for fifty years and set to expire
in 2019. If renewed, the lease would continue coal in the Navajo Nation until
2044. This was a temporal binding, connecting the energy economy of 1969 with
2044. Time in the form of treaties and contracts sets the terms of colonization.
At the same time, environmental activists called for dramatic carbon reduc-
tions in near future dates, such as cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by
2030. When I asked an environmental organizer about their work against coal,
they said, “Strategically if you want to stop global warming you have to reduce
the amount of carbon in the atmosphere and the quickest way to do that is to
move beyond coal—to stop using coal.” The time frame used by environmental
activists, the time frame that contained a threat to humanity in the not-too-
distant future, motivated immediate action against existing sources of green-
house gasses such as coal-fired power plants. Extending the coal economy into
2044 was anathema to the politics of climate change.
The Kayenta Mine and the Navajo Generating Station, in combination, also
constituted an important economic pillar for the Navajo Nation. The workers
who mobilized outside the council worked to preserve not only their incomes
but also their ways of life—their moral economy. They had worked in the coal
industry for decades, many starting out shortly after high school. Some workers
I interviewed integrated traditional Diné ethics of work and livelihood into
regimes of industrial labor. They did not want to stand by and watch their source
of livelihood close. The power plant and mine employed at its peak eight hun-
dred workers.2 Coal leasing and mining contributed $30 million to $50 million
annually to the tribe’s budget—25 percent of nonfederal revenues.3 The stakes
for Diné people were high.
During the lease renewal, tribal officials fully supported the continuation of
the coal mine and power plant. The reasons were clear: jobs and revenue. Many
elected leaders and community members were aware of the costs and risks of
coal to the community and natural environment. They knew the sordid legacies
of extraction on the land, especially in the case of uranium mining (Brugge,
Benally, and Yazzie-Lewis 2006; Eichstaedt 1994; S. L. Smith and Frehner 2010;
Voyles 2015). Despite this knowledge, Diné lawmakers tried to renew the lease
and continue the industry. It was just too important, and the tribe was too
dependent on the mine and plant to close them down. This part of the story is
well known. I wanted to find out what it was about coal that left it so politically
 INTRODUCTION 11

entrenched in the Navajo Nation. It wasn’t that lawmakers and coal workers
referred to this structuring condition—in fact they rarely mentioned them. In
ideology and practice, they believed in coal. It was a livelihood upon which sov-
ereignty, self-determination, and even the continuation of culture rested. These
features of coal and extractive industries were less understood.
This paradox was forefront in my mind while I formed my research questions.
In a failed National Science Foundation proposal, a reviewer asked me, “Why
would this be any different than in West Virginia?” Why would we describe
the Navajo Nation as different from West Virginia? What were the underlying
assumptions in the reviewer’s response? I hadn’t even mentioned West Virginia
in my proposal, yet it was immediately compared with the Navajo Nation. This
is not uncommon. We often insist on this comparison ourselves. But when we
think about it more deeply, the social, political, cultural, and historical circum-
stances that went into forming modern West Virginia are the opposite of those
that formed the Navajo Nation. In some ways, the only thing Diné people have
in common with people in Appalachia is coal. And even this comparability
breaks down after superficial inspection. The kind of coal produced in these
regions is very different. Yet social scientists were asking for this comparison,
in a quixotic quest for something generalizable. This forced me to think about
how we are thinking about energy and energy transition on national and inter-
national scales, often abstracted from particular social and political contexts. It
was this deeper history and aspiration toward sovereignty that better explain
why people believe the things they do about coal in the Navajo Nation.
What my proposal reviewer wanted was a universal claim about the experi-
ence of coal work, something I could thread through West Virginia, the Navajo
Nation, and other coal-reliant communities while ignoring or downplaying the
messy details about the place in order to arrive at some generalizable sociologi-
cal facts. This was the basis for a false start, for a project that would lose history,
context, and specificity. To treat Indigenous peoples and spaces as anything
but a captured racial minority in the colonial claims of the United States, one
had to depart from what C. Wright Mills ([1959] 2000, 50) calls “abstracted
empiricism,” which says nothing to either theory or experience, and to reach
out for the “promise of sociology,” where “history and biography” (structure and
agency) meet.
This book historizes the Diné coal experience. It cannot account for every
angle, every facet, every personal narrative in the making of the Navajo coal
economy and its eventual decline. However, this book tries to put many of these
 12 INTRODUCTION

experiences into context, to make unique what is often assumed to be universal,

and to make historical what is assumed to be a contemporary problem. First,
I make a historical-spatial argument using secondary sources about the his-
tory of Diné people to argue that Diné lands were made into extractive spaces,
designed to fit within the racial logics and colonial practices of U.S. capitalism.
The limitations of Indigenous sovereignty are defined within what the Lumbee
law professor Robert A. Williams Jr. (2005) calls the racial dictatorship of the
U.S. Congress. This is the colonial process at work. It is a process not simply
of settlement but also of enclosure, forced federalism, and a particular legal-
political configuration of “tribe” that is defined in notions of race, capitalistic
notions of territory and land, and exploitative ontologies of resources. In com-
bination, these material and symbolic changes create the conditions for colonial
capitalism in and around the Navajo Nation. In other words, the Navajo Nation,
as a legal-political creature of federal Indian law, works consistently with cap-
italist understandings of space and time. These are necessary to make resource
extraction possible.
Second, this book examines the history of colonial capitalism in the Navajo
Nation and tribal responses (at times, resistance) to it. What emerges are an
understanding and practice of tribal sovereignty that are built from resource
extraction—carbon sovereignty. The material conditions of this form of sover-
eignty include the revenues coal brought into the tribal government and the
jobs created and maintained with the expansion of coal mines and power plants.
Finally, this book looks at the grounded impacts of coal itself. These are the
costs to the local environment, air, water, and land. Coal provided jobs and
revenues, but it also displaced families from their traditional lands and per-
manently contaminated land that Diné families used for subsistence for gen-
erations. Although the story of coal in the Navajo Nation is understood often
in colonial terms, it is also a deeply personal experience for many people. This
was a story of intimate geopolitics, of bodies, community, territory, and plans
for the future (S. Smith 2020) as well as one of structural conditioning created
by and through coal.
To empirically account for carbon sovereignty, I draw on fieldwork con-
ducted in the Navajo Nation between 2012 and 2014 and follow-up interviews
in 2017. These two years of ethnography helped me reestablish my research
questions. Namely, it became clear that I needed to connect coal’s material and
ideological practices in the Navajo Nation to the networks of energy and water
infrastructures serving regional (colonial) places such as Phoenix and Tucson.
 INTRODUCTION 13

I interviewed tribal officials, coal workers, and environmental activists. I lived

in Flagstaff, Kayenta, and Sanders during this time. I briefly worked at the
Navajo Times and covered community events and arts and culture instead of
tribal politics because my father was on the tribal council and the paper wanted
to avoid the appearance of bias. In 2017 I returned to the Navajo Nation and
reinterviewed several people about the recent change in coal’s fortunes. I also
witnessed several events related to the social and political reproduction of coal in
the Navajo Nation. Key among these events was the passage of a lease renewal
in 2013 before the industry shutdown at the end of 2019.
To understand coal’s fate in the Navajo Nation (epitomized in the closure
of the Navajo Generating Station in 2019), I focus on the history of energy and
water infrastructures in Arizona that necessitated the building of the Navajo
Generating Station and the Kayenta Mine in the first place. Although these
projects are not the entire story of coal in the reservation, they are important
bedrocks of the coal industry in the nation that until now have been under-
examined. When I started this project in 2012, I went to the Navajo Nation
thinking that water, as in water from the N-Aquifer just below Black Mesa and
the Kayenta Mine, served the coal industry, which in turn profited the Peabody
Coal Company. This was the standard narrative about coal on Black Mesa (Nies
2014). My research, focused on the terms of renewal, found that water served
coal but also coal served water—a different kind of water and one consequential
for the State of Arizona. The coal-energy-water nexus was built to incorpo-
rate Diné bodies and resources for the movement of Colorado River water to
Phoenix and Tucson—what I call “colonial beachheads” (Curley 2021a). Finally,
I consider the lasting impacts of the closure of the mines and power plant for
the Diné people. I contemplate what was gained and lost.
Ultimately, I suggest we must think about Indigenous futures in the twenty-
first century as a commitment to a politics of decolonization. All of this is to say
that the Diné people were brought into the fold of colonial capitalism through
complicated and overlaying structures and events over time. The history of coal
mining within the Navajo Nation demonstrates this. Settler colonialism has
become a useful way to think about the impacts of colonization on tribes, but
it has limitations. Although using history, in effect the theorization can be
ahistorical. It often does not allow for history to fundamentally change the
conditions of human existence and experience. To run the thread of continued
and ongoing land dispossession through a cache of historical experiences—and
to remind us colonialism is a structure and not an event—analytically, the settler
 14 INTRODUCTION

and “the Native” must remain in an unchanged, dichotomous relationship over

five hundred years. As a result of the settler-colonial framework, Indigenous
peoples in 2020 are treated the same as Indigenous peoples in 1492, and colonial
mechanisms are left unchanged—like a machine marching across the continent.
There is obvious allure to the settler-colonial framework. It gives us a sense of
the power of history and a clear picture of the monster that is colonization.
However, the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands (one of the
key elements of settler-colonial theory) changes shape and practice over time.
Colonialism is a shape-shifter. The colonial state is not a discrete unit, represent-
ing a unified actor with a set of clear discernable interests, but is instead a mess
of issues spilling onto Indigenous lands, incorporating enslaved Black people,
sucking up and pushing out immigrants, polluting while destroying and then
conserving resources. “Domination” can be messy business, and sometimes we
lose track of the actors involved in reproducing and remaking colonial regimes
in the twenty-first century.
Colonialism is a series of events that structures the possibilities and limita-
tions of Indigenous life and lifeways. There are some long-standing tendencies
within the framework worth pointing out, such as dispossession, racialization,
and notions of white supremacy. But these things need to be put into histori-
cal motion and allowed to change meaning over time, and thus we will better
understand how they creep in, over, and through tribal communities.
Capitalism can serve as a blunt explanatory device. When we see inequality,
racism, and clear examples of greed, corruption, and violence among ruling
elites, we reach for our folder labeled “capitalism” and file these instances into it.
But what is capitalism, really? And how does it work and play out across Indige-
nous communities? Capitalism might suffer from overexplanation because it has
different meanings for different peoples. It is not just a reference to economic
practices but a key term in ideological discourse over the past century. So much
is written about capitalism that it cannot be summarized in any useful way. So,
for our purposes, what do Indigenous activists mean when they refer to cap-
italism? What do tribal leaders mean when they use the word? Or Diné coal
workers? While my ethnography falls short of comprehensively explaining each
actor’s unique understanding of capitalism or references to it, I work to explain
what I mean by capitalism and how I think capitalistic practices impact each
of these actors differently. Capitalism is a form, practice, and understanding of
economy that combines with colonial forces to create a unique configuration of
powers, incentives, and invisible social and political limitations on tribal peoples
 INTRODUCTION 15

and institutions. This configuration, unique to place and time, produces and
reproduces the unequal relationship between the tribe, state, and federal govern-
ment over water and energy. This is what I call in this book colonial capitalism.
The founding of the Navajo coal economy was part of a new kind of energy
economy—a technologically distinct network of power lines, power plants, and
political power that was the development of the Southwest. Diné coal was
conscripted into a unique energy system that included power plants in Califor-
nia, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico, while selling power in all four states.
Diné coal was part of a history, which included the damming of western rivers,
of providing cheap energy to the expanding Sunbelt. This geographic history
further distinguished Navajo coal extraction from the history of extraction in
Appalachia. A key focus of my research was moving beyond direct comparisons
between entrenched coal economies. Instead, I asked: How did the coal indus-
try enter the reservation in the first place? What were the social and political
circumstances that gave rise to this specific form of energy economy? What did
coal contracts in the 1960s seek to accomplish? And what did coal accomplish?
The legacy of coal turned out far different from what was promised. By studying
what was promised in the past and comparing that with what actually happened,
we dispel the intoxicating myth of development and progress. The coal economy,
like many promises before, fell far short of early expectations.
The early literature on extractive industries in Indian Country addressed
some of these questions. Building on the sociological frameworks of “world sys-
tems” and “dependency theory,” researchers and polemicists alike pointed to the
structuring forces that created the possibilities for extraction in the first place.
These new ways of understanding centered on the tragic social and environmen-
tal repercussions of extraction in Indian Country (Ambler 1990; Churchill and
LaDuke 1986; Nies 2014). Although these structuralist explanations accounted
for coal’s persistence as a basis for extractive capitalism, they did not address
social and political forces working inside reservation communities. These earlier
analyses did not account for the internal push for coal among Diné people in the
Navajo Nation. The literature did not explain the social meaning coal produces
among key actors and people within the Navajo Nation.
Critics suggest it was the Navajo Nation’s reliance on coal for jobs and rev-
enue that explains the industry’s persistence. Noticeably absent from this story
(especially apparent to Diné people and those who live in the Navajo Nation)
are the perspectives of coal workers and tribal officials who saw coal as a source
of jobs, livelihood, and a means to cultural survival. In 2013 the renewal of the
 16 INTRODUCTION

Navajo Generating Station coal lease exposed some of these social forces at
work: the unseen forces that structure, maintain, and reproduce coal as a mode
of development, economy, and way of life within the reservation. These workers
pressured the Navajo Nation to stay in the coal business because of new social
understandings about the resource.
More recent scholarship on the Navajo Nation, particularly by Western his-
torians, finds that the neo-Marxist structural arguments used to explain the
exploitation of Indigenous peoples and the environment are too totalizing. For
example, the labor historian Colleen O’Neill (2005), whose rich archival work
is used throughout this book, wrote that dependency theory does not account
for the agency of tribal actors. This was the problem that informed the paradox
that sparked my early interest on this topic—except I was coming at the ques-
tion from a different angle. For my work, dependency theory didn’t talk enough
about how enthusiastic Diné coal workers were to see their livelihoods renewed,
to keep the supposed dependency going. Nor did it mention the eagerness of
tribal officials as they imagined the future economic windfall of renewed coal
contracts. The tribal officials and Diné coal workers didn’t enter with trepida-
tion into a Faustian bargain—where jobs were gained at the expense of the
environment—but made a full embrace of the coal work and industry. This
coal-committed ideology needed acknowledging as well as explaining.
However, we do not need to abandon structural insights to account for
agency. We can put the two into conversation. The job of social science is to
identify the unseen forces shaping the limits and possibilities of agency. In the
case of coal mining in the Navajo Nation, we see the limitations of agency
in legal language (that of land leases, coal contracts), what dependency theo-
rists call “the uneven terms of trade.” Ultimately, despite the will of the Navajo
Nation, major parts of the coal industry were shut down and there was little the
tribe could do beyond mitigation.
Another critique of dependency theory comes from the Lumbee political
scientist David Wilkins, whose work on Indigenous political systems is used
extensively throughout this book. In a 1993 critique, at the height of depen-
dency theory’s popularity, Wilkins wrote that dependency theory and other
underdevelopment theses could not account for positive economic outcomes
in Indian Country. One outcome he was referring to was the booming casino
development that was generating vast new revenues for tribes whose lands were
close to urban centers like Los Angeles, Phoenix, or Boston. In dependency
theory and other neocolonial accounts, the failure of tribal economies results
 INTRODUCTION 17

from the colonial theft of Indigenous lands and resources for the benefit of the
core economy. Wilkins (1993) argues that this understanding predicts economic
failure for tribes.
When translating the insights of Mexican and other Latin American econ-
omists, the critical economist Andre Gundar Frank (1967) coined the phrase the
development of underdevelopment. He and economists based in Latin America
were referring to how global capitalists in colonizing nations exploited devel-
oping economies for their own benefit. This meant that places dependent were
also underdeveloped, but the meaning of underdeveloped is vague and subse-
quent critiques point out that dependency and underdevelopment theories are
still operating with an implied modernity in the background (Escobar 1995).
Yet, as James Ferguson (2006) points out, when we say all things are modern
or nothing is modern, we lose the ability to highlight the effects of globalized
capitalism on places like Africa, a continent lost in globalization discourse but
at the center of development work. A more generous reading of dependency
theory can move beyond the meaning of underdeveloped and think through
what remains useful in the framework.
Building on these critiques, but not disregarding the usefulness of depen-
dency theory to explain natural resource development in the Navajo Nation,
I return to the historical sociologist Philip Abrams’s (1982) understanding of
“the event” to account for both the structuring forces and the agency of people.
There are real limitations within colonial capitalism that impact Diné people’s
attitudes and actions on the topic of coal (Curley 2019b). In fact, federal Indian
law is premised on the idea of “dependency,” referring to Indigenous people as
“domestic-dependent” nations. But the notion of “dependent” as it is treated
in dependency theory is often applied too broadly and vaguely to account for
complex social and cultural attitudes on the ground. We can read critiques of
coal, water, and energy in scholarship and still not recognize the Diné people
who participate in these industries. It is to capture these complex and at times
contradictory attitudes toward the environment, development, and tribal sov-
ereignty where this book intervenes.
To put structure and agency in productive relation, this book treats politi-
cal mobilizations around coal as events with no predetermined or predestined
outcome. In historical sociology, events serve as objects of analysis in search
of sociological conclusions, perhaps “laws” and not simply a chronology of
happenings or narratives as is sometimes found in history. This book draws
upon historical sociological debates about temporality when interpreting
 18 INTRODUCTION

social actions at a particular place and time. Philip Abrams (1982) argues that
events are structuring—they produce and reproduce social, legal, and political
limitations—yet their outcomes are never certain. Events such as the Navajo
renewal of coal in 2013 reveal both the possibilities and limitations of Diné
actions during this time of revolutionary change across the energy landscape.
These feelings or immediate reactions to the question “Why did the Navajo
Nation and many Diné people support the renewal of these leases in 2013?”
point us in the direction of an “eventful temporality,” where we are attentive
to “the transformation of structures by events” (Sewell 2005, 100). Events such
as the signing of the NGS lease in 2013 account for the reproduction of struc-
tural and structuring forces as they pertain to energy, development, and climate
change in the Navajo Nation.

CARBON SOVEREIGNTY

The term tribal sovereignty is defined and used in different ways. It contains deep
understandings of home, livelihood, and cultural belonging. Tribal sovereignty
is also a practical day-to-day concept used in official documents and discussions
and vocalized in meetings within the upper echelons of tribal authority. In its
governmental application, tribal sovereignty loses much of its emotional reso-
nance and becomes a mix of confusing and sometimes contradictory practices.
These practices reinforce hierarchal spaces of colonization and control between
the federal government, state governments, and tribal nations. Sovereignty is
informed by structural incentives, favoring efforts to modernize and develop
along capitalist lines within tribal lands. In this book, I refer to this political-
governmental practice of sovereignty as “carbon sovereignty,” a sovereignty that
in practice responds to and works within the structural constraints of colonial
law. In the Navajo Nation, acts of modernization and development (part of a
day-to-day governmental sovereignty) favor continued coal mining, large-scale
water projects, and even the ownership of power plants. These “modernizing”
actions significantly affect how tribal peoples see and understand their lands
and resources.
Using carbon sovereignty as a concept, we can examine how energy transi-
tion and climate change affect Indigenous peoples. Through an exploration of
resources, we can learn the central mechanisms of colonialism in the twenty-first
century, perhaps as a final enclosure on Indigenous spaces. Carbon sovereignty
 INTRODUCTION 19

also accounts for capitalistic expansion, primitive accumulation, proletarian-

ization, and economic displacement of Indigenous peoples while lands, waters,
and air security are tussled from the control of Indigenous nations. These twin
processes, colonialism and capitalism, are not always the same thing, but they
impact Indigenous peoples simultaneously.
What is sometimes problematic about the language of tribal sovereignty
is its connection with the power of modern states. Within critical Indigenous
studies, “sovereignty” is under increased scrutiny, seen as a language that is both
“colonial” and an important discourse for tribal self-determination (Barker 2005;
Biolsi 2005). My research builds on understandings of sovereignty grounded in
Indigenous ethnographies of “the state” (Dennison 2012, 2017; Lambert 2007;
Nadasdy 2017) with critical scholarship on development and historical mate-
rialism. I show how competing and contested moral economies produce cat-
egories like work and livelihood, sovereignty, and “sustainable development”
as ideological constructs maintained in the political economy of coal in the
Navajo Nation (Curley 2019b). They are interpreted through ideas and practices
of power, authority, and representation within tribal institutions, communities,
and places of work. Tribal sovereignty shapes how Indigenous actors respond
to the contested political terrain of energy and transition, sustainability and
development, and climate change.
Much of the cited literature on sovereignty articulates the limitations of
political rights for Indigenous nations under federal and state laws. It is often a
legalistic discourse. What “carbon sovereignty” advances here is the metabolic
connection of raw resources and consumption within abstract notions of polit-
ical economy that influence what tribal actors do with their sovereignty and
what is made possible. This builds on Timothy Mitchell’s (2009) provocation
about carbon democracies in the Gulf states. Mitchell argues against resource
curse literature. He says it wasn’t that oil prevented development in these places
but that it actually made state making possible—funding infrastructure, social
services, militaries, and government positions. This is a powerful insight that
should be used to understand both the meaning and the practice of Indigenous
sovereignty in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Among “energy rich tribes,” extractives like coal, uranium, oil, and gas have
flooded tribal coffers. The revenues derived from land leases, water leases, and
royalty rates associated with these industries funded college scholarships, sti-
pends for meetings, roads, water projects, tribal government jobs, and so on.
These are the everyday performances of sovereignty that aren’t discussed in
 20 INTRODUCTION

theoretical and legalistic debates. Sovereignty is not just about rights and self-
determination, about territory and progress; it is also about living, building, and
sustaining work on the land. This was the biggest difference I observed between
“sovereignty” and all its paradoxes debated about in academic scholarship and
the ways in which it was understood and practiced on the ground.
Although coal tells us something about Diné tribal sovereignty, it also tells
us something about the people. The Diné coal workers I spoke with defined
the resources as a source of livelihood. In important ways, their sovereignty
was community and kinship focused. Diné life and survivability were found
not in the maintenance of tribal institutions but in the ability of Diné people
to live from the land. In ironic terms, the destruction of the land in search of
coal allowed for this. The replacement of sustainable livelihoods for wage-labor
jobs was a colonial violence, and Diné workers at the mines and power plants
responded by finding work within the reservation, often near their ancestral
homes. Understanding tribal sovereignty as rooted in real political and eco-
nomic anxieties allows us to appreciate it as an ideal constructed in response to
social and economic change happening to people and not necessarily with their
assistance. While Diné coal workers, officials, and environmental activists main-
tain agency (they still shape the course of their lives), they are unable to change
the larger, more powerful forces that are transitioning the U.S. energy landscape.

CAPITAL INCORPORATION

For centuries, colonial powers claimed Diné lands but didn’t control it. When
New Spain proclaimed Diné Bikéyah as Spanish territory in the sixteenth cen-
tury, Diné lands became part of New Spain—at least in the minds of Span-
ish colonizers. Similarly, Diné lands (nominally) became part of Mexico when
Mexico liberated itself from Spain in 1820. But Mexico was not so defined a
geography at the time. Contestation for power placed the frontier lands, includ-
ing Diné Bikéyah, far into the recesses of political concern for the struggling
Mexican-Spanish-U.S. factions (Alonso et al. 1994).
Diné people resisted colonial control. Neither Spain nor Mexico had any
real claim over Diné lands. Diné lands were incorporated vaguely and abstractly
into colonial maps. There was no Spain or Mexico in these parts. Diné people
were free from the worst aspects of colonial control well into the nineteenth
century. It was only after 1848, when an imperial United States seized half of
 INTRODUCTION 21

Mexico, that Anglophone colonization crept into Diné territory. The U.S. war
with Mexico was initiated by a southern, proslavery Democratic administration
that envisioned the expansion of slavery into newly conquered “territories” west
of Texas. In 1849, a year after revolutionary agitation in Europe and Karl Marx’s
publication of The Communist Manifesto, all future interactions with the conti-
nent’s Indigenous peoples were transferred from the U.S. Department of War
to the Department of the Interior as a move to consolidate Indigenous lands
into an expanding U.S. empire (R. Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).
Race became an important idea in the social and political construction of
new U.S. territories. Indigenous peoples and their lands were incorporated into
an expanding United States and racialized at the bottom of its “civilizing” nar-
rative. In the United States, white supremacy became the racial order (Olson
2004). Indigenous peoples, who generally (but not always) had phenotypes dis-
tinct from their colonizers, were marked by this difference. Race, religion, cul-
tural beliefs, language, and even governing practices were made social markers of
difference during nineteenth-century U.S. state formation. On the front lines of
this imperialism and administering the racialization of Indigenous peoples were
recent immigrants to the United States—peoples who had only recently become
white, such as Irish and Italian immigrants (Ignatiev 2009). Enumeration and
quantification of Indigenous racial identities were administered inconsistently,
haphazardly, and through crude surveys between the 1830s and 1930s. These
surveys assumed that physical differences set Native peoples apart from other
Americans. To this day, these surveys (often called rolls) serve as the basis of
“tribal” membership for federally recognized “tribes.” Today, this form of mem-
bership creates serious problems in determining who is or is not Indigenous.
It was cruel, it divided families, and it was based on biological racism and not
kinship practices existent in Indigenous communities.
Spatially, the United States created “reservations” out of territories it claimed
but neither controlled nor understood. The U.S. military attacked Indigenous
civilians not at war with settlers. The U.S. Army torched homes, destroyed crops,
and killed sheep, making survivability for a people who relied directly on the
land perilous. It was not military defeat but the threat of starvation that forced
thousands of Diné people to surrender to the army between 1862 and 1868.
For decades, historians have prioritized the perspectives of aggressors, quick
to rationalize murder and theft while dismissing the stories of the victims who
remember in graphic detail the brutality of these pogroms (Denetdale 2009).
Most histories of the Diné identify “livestock reduction,” nearly seventy years
 22 INTRODUCTION

later, when Diné subsistence economies were destroyed and the Diné people
were made “dependent” on capitalism for survival (White 1983). However, fol-
lowing Marx’s own approach to “primitive accumulation,” we should caution
against clear and definitive dates for when Diné subsistence economies were
clearly undermined. It was a decades-long process and in many ways is still
ongoing.
The history of American capitalism followed a different trajectory than that
of Europe. The United States emerged not as a site of industrialization from
feudal lands but as a commercial slave power from stolen Indigenous lands.
Indigenous peoples developed maize, tomatoes, cocoa, and other crops that
would become commodities in the making of “the world system.” They also
grew tobacco. This, along with imported crops like sugar cane, became a finan-
cier of colonization as European appetites for American goods exploded (Mintz
1986). Colonizers appropriated the wealth of Indigenous peoples and circulated
it into European economies during a transition from feudalism to capitalism.
Colonization of the Americas helped shift the balance of power away from
feudal lords, whose dominion was limited to Europe (Wallerstein 1974). The
wealth that Europeans violently expropriated from Indigenous peoples was
integrated into the world system of colonization, trade, and consumption that
was dominated by the empires of Spain, England, and France. Over time, Euro-
pean kingdoms divided into nation-states and incorporated colonies as territo-
ries with exclusive markets to their home countries, ensuring the dependency
and underdevelopment of the colonized. By the 1840s when the United States
entered Diné lands, the state was rapidly expanding its borders westward and
threatening to extend slavery into new territories. In the United States, capital-
ism matured with racial and class differences expanding, creating an economy
of “racial capitalism,” a process that consumed black and brown land and labor
for the benefit of a white racial order (Robinson 1983).

TEMPORAL BENDING

The way Diné people deploy time scales in climate debates points to a politics at
work. To tell stories about the future, Diné coal workers, environmental activists,
and tribal officials relate their past in ways that implement different temporal
and spatial scales. The use of time in service of political positions is a form of
temporal bending—a distortion of time to lengthen or shorten perceptions
 INTRODUCTION 23

about the passage of time built from competing ideologies. In a carnival fun-
house, mirrors are bent to distort one’s reflection. The subject can be made to
look longer by bending the mirror outward. The subject can be made to appear
shorter by bending the mirror inward. In the case of the Navajo Nation, coal
workers understand coal in terms of their lifetimes but also in the sense of time
immemorial. The mirror is bent backward, then forward again. Diné environ-
mentalists understand coal at a scale of the Anthropocene—billions of years in
the making (mirror bent out)—but also in terms of the past fifty years as coal
was developed in the reservation (mirror bent in). Diné tribal officials think of
coal in scales of decades or centuries, in fifty-year contracts but also in year-to-
year annual income as a basis of projected tribal revenues. Sometimes the longue
durée is important; sometimes it is the anxiety produced in crisis that matters.
This intersection of time, place, and social structure tells us something about
the Diné people’s incorporation into larger processes of capitalist expansion and
colonization. Both proponents and opponents of coal maintained their own
ideas of what was in the best interest of the Navajo Nation and the Diné people.
Each set of actors was earnest in its professed beliefs, although propagandiz-
ing occurred on all sides. They maintained different interpretations of the past
and visions of the future. Although this is a book focused on Navajo coal, the
ideological formations at work during the 2013 debate were connected to both
U.S. and international politics on climate change. Global connectedness was
imagined in competing ways. “Diné-ness,” as it were, was no longer confined to
the Four Sacred Mountains. A global imaginary was at work. The Diné actors
were responding to a global Indigenous phenomenon, whether it was part of a
U.S. subjectivity or a pan-indigeneity.

OVERVIEW OF THE BOOK

In chapter 1, “Shape-Shifting Colonialism and the Origin of Carbon Sov-

ereignty,” I provide a historical accounting of Diné lands. In this chapter, I
argue that the history of federal Indian policy, the creation of the Navajo Tribal
Council in the 1930s, and the move toward natural resource development in
the 1950s rendered Diné Bikéyah an extractive space for coal development. The
paternal federal government drove these political and social changes. Colonial
policy entered the region with New Deal policies designed to modernize the
“Navaho” people and assimilate them into an “American” (white Anglo-Saxon
 24 INTRODUCTION

Christian) core. U.S. colonial actors bent time forward and erased the past,
replacing it with their own characterizations of the present and future. These
colonial actors paved over Diné stories of survival and overcoming hardship, of
slaying monsters and tricking Tricksters with stories of Mayflowers, Thanksgiv-
ing, and benevolent colonialism. This new narrative was depicted in mural form
on the very walls of the Navajo Tribal Council chambers. The mural surrounds
tribal lawmakers to this day. It portrays civilization and progress as an Amer-
ican invitation to Diné people. This narrative opens the land for extraction. It
ushers in capitalistic relations with Diné land and people, and builds a regional
economy that ultimately benefits Phoenix, Tucson, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.
In chapter 2, “Carbon Sovereignty,” I account for a particular rendering of
tribal sovereignty, one bound to the extraction and exploitation of resources in
Diné lands. The sense of power, real and figurative, in resource development
was not simply a perpetuation of colonial relationships; it also ushered in a new
confidence in decolonization and “self-determination.” The decolonial paradox
results from the continued economic inequalities that remain after a colonized
country earns independence. In the case of the African nations, Kwame Nkru-
mah (1965) referred to this continued relationship as “neo-colonialism,” as part
of a larger project of imperialism. Indigenous commentators have described the
kind of colonialism experienced by tribes as “internal colonies” (Snipp 1986) and
“radioactive colonialism” (Churchill and LaDuke 1986) among other framings
before settling on settler colonialism (Wolfe 2006). In this chapter, the themes
of anxiety and shape-shifting continue. My research finds that the 1960s served
as an important moment of transformation in Diné national aspirations, and
in Diné political and economic development. Research (mine as well as that
of others) shows that the Navajo Nation was rendered into a resource colony
during this time. More recent work highlights how the resource colony was
built on Navajo aspirations for self-determination—what historians refers to as
“Navajo nationalism” (Needham 2014, 213) or “sovereignty for survival” (Allison
2015). In the end, I recharacterize these relationships as “carbon sovereignty” or
a sovereignty built on the expansion of energy resources.
In this chapter, I review the transcripts of the Navajo Tribal Council in the
1960s while delegates deliberated new coal leases. Tribal lawmakers did not
concede to coal development simply because they didn’t anticipate or under-
stand the true costs of coal on the land and the people (although there is some
truth in this narrative). Rather, I suggest that tribal lawmakers brought coal into
the reservation as a pragmatic concession to colonial interests and pressures
 INTRODUCTION 25

during the federal era of “termination,” when tribes were eliminated from fed-
eral recognition or placed under the control of state governments. The State of
Arizona threatened to develop energy infrastructure on tribal lands without
permission of the Navajo Nation. Navajo Nation chairman Peter MacDonald
and Arizona senator Barry Goldwater became notorious rivals over Navajo–
Hopi land partitions, which intersected with coal land leases. I argue that by
taking steps to develop its coal resources and to fight the expulsion of Diné
communities on contested Navajo–Hopi lands, the Navajo tribal government
exercised decolonial nationalism and sovereignty. “Carbon sovereignty” refers
to a practice of sovereignty that is shaped by colonial limitations and entan-
glements. Carbon sovereignty bends time backward and forward, replacing the
foundational narrative of Euro-American colonialists with origin stories based
in Diné oral history.
In chapter 3, “Carbon Treatymaking,” I analyze the coal and climate question
at a time of uncertainty in the industry. In 2013 the entire Navajo coal economy
could have shut down forever. Leases were coming up for renewal while utilities
and mining companies alike showed only lukewarm interest in continuing coal
work in the nation. Coal workers and tribal officials grew anxious. If the tribe’s
two coal mines and two power plants closed, the results would be catastrophic.
And although the mines and plants remained open for a time, the workers’ and
officials’ fears were not unfounded—six years later, one mine and one plant did
close. At the same time, Diné environmental groups sought to bend the sov-
ereignty time scale back further, extending it to billions of years of history and
connecting it to geologic time and the current Anthropocene. In this chapter, I
argue that the Navajo Nation Council’s 2013 renewal of the Navajo Generating
Station lease was a modern example of carbon sovereignty at work—with the
lease renewal, the tribe once again conceded water rights to the colonizing
government. The 2013 lease was a near exact replication of the 1969 one that
forfeited Navajo claims to the Colorado River for fifty years. The 2013 lease
extended this concession for another twenty-five years. “Sovereign” time and
the time scale of the Anthropocene came into direct conflict. Tribal lawmakers
debated the water concession in particular. During the council sessions when
the lease was considered, future Navajo Nation president Russell Begaye said it
was unjust. Other delegates felt that water was drying faster than ever before.
Water would be the resource of greater importance in the coming years due to
climate change. For a moment (whether intentional or not), these claims con-
nected the lawmakers to the Diné environmental groups. During the debate
 26 INTRODUCTION

on renewing the coal lease, tribal lawmakers reinterpreted these tropes into
the framework of tribal sovereignty, grafting the anxiety of a changing climate
into the political project of Navajo national self-determination. In this way,
the Navajo Nation Council worked to preserve Diné control over its resources
while trying to expand rights, sovereignty, and governing prerogatives into new
areas. Yet these efforts failed, and the resolutions eventually passed the council
unaltered. The colonial conditions of 1969 were copied and pasted into the 2013
agreement. The actions of two very different tribal councils nearly fifty years
apart reveal the ways in which carbon sovereignty encourages energy devel-
opment projects in reservation lands and limits what can be done about them.
In chapter 4, “Workers’ Perspectives on Coal,” I examine how Diné coal
workers incorporated mining into their identity and politics. This chapter relies
on ethnographic research and in-depth interviews with coal workers, family
members, and community members that I conducted in Kayenta and Window
Rock between 2013 and 2014. I lived in Kayenta in 2013 when the lease for the
Navajo Generating Station was discussed and renewed in Window Rock. At
that time, the political issue of coal was sensitive and divisive. By the time the
lease was renewed, coal could no longer be seen simply as money on the ledger
books. It was both a political and a social issue. It was also an embedded econ-
omy, a source of livelihood and meaning for Diné coal workers. For those who
supported the renewal, the Diné idea of “t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego,” or “you are respon-
sible for your own well-being,” captured their feelings about coal. It also bent
time forward and backward in ways that served the politics of coal extraction.
The phrase t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego is rooted in a particular sense of sustainability. It
refers to a time when Diné life was derived from living on the land. Importantly,
this reference does not engage colonial questions directly. The colonizer is absent
when framing Diné life during the time of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego. For my coal miner
interviewees, it was not a precolonial time that mattered but a precapitalist
one. This speaks to the larger phenomenon operating in the background—the
anxiety about cultural loss. Within the problem of cultural loss, the most imme-
diate challenge was language loss. Many younger Diné people do not know
how to speak Diné bizaad, or the Navajo language. The loss of Navajo language
increased dramatically for children born after 1980 (T. S. Lee 2007). The workers
I spoke with started labor at the mine in the 1970s, at least a generation older
than the children of the 1980s. Most workers were proficient in Diné bizaad.
They believed their work kept them on the land to maintain cultural practices
and knowledge. The idea of traditional Diné culture was intertwined with the
 INTRODUCTION 27

work of the mine. Their work in the coal mines empowered the workers to stay
at home (instead of leaving their homelands for work), practice Diné culture,
and impart their teachings to their children and families. Coal work was a
response to the anxiety of cultural loss. It bent the temporal significance of coal
backward again into the time of traditional Diné teachings. Coal work was not
simply the beginning of modernization and development of the Navajo Nation
(as it was originally conceptualized in the 1960s). For these workers, coal had
become the basis for cultural survival.
In this chapter, I argue that coal workers used the idea of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego
to form a “moral economy” of coal mining that demanded the perpetuation
of a political system that ensured their class survivability for the foreseeable
future. Through new forms of socialization, such as the coal workers union, this
moral economy took shape and life to become an operating rationale for lease
renewal by 2013. In this chapter, I argue that t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego was a subsistence
ethic rooted in presence on the land. For coal workers, the mine fulfilled this
ethic. However, t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego spoke not only for continued coal mining
but to a self-determination set against colonial constraints. The term is also
used in a political discourse that is deployed for decolonization, independence,
and liberation. At the time of this writing, some Diné groups use this term to
advocate for transition away from coal. This is culture at work, responding to
the conditions of change imposed on a people and preparing them for practices
of survivability.
In chapter 5, “Toward Energy Transition,” I extend the insight of t’áá hwó’ ají
t’éego as a Diné concept to consider the language of “transition” used by envi-
ronmental organizers and Diné people concerned about climate change. Since
the closure of the Black Mesa Mine in 2006, the Navajo Nation has considered
the future of coal as a permanent feature on the Diné economy. While Diné coal
workers worked for the industry’s preservation, Diné environmental organizers,
activists, and those critical of the coal economy openly talk about “transition”
away from coal. This transition discussion is based on an understanding of Diné
relationships with the earth. To exemplify this nonlinear understanding of his-
tory, I highlight a mural produced during this crisis. The Water Is Life mural
(part of the series Water Writes) on a youth theater wall in Phoenix depicts the
uneven history of coal mining and environmental exploitation in the Navajo
Nation. Ironically, the mural was commissioned in Phoenix while the Navajo
Nation decided on the renewal of fifty-year-old coal leases. The mural centers
the Diné spiritual figure Changing Woman (Mother Earth), who gave birth to
 28 INTRODUCTION

the Warrior Twins. In the mural, the Warrior Twins are the antidote to monsters
plaguing the people. Their presence is timeless. Conceptually, the mural is about
balance and not linear stages of time.
Transition implies epochs. There is considerable debate about what form
transition should take, from neoliberal developmentalist approaches to anticap-
italist ones. Each ideological understanding maintains different relationships
with science and technology. Since 2006, the discursive terrain of “transition”
has changed as the result of Indigenous activism and new forms of decolonial
thinking. This chapter focuses on the clean energy campaign of Diné environ-
mental actors in 2013. In their work—centered on land, sustainability, and an
alternative vision of survivance of the people—these critics of coal redefine t’áá
hwó’ ají t’éego as an idea grounded in Diné Fundamental Law. Their definition
centers Diné lifeways (instead of extractive industries) as the pathways toward
sustainable development.
Finally, in “Conclusion: All That Is Solid Melts into Air,” I consider the
legacy of coal for the Navajo Nation. Its fifty-year promise comes to an end.
What was gained? What was lost? In this chapter, I argue that coal created the
modern Navajo Nation in response to development pressures from the State of
Arizona and regional utilities. In the end, these colonial partners abandoned the
Diné people. Here, the analysis will do the temporal bending, bridging coal’s
fifty-year story in the Navajo Nation with a five-hundred-year story of colonial
occupation. The Diné economy was broken not by coal but by free-market cap-
italism. The political economy of Navajo coal was that of a “resource frontier”
(Tsing 2005, 28), places of renewed transnational investment (and ecological
destruction) because of “discovered” or renewed interest in the known raw com-
modities important to shifting global capitalism that is contained within. As
Anna Tsing writes, “Frontiers aren’t just discorvered at the edge, they are proj-
ects in making geographic and temporal experience” (2005, 28–29). The chapter
subtitle comes from Marx, whose phrase all that was solid has melted into air
captures the current mood of social change.
The Navajo Nation was made underdeveloped by its participation in colonial
capitalism. By focusing on the Navajo coal economy, this book demonstrates the
mechanism of capitalism through colonialism over the fifty-year period of 1969
to 2019. Colonialism was not a juggernaut. It was not Christopher Columbus,
Kit Carson, Barry Goldwater, or Jon Kyl. Colonialism is a shape-shifter. It was
an evil spirit that first killed and exiled Diné people from their lands, Hwéeldi,
then moved Diné families once again to open up new lands for mining and
 INTRODUCTION 29

ranching and give revenues to the Hopi Tribe (Navajo–Hopi land dispute).
Colonialism then became (through water settlements and infrastructures tied to
coal leases) the structural abandonment of Diné people. In sum, these chapters
speak to the construction of carbon sovereignty, in both the Navajo Nation’s
embrace and its rejection of a coal economy—some doubling down on coal
while others advocated for energy transition. These political struggles ultimately
shaped how we should understand coal, capitalism, and climate change as issues
of nuance and complexity where history and the contemporary intermingle,
with lasting consequences, in everyday life.
FIGURE 2 . Mother Earth and Father Sky depicting the way the world is understood in
Diné traditional stories. Illustration from the Navajo Nation Code, Title 1, “The Foun-
dational Laws of the Diné,” 2002.
 CHAPTER 1
SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY

M
OVEMENT WAS FUNDAMENTAL to Diné history. It defines the people. Figure 2
represents the boundaries of the Diné people as is understood in Diné
cosmology. According to Diné oral history, the Diné people emerged into
the modern, “glittering” world after traveling through four previous worlds. The
Diné word for human, bíla’ ashdla’ii, refers to “the five-fingered earth-surface-
people” who walk horizontally across the earth. In the production of Diné space,
there was both horizontal and vertical movement. The vertical movement hap-
pened when Diné people moved from one epoch to the next. When moving
between worlds, Diné ancestors climbed to the surface of the earth from worlds
below.
For Diné people, the images shown here represent two competing conceptu-
alizations of space. They are found or defined within the Navajo Nation Code,
the governing laws of the tribe. Today, both images are official representations
of Diné space. Yet the story of each image implies a different ideology of gov-
ernance at work, with contrasting senses of time, place, and purpose. Figure 3
is an illustration in the code found within the section called “The Foundational
Laws of the Diné,” a 2002 addition to the Navajo Nation Code. This section of
the code attempts to decolonize the tribe’s government, tacitly acknowledging
that many of the code’s original laws were colonial in origin (more on this later).
 32 CHAPTER 1

FIGURE 3 . Navajo Nation chapter house boundaries. Map by Navajo Nation Land
Department.

In this chapter, I account for the construction of the Diné nation as an

extractive space in anticipation of carbon sovereignty. This is a new phase in
the history of the people, one in which things that came from within the earth
defined life on it. This world was not “natural” in any familiar sense of the word.
It was built. It was a world constructed to fit within colonial law and notions
of progress and development. Colonial pressures defined internal and external
practices, hardening borders between “reservation” and settlement. It is import-
ant to emphasize that this construction was largely accomplished through vio-
lence. After the U.S. Army hunted and killed Diné men, women, and children in
the 1860s, the military interned survivors at a place called Hwéeldi for five years.
Many of us refer to Hwéeldi as a place shaped by a series of events in the near
distant past. But the original violence of Hwéeldi never ended. In this way, it is
an event that structures Diné political possibility. This is a sociological use of the
term Hwéeldi, to think about it as the basis of colonial “legitimacy” and control.
We will proceed to understand the spatial construction of Hwéeldi first by
defining the traditional boundaries of Diné Bikéyah through the mountains
that surround the Navajo Nation while accounting for the violence used to
enforce these boundaries.
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 33

Border towns engender relationships between captured nations and parasitic

communities. Border towns are white settlements built on the edges of reserva-
tions that both punish and prey upon Indigenous people, lands, and resources.
These settlements, which have now become urban centers, act as leeches on
Diné life. They are the nodes of a predatory network of capital accumulation
that consumes the people and wealth of Diné Bikéyah. Once border towns
were established, the internal drive to develop and expand extractive industries
emerged. The BIA paternalistically partnered with outside industries on the
tribe’s behalf to bring gendered versions of wage work onto the reservation. The
construction of extractive spaces in the Navajo Nation started as violent border
making and displacement between reservation and settlement spaces but later
moved toward the incorporation of these spaces into regional economies. For
colonial officials, this move was premised on the anticommunist ideology of
“development” as coined and implemented after 1947, when modernity began.

FIRST FOUR WORLDS

In the first four worlds of the Diné origin story, Diné people encountered many
difficult challenges and dangers such as malicious insects and supernatural mon-
sters. Diné people moved vertically through a small opening in each of these
worlds on a ladder, and they had to keep moving upward to escape the dangers
from the world below. In these stores, Diné people understand place as both
horizontal and vertical. Often traditional Diné prayers ends with the refrain
“May it be beautiful and peaceful above me, below me, in front of me, behind
me, all around me. May I walk in beauty and peace this way.” It is this prayer
that sets both the space and ideological understanding of Diné place making,
as containing both vertical and horizontal movement, projecting hózhó into
the future and the past.
Diné people emerged into the current world, the Glittering World, more
recently. This became the fifth world. In this world, the Holy People instructed
the Diné on how to live within the geophysical boundaries known as Diné
Bikéyah, boundaries defined by the Four Sacred Mountains (figure 3) on the
edges of the sphere. The fifth mountain, in the center, represents Navajo Moun-
tain and Black Mesa, two of the remotest regions of the Navajo Nation that are
also sites of spiritual and historical significance. Black Mesa is also the center
of the Navajo coal economy.
 34 CHAPTER 1

The western boundary of Diné Bikéyah is the Sacred Mountain

Dook’o’ooslííd.1 The mountain is represented by abalone shell, which comes
from the California coast. Abalone is an important material for Diné jewel-
ers and is part of Diné origin stories. The presence of abalone in Diné cos-
mology demonstrates long-standing networks of international trade prior to
Euro-American colonization. The hundreds of nations living on the continent
traded with each other from one end to the next. Another globalization is not
only possible but already existed between Indigenous nations in the Ameri-
cas before European contact. As Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (2014) writes, corn
moved from central Mexico all the way to the subarctic. However, for Euro-
American colonialists today, the mountains of Dook’o’ooslííd are called the
“San Francisco Peaks.” At the base of this mountain is Flagstaff, Arizona. It
was founded as a railroad depot in the 1880s and immediately became the cen-
ter of a logging industry in northern Arizona. Euro-American settlers arrived
to the region and looked for resources to exploit. The rich, lush northern Ari-
zona pine became feed for logging mills.
The southern boundary of Diné Bikéyah according to Diné philosophy
and teachings is the mountain Tsoodził. Tsoodził is a larger mountain than
Dook’o’ooslííd. It was once a huge volcano that erupted millions of years ago.
The charred, black rocks at the base of the mountain are remnants of this explo-
sion. These rocks reach as far as Albuquerque, New Mexico—nearly seventy
miles to the east. For Diné people, the mountain is represented by turquoise,
another important stone. It is said that the Holy People cannot see Diné people
unless they wear turquoise. Today, silver and turquoise define the aesthetic of
southwestern jewelry. At the base of Tsoodził is Grants, New Mexico. Grants
was also a rail depot, named after land speculators, the first white Americans
to claim the area. The permeance of rather recent names like “Grants” and
“Flagstaff ” and the erasure of older, Indigenous place-names is part of the con-
temporary colonial experience. Grants was also once the center of the uranium
boom in the 1950s and 1960s (Voyles 2015).
Forming the eastern boundary for Diné people is the mountain Sisnaajíní.
Sisnaajíní is represented by white shell. The mountain is in southern Colo-
rado and is today closer to two Ute reservations than the eastern edges of the
Navajo Reservation. The northern boundary of Diné Bikéyah is Dibé Nitsaa.
The black jet stone represents Dibé Nitsaa to Diné people. Dibé Nitsaa, in what
is today southwest Colorado, is located between the border towns of Cortez
and Durango.
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 35

Sisnaajíní and Dibé Nitsaa represent the traditional boundaries of the Diné
people, yet the Navajo Nation has no reservation lands in Colorado. Colorado
denied Diné people reservation lands in the state, even though two of the Diné
people’s sacred mountains are in Colorado and form the northern and east-
ern boundaries for the nation. The mountain towns of Durango, Cortez, and
Alamosa are all in the region. Not only do these communities benefit from
the violent theft of Indigenous lands, but much of this region is dedicated to
industrial-scale agriculture and ranching. White farmers and ranchers use water
from the Colorado River and its tributaries to flood their fields, waters denied
to the Navajo Nation.

CONSTRUCTING A CAPITAL CITY: MODERNIZATION, DEVELOPMENT, AND COLONIAL TIME

Shape-shifting colonialism is a contingent way to think about the settler-

colonial process, to understand and amplify the trickery and obfuscation used
in signing leases, settling water claims, or agreeing to resource contracts—
modern forms of resource dispossession. It refers to the legal-judicial chal-
lenges to tribal sovereignty that try to reduce, contain, and weaken the inher-
ent rights of Indigenous nations. The mural shown in figure 4 surrounds the
interior of the Navajo Nation Council chambers and epitomizes the con-
struction of a modernist and development-oriented ideology in the Navajo
Nation. Painted by famed Diné artist Gerald Nailor Sr. over a period of fifteen
months in 1942 and 1943, The History and Progress of the Navajo People was part
of the federal government’s New Deal initiative (McLerran 2012). The Navajo
Nation council chambers in Window Rock was built to reflect white notions
of modernity. The entire tribal headquarters was also constructed during this
time and became the central site of governance for the largest Indigenous
nation in the United States.
It was the only attempt by the Bureau of Indian Affairs to build a capital city
within an “Indian” reservation (Leibowitz 2008). Relics of the New Deal, such
as the mural, are found throughout Window Rock. They symbolize an ideol-
ogy under formation. This ideology was characterized by federal policies: the
Indian Reorganization Act of 1934, the Indian Mineral Leasing Act of 1938, the
Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act of 1975, the Indian
Mineral Development Act of 1982, and the Indian Energy Development and
Self-Determination Act of 2015. This ideology is the shape-shifting colonizing
 36 CHAPTER 1

FIGURE 4 . Gerald Nailor Sr., The History and Progress of the Navajo People, mural in Navajo
Nation Council chambers, Window Rock, Arizona, 1943.

ethos. It is shape-shifting colonialism. Colonialism no longer took the form of

blue-coated soldiers but of legal documents and courtroom motions.
The mural in the council chambers highlights central features of the modern-
ist narrative operating in the Navajo Reservation at the time. The mural depicts
time working in a linear direction. It begins with Diné people precontact near
the entrance of the chambers. Then it depicts phases of colonization, from the
Spanish to Mexican to American periods. The signing of the Treaty of 1868 is
featured prominently. In the chronology of the mural, Diné people are featured
going to school, building infrastructure for livestock, and working monoculture
fields of corn. The mural established notions of the past and projections about
the future. The children in the center of the mural wear modern clothes and
represent the end point of a colonial-civilizing telos. Yet they are already past,
looking like schoolchildren of the 1930s and not children today.
Colonialism started at the intimate level, that is, the nuclear family. Moder-
nity was built on the attempted destruction of Indigenous social, cultural, and
political institutions. Children were removed from homes, forced to forget the
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 37

Diné language and beliefs. Instead, in boarding schools Diné children were
compelled to learn and recite “the pledge of allegiance” in English. The mural
depicts a mythology of progress. At the end point of the civilizing process is
education—the liberal, democratic ideal in a modernist narrative that becomes
the justification for violently suppressing traditional institutions.
The anxiety created by state violence is supposedly resolved through assimila-
tion and forced education by the end of the mural. This is a civilizing narrative, one
that says white settlers brought Diné people gifts of modernization. It says white
settlers brought the railroad, modern animal husbandry, monoculture, agriculture,
gendered division of labor, and education. Coal mining in the Navajo Nation
represents a part of this larger modernizing project in the Navajo Nation. Coal
mining demonstrates the form and shape of this manifestation of colonialism.

BORDER TOWNS AND CAPITAL INCORPORATION

The racial regime of the United States arrived in Diné country via the expansion
of railroads (Karuka 2019). The railroads fundamentally changed Diné life for-
ever. Although the Spanish and Mexicans were genocidal, they never managed
to fully control Diné people or lands (Curley 2014). It was U.S. colonization that
became the origin of modernization in the Navajo Nation. U.S. colonialism was
the beginning of a new timeline, a particular epoch in Diné history. It was the
beginning of another world. The Hwéeldi moment initiates the modernization
and development project in the Navajo Nation. It was the starting point for the
timeline represented in the mural shown in part in figure 4.
Hwéeldi is the Diné word for the place of forced removal of Diné people
from homelands to Fort Sumner. Temporally, it refers to violence from roughly
1864 to 1868. Our ancestors were allowed to return to Diné homelands follow-
ing the Treaty of 1868. During those four years preceding the treaty, groups of
mercenaries under the direction of U.S. general Kit Carson terrorized Diné
people. These warlike bands of white colonists torched homes and fields, and
killed Diné people who resisted. U.S. historians casually referred to this violence
as “the Navajo roundup,” as if Diné people were cattle on a range (Denetdale
2009; Kelly 1970). It is important to recognize that dehumanization of a people
is a necessary element for a colonizer to carry out ethnic cleansing and genocide.
American capitalism followed a different trajectory from that of Europe.
Capitalism in the United States did not emerge out of the social and political
 38 CHAPTER 1

institutions of feudalism. It was built on chattel slavery and Indigenous land dis-
possession, requiring racialization of stolen Africans and the continent’s Indig-
enous nations. Cedric Robinson calls this version of capitalism “racial capital-
ism”—a practice and process of exploitation (fundamental to Marx’s argument)
that consume brown and Black bodies and places for the benefit of a white
majority. His phrasing helps us understand how racism was necessary for colo-
nial exploitation and land theft (Robinson 1983). Much like how the “bloody
legislation” of England’s Parliament targeted rural peasants while enclosing “the
commons,” in the United States white supremacy targeted peoples seen as non-
white and forced them into the lowest rungs of wage labor.
When the United States entered the Indigenous Southwest and replaced
Mexico’s colonialism, the U.S. Army branded Diné and Apache peoples as
unconquered and ungoverned peoples, and therefore targets for colonial vio-
lence and conquest. Between 1848 and 1864, the troops garrisoned in the area
made casual forays into Diné lands. Following the brief conflict between Con-
federate and Union soldiers in New Mexico (1862–63), however, Union victors
turned their attention toward Diné and Apache peoples. The war machine was
in motion. As some historians are writing today, the so-called Indian Wars and
the Civil War were entwined (Kelman 2013; Nelson 2020). In New Mexico
territory, the expulsion of the Confederates and the violence directed toward
Indigenous groups were part of the same constellation of actions. Between 1864
and 1868, the U.S. Army sacked Diné peoples’ homes, burned fields of corn and
squash, killed sheep, and murdered men and women. Each violent campaign
into Diné land brought more prisoners. The U.S. Army forced more than eight
thousand Diné men, women, and children to walk more than three hundred
miles, from their homes to a small dusty compound in eastern New Mexico
called Bosque Redondo.
At Bosque Redondo, the military tried to force Diné people into sedentary
agriculture. The military provided seeds, bags of flour, and other rations and
expected Diné people to grow their own food in alkaline soil and with second-
rate rations. Private contractors overcharged the military for shoddy provisions
(Iverson 2002). In 1868 U.S. general William Sherman visited Bosque Redondo
and said the camp was a waste of money—never mind genocide. He wanted it
closed. Sherman recommended to President Ulysses S. Grant that Diné people
should be moved to “Indian Territory,” now Oklahoma. Diné leaders pleaded to
return to their original homelands in Diné Bikéyah. Sherman agreed, and today
he is a celebrated figure in Diné history. One can find a depiction of Sherman
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 39

negotiating with Diné headmen in the mural Gerald Nailor Sr. painted in the
council chambers. It is the beginning of the modernization timeline.
In order to return home, however, Diné leaders were forced to sign a treaty
with the United States. The politics of this leadership were not well under-
stood. Diné people did not choose leaders like “chiefs”—a common political
stereotype given to Indigenous peoples. Naat’áaniis, or “leaders” (lit. “the one
who orates/makes a speech”), were people selected to advise the direction of the
people during a particular crisis (Wilkins 2013). These were organic speakers
with no real power to force their will on the people and without a clear, marked
constituency—very different from today’s political systems. The Diné headmen
who signed the Treaty of 1868 were selected by the U.S. Army. As far as we
know, Diné people did not select these men to sign final peace terms between
the people and the United States. All the signers of the Treaty of 1868 were
men, despite the long tradition of woman and gender nonconforming leaders
in Diné history (Denetdale 2007; Thomas 1997). The U.S. Army, conducting the
negotiation, only recognized male leadership. The patriarchal tone of the treaty,
including the immediate disenfranchisement of Diné women, is evidence that
the document was a peace accord and attempted social engineering. Although
the social engineering would take decades to accomplish, it articulated a blue-
print for what was to come. As the Ojibwe scholar Scott Richard Lyons writes,
“treaties compelled Indians to change how they lived” (2010, 2). Treaties between
“tribes” and the federal government were always unequal and served colonial
interests (Prucha 1994).
The original 1868 reservation boundaries differed considerably from the
imagined homelands of Diné cosmology. The space the U.S. Army made into
a reservation was absolute, with hard borders. This reservation did not match
Diné understandings of space or place. It did not include any of the Diné
sacred landmarks. On a map, the reservation was an oddly placed rectangle on
the edges of what was then the Arizona and New Mexico territories. The lands
were also tied to a centralized political authority, the headman system that the
U.S. government worked hard to legitimize. These changes were outlined in the
treaty’s articles. This was the first form of territorialization of Diné lands that
was made consistent with white notions of territory. As Stuart Elden (2013)
writes, “territory” is a concept linked not simply to land and terrain but to tech-
niques of governance, including notions of jurisdiction. The Treaty of 1868 was
both a state formation and a boundary making that replaced aboriginal juris-
diction over the land. Shiri Pasternak (2017) describes a similar process for the
 40 CHAPTER 1

First Nations communities in Ontario, Canada. In Pasternak’s study, the idea of

“jurisdiction” is central to political contestation between the two nations. It is a
question of land and especially the jurisdictions over these lands. Territory was
and is a Western imposition on Indigenous spatial practices. After Diné leaders
signed the treaty in 1868, Congress quickly ratified it and created the “Navaho
Indian Reservation.” Diné scholar Melanie K. Yazzie (2018) argues that colo-
nialism and notions of progress were built on “biopolitical death drives” toward
development, one defined by a colonial shape-shifter and Wiindigo economy
(LaDuke and Cowen 2020).
Techniques of exclusion that are today essential to modern statecraft had
little to no documentation in Indigenous oral histories. The right of the state
to exclude others as a function of territorialization is a historically recent expe-
rience for Indigenous peoples. Diné people, even when retaining aboriginal
jurisdiction, enjoyed overlapping control of space. This is not to suggest all
nations lived harmoniously with each other. Diné people had neighbors who
might attack, steal, or kill. There are locations in the reservation such as the
community of “Steamboat,” with the place-name “hoyéé,” meaning “place of
fear.” In a casual conversation I had with a chapter manager in 2008, that person
gave me this translation and said it referred to water springs that Ute warriors
would hide near and ambush Diné. This was deep in the heart of what is now
the Navajo Nation and is indicative of overlapping movements of people and
nations.
Ute, Diné, Pueblo, Piute, Apache, Hopi, and Zuni all had interlocking and
overlapping land practices in Diné Bikéyah (see map 2). Modern tribal gover-
nance blends old and new understandings of space and governance into new
institutions. In some instances, exclusionary politics are exercised, but in practice
tribal governments maintain little right to exclude outsiders. There are no hard
boundaries at reservation lines, and even non-Indigenous criminal offenders are
largely excepted from tribal jurisdiction. Today, Piute people live in the Navajo
Nation on the western end of the reservation and use Diné tribal services. Diné
and Hopi people share roads. Ute and Diné people maintain overlapping sacred
sites. What is more, there are intermarriages between tribal nations that blend
Indigenous national identities and combine and expand one’s kinship spaces.
Someone might be half Diné and half Lakota and have land relationships with
both places in different ways. These intermarriages defy colonial and anthropo-
logical categories of “tribe” and “race” and hint to very different understandings
of space.
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 41

It was after the Treaty of 1868 that Euro-American concepts of race became
an important factor in reservation life. The Treaty of 1868 was a spatial and
political imposition on the Diné people. Yet federal Indian policy transformed
the language of the treaty into a biopolitical meaning. Treaty “rights” delineated
political systems based on geography. The treaty mentioned nothing about tribal
membership, just places of tribal authority. In other words, the treaty specified
where Navajo could happen but not who was Navajo. There was an implied
geopolitical definition of Diné political authority. The members of the tribe who
lived within the reservation were subject to the terms of the treaty. Diné people
living outside the reservation were bound by U.S. law. A membership criterion
was absent from the treaty document. During the reservation period, Diné peo-
ple pushed against these boundaries. They returned to their former homesites—
wrecked by the U.S. Army—that were no longer recognized as Diné territory.
Yet the state governments did not consider Indigenous peoples as U.S. citizens.
Citizenship was reserved for white people. Indigenous peoples were defined
externally as noncitizens by territorial governments before internal definitions
of membership were practiced and institutionalized by tribal governments.
Indigenous peoples and their lands, incorporated into an expanding United
States, became subject to brutal policies that placed tribes at the bottom of
a racial hierarchy. The entwining of biological notions of heritage, race, and
tribal identity became a cornerstone of federal Indian policy. The Navajo Nation
lawyer Paul Spruhan (2006) argues that “blood,” “as a metaphor” for Indig-
enousness, draws on traditions of inheritance long practiced within English
common law. It was not until the passage of the Indian Reorganization Act of
1934 that blood quantum as a means of tribal membership was concretized for
many Indigenous nations (Spruhan 2006). At the same time, the United States
long used biological notions of race as a form of citizen making. As America
was an empire built on Indigenous land dispossession and slavery (Goldstein
2014), race became a powerful operating concept when employed for wealth
accumulation and westward expansion. As the historian Nancy Shoemaker
(2006, 129) documents, it was during the eighteenth century that race became a
governing logic based on perceptions of physical difference within the English
colonies. Indigenous peoples were marked by their perceived difference in phys-
ical appearance, cultural beliefs, and language (Perdue 2005). Racialization was
important for the expansion of slavery. Even among white people, notions of
“good breeding,” “stock,” and other livestock metaphors were common to distin-
guish between classes. Social Darwinism, racism, classism, and patriarchy were
 42 CHAPTER 1

the central ingredients for white supremacy ideology that served as a basis for
U.S. state formation from the eighteenth to the twentieth century (Isenberg
2017). However, the front lines of racialization were not the intellectual archi-
tects of it but often the people who had only recently become white, such as the
Irish and the Italians (Ignatiev 2009). Alongside the Chinese, new white people
worked the railroads crossing the continent.
In an effort to fulfill treaty agreements, the federal government hired “Indian
agents” to staff regional bureaus around reservations. On July 4, 1884, Congress
passed appropriations for tribes that required Indian agents to record the num-
ber of adult males over eighteen, girls over fourteen years of age, the number of
schoolchildren between six and sixteen, and the number of schoolhouses on res-
ervations. Although the intent was to enforce schooling and assimilation, these
Indian agent reports were foundational for the creation of tribal memberships
based on “degrees of Indian blood.” Afterward, the U.S. government created
instruments for taking censuses across reservation communities, to document
who was or was not “Indian,” and assign them a blood quantum. The Dawes
Commission, established in 1898 to divide Indian land among tribal members
and sell what was deemed “surplus” to non-Indians, is perhaps the first U.S.
entity to systematically racialize Indigenous peoples (Debo 1973).
The increased use of census rolls and notions of “blood” and inheritance to
define Indigenousness transformed the U.S. relationship with the continent’s
Indigenous peoples. Expulsion and displacement (spatial forms of repression)
formed the backbone of U.S. imperial expansion and ethnic cleansing cam-
paigns during the nineteenth century. The federal government established the
reservation system under the War Department in 1847 to move Indigenous
nations such as the Cherokee away from white settlement. The goal was to
maintain distance between the settler population and the settled. Until 1871,
the United States signed treaty agreements with Indigenous nations that carved
out competing jurisdictional domains. It was implied that the governing laws of
the Indigenous nations would apply within reservation lands. The laws of the
territories, states, and the United States would operate outside the reservation
boundaries. As mentioned previously, this was a territorialization of Indigenous
spaces.
In 1867, while some in the Grant administration openly discussed ethnic
cleansing and genocide of Indigenous peoples, the administration ultimately
pursued a “civilization” and Christianization approach among remaining tribes.
Congress created the Indian Peace Commission to enter into treaty agreements
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 43

with many western tribes directly in the pathway of railroad expansion (Oman
2002). Grant appointed General Sherman, who signed the Treaty of 1868 with
the Navajo people at Bosque Redondo. The Indian Peace Commission cre-
ated boilerplate treaties that it used in negotiation with the Kiowa, Comanche,
Kiowa-Apache, Northern and Southern Cheyenne and Arapaho, Crow, Diné,
Eastern Shoshone and Bannock, and the Brulé, Oglala, Miniconjou, Yanktonai,
Hunkpapa, Blackfeet, Cuthead, Two Kettle, Sans Arc, and Santee bands of
Lakota Sioux (Oman 2002, 35). Many of these treaties included a “Bad Man”
provision that ultimately resulted in competing spatial jurisdictions over crim-
inal offenses. The “Bad Man” clause is indicative of spatial understandings of
Dinéness at the time. It required Diné leadership to turn over to U.S. or state
officials any “bad man” who had committed an offense outside the reserva-
tion. The same was true in the other direction. If the Diné found evidence of
a wrongdoing against them, they could present evidence to law enforcement
and extradite the offending party to the reservation for judicial process. Soon,
as the result of powerful federal policies, this spatial understanding would be
transformed into a biopolitical one, in which jurisdiction was tied to notions
of race, not territory.
The 1884 requirement to start counting reservation populations, the 1885
Major Crimes Act, the 1887 Dawes Allotment Act and subsequent Dawes
Commission, and the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act all transformed “Indi-
anness” into an inherited, biopolitical identity. The Nazis would use similar
techniques in their own campaigns of ethnic cleansing and genocide with the
passage of race laws in the 1930s (Neumann 2009). Raul Hilberg’s study on the
Holocaust demonstrates the bureaucratic muckiness and sometimes arbitrari-
ness of Nazi antisemitic laws and policies. Being Jewish under Nazi occupation
was eventually linked to enrollment records (such as seized membership lists
from a synagogue) and one’s relation, both near and distant, to someone on that
list (Hilberg 2003). Nazi racial law used broad strokes to classify Jewish people
and sometimes came dangerously close to implicating core Nazi leadership as
lacking sufficient Aryan heritage.
With U.S. colonization, the Southwest changed. Following the conclusion of
the Mexican-American War in 1848, settlers from the United States moved into
the region and transformed its landscape, governance, and economic practices
to conform with Anglo-American norms, including land tenure laws, notions
of water rights, and industrial exploitation of natural resources. To this day, the
original streets of Albuquerque, where many white settlers moved, bear the
 44 CHAPTER 1

names “Gold,” “Lead,” “Coal,” and “Silver,” after the resources they hoped to
find in the region. Most Diné people lived in what was called “New Mexico
Territory,” which included the current states of New Mexico and Arizona. In
the mid-nineteenth century, rail was a lucrative and corrupt industry. It was not
long after the conclusion of the Mexican-American War that railroad compa-
nies started laying tracks from St. Louis to California. Today, the Burlington
Northern Santa Fe (BNSF) Railway, part of the largest network of railroads in
the country, runs along the southern boundary of the Navajo Nation. The U.S.
Congress originally chartered the railway in 1859, nine years before Sherman
outlined it in the 1868 treaty with its first clause dealing with the rights of rail-
roads (Grant 2022; Montoya, forthcoming).
The Treaty of 1868 introduced the settler-colonial power difference. The United
States practiced (and continues to practice) absolutism over Indigenous spaces.
These early reservation years (1868–1922) were profoundly transformative. They
established the social conditions from which reservation spatial practices would
later emerge (Curley 2014). The centralization of land and leadership, against
the backdrop of violence and removal, ushered in unshakeable senses of anxiety.
The Office of Indian Affairs opened agency bureaus around the Navajo Reserva-
tion. Eastern missionaries were encouraged to Christianize Diné people, starting
with children in boarding schools (King 2016; Woolford 2015). The trauma of
the reservation was the U.S. alternative to genocide. White settlers could only
tolerate Indigenous peoples as a benighted Native in need of “saving.” Indepen-
dent nations with long-standing political and cultural traditions threatened white
hegemony over the continent. Especially in the early reservation years, the federal
government surveilled and interfered with social and political life in the reserva-
tion. This sixty-year period from 1868 to 1938 was fraught with increasing poverty,
racial harassment, and the displacement and murder of Indigenous peoples at the
hands of white cowboys (Kelley and Francis 2019).
After Bosque Redondo, Diné people returned to their homelands, where
they rebuilt animal herds and planted fields (Denetdale 2009). As Diné sheep
and horse herds expanded, so too did the reservation boundaries. Over the next
sixty years, subsequent U.S. presidents added more and more lands to the orig-
inal reservation boundaries through the legal mechanism of “executive order.”
That expansion was arrested, however, in 1934 when Congress failed to pass
legislation that would have consolidated “checkerboard lands” on the eastern
half of the Navajo Reservation into contiguous reservation land. In the 1930s,
John Collier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Commissioner of Indian Affairs,
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 45

pushed hard to consolidate Diné reservation lands on the eastern end of the
reservation. Had the effort succeeded, the Navajo Nation would have had one
consolidated land base. But New Mexico politicians blocked this. The failure
of this effort was due to New Mexico’s strong opposition to Diné people in
the state. New Mexico’s white political elite did not want Diné people to gain
territorial claims within the state. The state lobbied against land consolidation
in Congress and won. To this day, the eastern half of the reservation remains
fragmented, a shatter zone of colonial policies. This area is still referred to as
the “checkerboard” because of the patchwork pattern of private and Indian trust
lands as it appears on a map (Grant 2022).
In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) institutionalized blood quan-
tum as a basis for tribal membership for many Indigenous nations. The act
accomplished this by requiring tribes to adopt “constitutions” in which mem-
bership was defined by degree of lineal descent from an Indian on a census
roll (Ellinghaus 2017; TallBear 2013). The Navajo Tribe rejected the IRA con-
stitution in 1934 and did not ratify a constitution. Membership for the tribe
wasn’t formalized until 1953 when the Gallup Indian Agent and the tribe’s white
attorney persuaded tribal lawmakers to pass a council resolution recognizing
one-quarter lineal decent from a 1940 base census roll as the only criterion for
tribal membership (Spruhan 2007).
When the Navajo Nation Council debated tribal membership in 1953, many
council delegates were confused about what membership was. Some delegates
believed that membership was a spatial definition, not a racial one. They believed
tribal membership was contingent on living within the reservation as was
spelled out in the Treaty of 1868. This spatial understanding of membership was
consistent with notions of citizenship in the modern, “territorial” United States.
In a letter to the Commissioner of Indian Affairs, however, the regional Indian
agent recommended against spatial definitions for membership (Spruhan 2007).
The commissioner observed that many Diné lived outside the reservation
for employment reasons. It might not be the best idea for the Navajo Nation to
disenroll these members because they had to find work outside the reservation.
Council Delegate Manuelito Begaye asked the council to consider a kinship
basis for membership (Spruhan 2007, 7). Familial relationships are still the basis
of Diné identity throughout Diné Bikéyah and even in the Navajo Diaspora. In
public as well as private settings, many Diné people still introduce themselves
with the clans to which they belong, thereby invoking an identity that super-
sedes notions of “blood quantum” in Diné political and cultural life.
 46 CHAPTER 1

The consequence of this racialization is still felt. Tribal membership remains

tied to notions of blood, race, and heritage. All tribal people today must prove
direct lineage to people who appeared on a government survey, such as the
Dawes Rolls that were used from the eighteenth century until 1934. Criteria
such as one-half or one-quarter lineal descent were required to be considered
Indigenous in the United States. These policies were inherently divisive and still
cause problems today.
Most histories of the Navajo point to the federal policy of livestock reduc-
tion, nearly seventy years after Bosque Redondo, as the point when Navajo sub-
sistence economies were destroyed and Navajo people were made “dependent”
on capitalism for survival. In Marx’s understanding of primitive accumulation,
the process of socioeconomic transformation is not so neat and clean that it can
be pegged to one specific range of dates or set of policies like livestock reduc-
tion. Rather, it is a culmination of policies, enforced by colonial laws, that over
time works to make subsistence life impossible and forces the region’s Indig-
enous peoples into capitalist relations and participation—at which point the
maintenance of Indigenous life becomes difficult. In the next section, I discuss
the origin of carbon sovereignty, the beginning of a fossil fuel regime in the
Navajo Reservation that moved efforts toward modernization and development
in a specific direction. The federal government in concert with tribal officials
established the legal and political infrastructure needed to extract subterranean
wealth and put it into capitalist circulation.

OIL AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY

For the first half of the twentieth century, the United States was at the center
of the world’s most lucrative resource. Much of the oil boom happened in the
western states, particularly Texas and Oklahoma, what had only recently been
“Indian Territory.” The Osage in Oklahoma were the first tribe to fall victim to
the cruelty of oil entrepreneurs (Fixico 2012). The federal government built the
refugee Osage Nation on an identity based on census rolls, land allotments, and
mineral rights. This was a biological, political, and material sense of being. Oil
found within Osage land was bound to the bodies of Osage people (Dennison
2012). What happened next was a vicious cycle of murder and subterfuge and
increased policing throughout Indigenous lands as white settlers sought to steal
Osage land and resources (Strickland 1995).
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 47

Popular books like Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann (2017) have
sensationalized the murders and highlighted that the killings served as an
important impetus for the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Grann leaves us with the impression that the federal government solved the
problem of the murders and created a national institution that benefits the
United States. For many Indigenous peoples, the creation of the FBI was not
an extension of justice but another form of corrosive control and intrusion
into tribal sovereignty. Oil initiated the violence, but the FBI did not solve it.
Today, Indigenous women bear much of this violence (Anderson, Campbell,
and Belcourt 2018). Poor, vulnerable, or exploited women are channeled into
“man camps” burgeoning around oil drills, and many do not return. The status
of these women remains uncertain. Prairie and Plains Indigenous communities
are particularly impacted, but the problem follows oil rigs and construction
crews (Dorries et al. 2019) across the country. In the Navajo Nation, oil, gas, and
fracking are old industries that ushered in cultural political change and gender
violence (Denetdale 2006; McPherson and Wolff 1997).
Oil was found near the Diné community of Shiprock in 1922 (Chamberlain
2000). Prospecting for oil became a lucrative business. President Warren G.
Harding appointed New Mexico senator Albert Fall as secretary of the inte-
rior. Fall was corrupt and took bribes from oil companies. He worked to open
the Navajo Reservation for oil prospecting. The Treaty of 1868 required that
three-fourths of the male population had to consent to any land leasing by
outside interests. This was a provision that Grant’s peace commission almost
always included. This vague, patriarchal form of democracy was not workable
for oil contracting. The Office of Indian Affairs and local Indian Agency offices
worked to grant title to Diné people living in New Mexico on so-called public
domain land but beyond the 1868 treaty boundaries. Federal policy at the time
favored assimilation. The General Allotment Act of 1887, the Major Crimes Act
of 1885, the Dawes Commission of 1895, and the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920
were all policies bent on the assimilation of Indigenous peoples into a main-
stream American society. Key to this goal was the alienation of Indigenous lands
from their collective holding by Indigenous nations (Kelly 1963).
Initially, Secretary Fall treated parts of the Navajo Reservation that were not
originally defined in the 1868 treaty as “public domain” lands that fell outside
of the provisions of the 1868 treaty. But Fall resigned when news of the Teapot
Dome scandal loomed. He was caught receiving kickbacks from oil speculators
for no-bid contracts on public lands. After Fall resigned, the Office of Indian
 48 CHAPTER 1

Affairs treated executive order lands and treaty lands legally and politically as
the same thing. The tribal jurisdiction over mineral leasing that now extended
over all reservation lands revealed the need for a governing body for the Diné
people. The Department of the Interior organized the tribe’s first “business
council” in 1922 for the purpose of agreeing to lease contracts between the
Navajo Tribe and outside companies and corporations (Kelly 1968).
Often, those who interpret the tribal government as an instrument of colo-
nialism conflate the 1920s and 1930s councils. The early council was a product of
oil boom in the region and the corruption that went into Teapot Dome scandal.
Questions of governance weren’t important for the federal officials setting up
this government. They simply wanted any kind of political body that could sign
leases on behalf of the entire tribe. But after 1927, oil prices collapsed and bids on
oil in the reservation declined. It was not until the 1950s that oil really took off
across the reservation. Between the early 1920s and 1950s, a reworking of Amer-
ican capitalism and U.S.–Indian relations required questions of governance and
development to reflect the New Deal and the early welfare state.
The origin of modern tribal economies in Native North America is arguably
found in the 1928 Merriam Report commissioned by the Department of the
Interior. The report, by the Brookings Institution, confirmed what many already
knew at the time about reservations. The authors and researchers found that
U.S. assimilationist efforts had failed and had only further impoverished tribes
(Deloria 1985). With the fall of the U.S. economy in 1929 and the Democratic
Party’s strong win during the 1932 election, the federal government changed its
approach toward public spending and relief efforts. New Deal policies guaran-
teed work and galvanized investment in rural infrastructure development. This
change in the political landscape also impacted federal Indian policy. Roosevelt
appointed New Deal Democrat Harold L. Ickes as secretary of the interior.
Ickes believed in the reform of Indian policy. The Merriam Report provided
the impetus for a dramatic overhaul of federal–Indian relations by the time of
the New Deal in the early 1930s (Kelly 1968, 138).
Ickes brought in reformer John Collier for the important role of Commis-
sioner of Indian Affairs. Collier worked to reverse decades of assimilation poli-
cies rooted in the General Allotment Act of 1887. He believed it was important
for Indigenous nations to maintain the collective space of the reservation for
modernization and development. Through Collier’s efforts, Congress passed
the most important federal Indian reform of its time, the Indian Reorgani-
zation Act of 1934 (Deloria 1985). The cornerstone for notions of the Navajo
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 49

Reservation, the Navajo Tribe, and the Navajo Nation is the Indian Reorga-
nization Act.
Importantly, the Rural Electrification Act of 1935 largely bypassed reser-
vations, leaving the project of infrastructure development to the underfunded
Office of Indian Affairs. In the Navajo Nation, Collier focused on creating
industrial centers, cities and towns, where Diné people could work. Window
Rock was one such industrial center with permanent buildings and even a small
power-generating station located at the capital (Glaser 2002).
The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 changed the nature of tribal gov-
ernance. It was probably the greatest advancement for Indigenous people in
realizing anything that looked like “sovereignty.” The IRA was the first and
most significant exception to a century’s worth of debilitating and controlling
legislations and Supreme Court rulings. As the legal writer Stephen L. Pevar
(2012, 10) writes, the act was meant “to rehabilitate the Indian’s economic life
and to give him a chance to develop the initiative destroyed by a century of
oppression and paternalism.”
An ideology of progress and development was an inherent part of these
reforms. On one end of colonial law, assimilationists believed Indigenous peo-
ples were premodern and needed to learn Western liberal values of democratic
rule and capitalist industriousness, and also to adopt nuclear family structures.
On the other end, cultural preservationists like Collier wanted modernization
and preservation at the same time. They exoticized, essentialized, and misread
social change among Indigenous peoples. They considered “culture” to mean
“difference,” which rendered Indigenous practices inconsistent with Euromer-
ican beliefs.
This was also a time of profound racism in the United States. During the
1930s, fascist parties across the globe took over governments with weak institu-
tions and failing economies. These parties broadcast racist agendas and imple-
mented genocidal policies, some of which were inspired by U.S. “Indian Wars”
and the reservation system. With the passage of the Indian Reorganization
Act in 1934, tribes like the Navajo Nation were encouraged to participate in
wage-labor regimes, first through the Civilian Corps, then through military
participation in World War II, and finally through the construction of railroads
and highways up to and through Indigenous lands (Hosmer, O’Neill, and Fixico
2004). For U.S. colonialists, the solution to the “Indian Problem” was to trans-
form reservation spaces into sites of work, development, and modernization.
Extreme poverty was already a trope in the lexicon of federal Indian discourse.
 50 CHAPTER 1

It was used as a tool to justify unjust interventions. But it also placed tribes in
a linear narrative of progress.
The tribal government was the legal infrastructure within Diné territory
necessary for the expansion of Western capitalism into the region beyond
just mineral leases. In 1922 oil developers realized that there was a lack of
applicable laws in the Navajo Reservation for oil leasing. Developers needed
something to legitimize and protect their property and investments. The
greater meaning of the tribal government was not how it facilitated access to
minerals but how the government consolidated jurisdictions and governance
under a single political infrastructure. The Indian Reorganization Act reflected
Collier’s social reform agenda. It changed the federal government’s relation-
ship with Indigenous nations across the United States. The IRA empowered
modern “councils” as the governing organization of reservations, and by so
doing ignored individual treaties between the U.S. federal government and
Indigenous nations.
During the 1930s and 1940s, government soil scientists blamed the Diné and
their abundant livestock for desertification and erosion in the Colorado Pla-
teau. The anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn, who wrote the definitive work The
Navaho in the 1940s with Dorothea Leighton, using an anglicized h instead of
the conventional j, was also a strong proponent of livestock reduction and gov-
ernment programs designed to change Diné life. In the preface to a 1951 book of
photographs by Leonard McCombe, Kluckhohn and the anthropologist Evon
Z. Vogt jointly wrote: “It is perhaps true that the difficulties of adjustment to the
White man’s world are overemphasized at the expense of satisfactions remain-
ing from the aboriginal culture and the genuine rewards brought to the Navaho
from our modern world. Nevertheless, the drama of the story at the moment is
mainly that of clash, maladjustment, and this is what the pictures appropriately
reflect” (McCombe, Vogt, and Kluckholm 1951, n.p.). In this assessment, Kluck-
hohn and Vogt refer to a preexisting “aboriginal culture” that is defined sepa-
rately against “the White man’s world” and implies one is gradually replaced by
the other. This was a teleology foundational to early anthropology. It is also one
of the reasons why the Navajo Nation Council specified that “Navajo” should
be spelled with a j and not h in the Navajo Nation Code.
By placing blame squarely on the Navajos, the government ignored the
cattle industry that surrounded the reservation and pushed Diné people into
concentrated areas of grazing (Weisiger 2011). To “improve” the soil (a colo-
nial motif ), the federal government stole and murdered Diné sheep, often on
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 51

site, compensating Diné people with money that did little good in the 1930s
reservation economy. Agricultural specialists also developed a new breed of
sheep at nearby Fort Wingate. The government intended to replace the Churro
sheep (descended from sheep introduced by the Spanish colonialists) with sheep
engineered at Fort Wingate that were designed to eat less grass and produce
lighter wool. These new sheep served as biopolitical intrusions on Diné lifeways.
Throughout the reservation, people protested this program, euphemistically
called the Navajo Livestock Reduction. For Diné people impacted by it, live-
stock reduction was a violent assault on their lives and ways of life. The colonial
destruction of Diné sheep herds was a traumatic assault on Diné people.
Some Diné people say, “Dibé éí iiná,” or “Sheep is life.” Today, there is a
regular conference dedicated to the cultural maintenance of Diné sheepherding.
Sheep remain central to Diné life, from familial relations to spiritual well-
being. The killing of Diné sheep was immediately compared with the trauma
of Hwéeldi. It was a continuation of the same violence, just in a different form.
Each kind of violence was an attack on Diné ways of life. Hwéeldi simultane-
ously took Diné people away from the land and transformed them into agri-
cultural homesteaders. The colonizer’s aim was to make settlers out of the colo-
nized. Hwéeldi did not end with the signing of the Treaty of 1868 but changed
form and location. Diné people moved back to traditional homelands but under
colonial conditions. In this way, the spatial overlap hides more than it reveals.
Because Diné people returned to life between the Four Sacred Mountains,
many believe that colonization was thwarted. Diné people were not exiled to
Indian Territory like so many eastern Indigenous nations. The Diné people did
return to their homeland. But Diné people still had to live within reservation
boundaries and subject their children to colonial schooling. At the same time,
the tribe had to give way to the railroad and cattle industry. Immediately after
Hwéeldi, the needs of colonial expansion and capital accumulation defined and
circumscribed the future of Dinéness.
Livestock reduction and the centralization of political power in Window
Rock were related events. The Indian Reorganization Act that Congress passed
required Collier to secure a majority vote from tribes. A referendum had to be
held to support the creation of tribal councils as the governing authority within
reservation spaces (G. Taylor 1980). Today, the Harvard Project on American
Indian Economic Development refers to the resulting tribal constitutions as
“boiler plate” constitutions. They were dreamed up in Washington, D.C., and
did not reflect the particular values of the nations that adopted them ( Jorgensen
 52 CHAPTER 1

2007). Many who voted in these referendums did not fully understand what
they were endorsing. Regardless, Congress considered simple majority votes
sufficient to permanently change the nature of political leadership in Indigenous
nations. The Navajo Reservation was Collier’s main prize. It was the largest res-
ervation in size and population. He worked hard to secure the Navajo Nation’s
endorsement of the IRA. Diné people, however, recognized that policies of
livestock reduction were directly tied to IRA reforms. In a referendum vote in
1934, Diné people rejected the law, thwarting Collier’s goal.
Yet the rejection of IRA did not mean that Diné people would return to
traditional forms of leadership. Federal policy needed centralized governments
in reservation spaces. IRA acceptance or rejection impacted the details of the
structure of governance, but it did not change the context of law. Even though
Diné people rejected the IRA, they received an IRA government nonetheless.
Collier had to organize something legible for the Department of the Interior
to remain consistent with U.S. law, now defined by the IRA. To reconcile this
need for a central government, Bureau of Indian Affairs officials identified sev-
enty “traditional leaders” from throughout the reservation to create an alterna-
tive central government (Wilkins 2013). What they proposed is unknown, but
Secretary of the Interior Ickes rejected it. Instead, he told Collier to organize
these leaders into a tribal council, but one not based on a constitution, as was
the case in IRA governments. These constitutional delegates simply became the
new tribal council. It was this government and not the one created in 1922 that
is the antecedent to the government currently in Window Rock (Curley 2014;
Wilkins 2013). It was with this council that the secretary of the interior invested
the tribe’s “governing authority” under colonial law.
The historian Lawrence Kelly is arguably the most responsible for our inter-
pretation of the Navajo Nation Council as a 1923 creation. In his 1963 article,
“The Navaho Indians: Land and Oil,” Kelly writes, “An important by-product
of the discovery of oil was the creation of the Navaho Tribal Council” (16). Since
then, historians and other scholars have built on Kelly’s analysis. There is an
obvious truth in the association between oil and government. However, there
is much missed in this statement. The evolutionary dynamics of Diné society
and governance over the forty years after 1923 are lost with a simple reading of
“oil and government.” In an indication of the limited scope of the “oil” reading,
Kelly himself was careful to downplay the influence of oil on the Navajo Nation,
arguing at the end of his article that the oil economy did not really take off in
the reservation until the 1950s.
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 53

The creation of the Navajo Tribal Council ushered in a way of thinking

that is today the way Diné people understand their government and political
decision-making in the reservation. This governing system includes such fea-
tures as democratic elections, a capitalistic economy, and an appeal to the rule of
law. For oil developers, a governing authority was a requisite for development in
the reservation. It is also one that has rendered tribal economies dependent on
extractive industries (R. Dunbar-Ortiz 1979; Nies 2014; Reno 1981; Snipp 1988).
The 1937 Navajo Nation Council confirmed an ontology of governance and
resource management within reservation spaces. New governing powers vested
in the tribal council incentivized a relationship with extractive industries that
came to define the nature of Diné sovereignty. This was the birth of a notion of
carbon sovereignty—a sovereignty defined by colonial violence and an enforced
patriarchal governance.

PARTITION, TERMINATION, AND DEVELOPMENT

On the front page of the November 30, 1947, issue of the Arizona Republic,
the banner headline read, “Palestine Partition Voted.” The accompanying story
described a United Nations resolution that passed 33–13 the previous day in
support of a Soviet–American partition plan to break up Palestine and establish
a Jewish country in the “Holy Land.” The 1947 vote established the conditions
of the Nakba (Arabic for “catastrophe”) the following year—the violent cre-
ation of Israel in 1948. On that same front page of the Arizona Republic, the
third headline down read, “State Group to Aid Navajo.” The story described
Arizonans organizing relief for the Navajo Reservation. The winter of 1947 was
particularly harsh for the Diné people. Reports from white officials visiting the
reservation described near-starvation conditions, although reports were widely
exaggerated and full of racist stereotyping. Citizen relief groups organized pilots
to airlift food supplies and winter clothing for starving Natives. The Diné air-
lift anticipated the Berlin airlift by nearly six months. Throughout November
and December 1947, readers of the Arizona Republic were told of the desperate
situation for Diné people in Window Rock, Monument Valley, and elsewhere
in the Navajo and Hopi Reservations.
Although the partition of Palestine and relief efforts to the Navajo Reser-
vation are treated as unrelated happenings, these events are linked in history.
Both were foundational for the legal-political direction of U.S. foreign and
 54 CHAPTER 1

Indian policy during the Cold War era. The headlines and stories informed
the American public about what was possible for European Jewish refugees,
emerging Arab states, and Diné people at the time. The winter crisis of 1947
created the political conditions in the United States to make consequential
reforms to federal Indian law and policy. In the fall of 1949, Congress passed the
Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act, ushering in millions of federal dollars for road
development, water infrastructure, housing, and the relocation of Diné families
from the Navajo Reservation into cities throughout the West.
At the same time, Congress terminated the federal government’s relationship
with more than one hundred tribes. The reordering of the world after World
War II included partition, termination, and development across the globe. India
and Palestine are the most well-known examples of partition, development, and
colonizers retreating (Åsbrink 2017). On the Colorado Plateau, Diné lands were
formally partitioned from Hopi places, creating unresolved divisions between
the two peoples, which have been explained as an “ancient feud.” This explana-
tion created powerful myths about an intrinsic discord and dispute between the
tribes, but it is important to understand that the modern arguments between
the Hopi and Navajo peoples are contemporary and political.
This section of chapter 1 is called “Partition, Termination, and Development”
because termination was the federal government’s response to reservations. As
the United States expanded its commitments abroad to “fight the spread of
communism,” Congress worked to extinguish tribes (a policy called “termi-
nation”) under a similar justification. Colonial overseers conflated notions of
primitivism, underdevelopment, and communism. While the implementation
of termination was inconsistent, the federal government did set the tone for
a heavily assimilationist era for tribes. Over the 1950s, the Bureau of Indian
Affairs (BIA) implemented a “relocation” program, which was designed as a
volunteer initiative but was actually a form of racist anti-Indian assimilation.
U.S. president Harry S. Truman appointed Dillon S. Myer (who oversaw the
war relocation program that targeted Japanese Americans) to lead the BIA.
Myer created a program tantamount to cultural genocide, moving thousands
of Indigenous families from their home communities to cities under the naïve
assumption this would accelerate assimilation (Fixico 1986).
The postwar era introduced ideas of modernization and development for
formerly colonized places throughout the world (McMichael 2011). During the
Bretton Woods Conference in 1944, held on the unceded lands of the Abenaki
people, capitalist countries of “the West” mapped a new international order that
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 55

was designed to challenge “communist” countries following the defeat of Nazi

Germany. Architects of this new international order felt it necessary to create
the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. Publicly, these institutions
were meant to challenge communism in the Third World through development
aid. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana (the first decolonized nation
in Africa), described these organizations as an extension of monopoly capitalism
and a form of neocolonialism (Nkrumah 1965).
Within global studies, the postwar modernization drive is understood today
as the beginning of the idea of “international development.” The development
studies scholar Gilbert Rist (2002) writes that Truman used the term development
for the first time in its conventional understanding in an inauguration speech in
1948. He was referring to the diffusion of aid, technology, and skills to underde-
veloped places in order to ensure their participation in free markets and avoid
the influence of communism. What is often missed in development studies is
that much of the U.S. postwar approach to “the darker nations” was learned in
Indian Country. Colonialists built reservations as sites for social interventions
(Hosmer, O’Neill, and Fixico 2004). Two years later, upon signing one of the
largest funding packages for Indigenous nations in the United States, Truman
expressed much of the same “civilizing” narrative he used to describe developing
countries. The historian Brian Hosmer points out that popular press biographies
of Truman exclude any reference to federal Indian policy. Hosmer (2010, xiii)
writes that this could be a result of the dominant international issues that have
come to define the Truman legacy, such as the Marshall Plan, civil rights, and
the recognition of Israel. However, this chronology of postwar events forgets
centuries of colonization built on foreign intervention. This section intends to
link the history of postwar federal Indian policy with U.S. foreign policy. The
United States continued its imperial expansion and eventual global hegemony
by employing the lessons it learned from expelling Indigenous nations from their
homelands and confining them to reservations. The state used “hard” and “soft”
power as forms of violence and intimidation and employed development aid
and propaganda. Even the colonial terminology of frontier violence, like “Indian
Country,” continued to be used by the U.S. military (R. Dunbar-Ortiz 2014).
Truman’s notion of progress in the Third World mirrors his sentiment toward
Indigenous nations at the time. Both kinds of places (the Third World and
reservations) were understood as in need of Western aid and assistance. This
link between Third World spaces and Indian reservations, however, is rarely
recognized. Scholars in development studies take U.S. Cold War proclamations
 56 CHAPTER 1

at face value and do little to interrogate long-standing development practices

in reservations. Arguably, U.S. development ideology and practice begin in
1868 rather than 1948 and are linked to the civilizing mission of the Grant
administration.
It is important to understand global developments happening alongside
reservation history. Reservations were not only places of military recruitment
(as is often cited, especially in relation to the high numbers of Native people
who enlisted in the U.S. military in World War II), but they were also sites
of social activism. Indigenous social movements often made connections with
international decolonial and liberation movements (Cobb 2008; Estes 2019).
These global connections directly informed the practice and rhetoric of post-
war tribal sovereignty. We cannot understand the creation of the Council of
Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) in the 1970s without acknowledging the
global impacts of Israel’s invasion of the Sinai in Egypt in 1973, the subsequent
embargo of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC),
and a consumer oil crisis. Indigenous leaders worked to link their struggle with
global developments. At this point in history, we must understand the reserva-
tion as a global place.
It was during this time of renewed colonial violence that many Indigenous
nations initiated large-scale contracts with mining companies to develop min-
eral resources. The Navajo Tribe was one of the first to embark on coal. This
became the origin point of carbon sovereignty in Indian Country and mirrored
the carbon democracy in the Gulf states, organized around oil, happening at
about the same time (Mitchell 2009).
National leaders in the colonies of Africa, Asia, and parts of North Amer-
ica organized movements of self-determination to decolonize the empires of
Europe. They had to confront their own “national questions” in decolonial
spaces. These places became the Third World—neither First nor Second World
nations (Prashad 2008). Frantz Fanon joined Algerians in petitioning for inde-
pendence from Greater France, writing his influential text Black Skin, White
Masks (1991) on the nature of colonialism and coloniality on subjected peoples.
Kwame Nkrumah returned from obtaining an education in the United States
and the United Kingdom to throw in with existing independence movements
in the British colony of Gold Coast in West Africa. What sometimes emerged
from these movements were national movements that excluded parts of the
former colonial population in various ways, creating tribal, religious, or linguistic
conflicts. Nationalism had destroyed much of Europe and was now unleashed
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 57

onto the rest of the world. Nearly forty years after independence, the African
historian Basil Davidson, who also lived during World War II, reflected on
the similarities of both places. Davidson (1992) believed that nationalism had
brought war onto Europe and was doing the same in Africa. He referred to this
as “the curse of the nation-state.”
By the second half of the twentieth century, the empires of the United King-
dom and France could not financially or physically maintain these colonized
places across the globe. Nazi Germany had crushed their militaries and econo-
mies. The United States emerged as the world hegemon and was interested in
opening the world to its own influence. Yet it was not possible to consider col-
onization and decolonization without considering the settler-colonial nations—
the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and others.
Indigenous peoples in these countries were not new to international forums. At
the end of World War I, Akwesasne leaders had traveled to Geneva, Switzer-
land, to petition the League of Nations for rights to self-determination. These
leaders were ignored. U.S. and Canadian colonialism were left unexamined in
international forums while the globe divided itself into capitalist and commu-
nist spheres. The Anishinaabe scholar Sheryl Lightfoot (2016, 7–8) writes that
United Nations declarations on decolonization had to turn to a “salt water the-
sis” of colonization—colonization only happens across large oceans—to allow
for countries in Africa, Asia, and parts of North America (such as the Carib-
bean) to gain independence from the UK and France while denying Indigenous
nations in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand the right to
self-determination.
The winter of 1947 was used as a justification for the U.S. Congress to pass the
1950 Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act. The act was one of the most important
federal interventions in the making of the modern Navajo Nation. It remains
the cornerstone of Navajo modernization. To paraphrase Swedish writer Elis-
abeth Åsbrink (2017), it was “when now begins” for the Diné people. As the
preamble of the act reads, it was intended to “promote the rehabilitation of the
Navajo and Hopi Tribes of Indians and a better utilization of the resources of
the Navajo and Hopi Indian Reservations.” The act appropriated millions of
dollars toward development in two isolated reservations, unprecedented at the
time: $20 million was set aside for the construction of roads and trails through-
out the reservation, $25 million was put toward the building of new schools, and
another $3.5 million was reserved for “off reservation employment and reset-
tlement.” Importantly, the act set aside $500,000 to survey the reservations for
 58 CHAPTER 1

timber, coal, and other mineral projects. With the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation
Act, progress and mineral development were intertwined.
The historian Peter Iverson (2002, 181) says that it was during the 1950s that
“the Navajo ‘tribe’ started to become the Navajo Nation.” The 1950s did not so
much bring about a change in this direction as this period was an enhancement
of it. Following World War II, anticommunist paranoia among white elites
targeted communities of color who had long pooled community resources to
survive centuries of repression, including genocide and slavery. In the minds of
U.S. lawmakers, these collaborative practices were hotbeds for communism and
had to be stamped out. We know the sordid history of the FBI’s paramilitary
activities against the Black community. For tribes, the caprice of lawmakers
made it possible to eliminate the federal government’s recognition of tribes.
Whole nations were denied recognition by the United States, and although they
did not stop being Indigenous, they were limited legally and politically in how
they could protect their lands and identity. The “elimination of the Native,” as
Patrick Wolfe (2006) puts it, was accomplished through legislative fiat.

CONCLUSION

Since 1868, Diné people have lived in a new world and one not entirely of
their own making. This is a colonial world, dominated by a capitalist econ-
omy. This world was oriented toward new industries, new understandings of
nature and gender, and new places. It is a world where Diné lands are resources
for other places, and not for Diné use exclusively or primarily. In the remak-
ing of capitalism, capitalist countries abandoned uninhibited free markets for
strong state interventions. In the United States and England, this took the
form of Keynesian welfare policies. Investment in public work projects to stave
off unemployment increased. Such changes accompanied political revolutions.
This period in Native American history is linked to reforms in federal Indian
law such as the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. The IRA centralized political
leadership into elected “councils” that could then make decisions on behalf of
the tribe with outside interests. In 1947 the Navajo Tribe became a nation, in a
time after development was the catalyst for social change and the solution to
the long effects of colonialism, displacement, and racism on a people and land.
This development would take shape in carbon sovereignty, an expression of
self-determination through the expansion of mining, drilling, and extraction.
 SHAPE-SHIFTING COLONIALISM AND THE ORIGIN OF CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 59

For the Navajo Tribe of Indians, the governing political apparatus expanded
its engagement in resource extraction. In an environment of anticommunism,
termination, boarding schools, and Christian missionary practices, Diné people
became more incorporated into capitalist processes and resource extraction.
During the 1950s, the political institutions and governing practices of the
Navajo Tribe solidified. The council-chairman system reflected anticommunist,
procapitalist welfare governing ideologies. It was in 1950 that the trajectory of
what would become the Navajo Nation was set into place. The Navajo-Hopi
Rehabilitation Act of 1950 provided millions of dollars for the construction of
roads, water wells, schools, and health facilities among other things within the
two reservations (Iverson 2002, 190). It was consistent with Congress’s inter-
est in both terminating and developing tribes, when “the focus of acquisitive
interest in Indian resources had shifted from land to water and energy reserves”
(Reno 1981, 4).
Following the cementation of the Diné resource regime, as an anticommu-
nist form of tribal development, border towns swelled in economic importance.
Without colonial restrictions, white and Hispanic entrepreneurs took advan-
tage of the swell of cash afforded to a new proletarian labor force. Diné men,
conscripted into gendered forms of wage labor, spent their money in new stores
located just outside the reservation. The racial regime that worked to dispossess
Indigenous nations of their lands also stripped them of their humanity. Pawn
shops, auto dealerships, bars, and restaurants preyed on the limited wealth of
tribal members. Sales tax went to the state, debt to Diné community members.
This was how racism and capitalism worked together as structural forces of
dispossession.
Modernization and development told a different story. The narrative of post-
1947 global capitalism was one of unrealized prosperity. It wasn’t colonization
but a lack of development that explained precarity, poverty, and other effects
of colonial control. The post-1947 world created the conditions for both carbon
democracies and carbon sovereignty—a world order built around oil, consumer-
ism, and a global division of labor. In this global shift, after the end of welfarism
and neoliberal hegemony, Diné space is cheapened. Land—for pastoralism and
small-scale agriculture, and far from highways, rail lines, and airports—becomes
less valued. Settler colonialism explains the utility of land theft but not land
devaluation. The currents of modern capitalism made reservations into spaces of
poverty redeemable through development in the form of extraction, or carbon
sovereignty.
 CHAPTER 2
CARBON SOVEREIGNTY

F
OSSIL FUELS WOULD come to define a particular brand, practice, and understand-
ing of tribal sovereignty, which was under threat and flux by changes in
federal policy. Many Diné social commentators and scholars date the estab-
lishment of the first Navajo council in 1923 as the origin of a political regime
built on fossil fuel exploitation. However, several important features of today’s
sovereign practices were decades away from fulfillment. In fact, Indigenous peo-
ples were not even citizens of the United States when the first tribal council was
created in the interest of simply agreeing to contracts between Diné people and
Standard Oil. To read that council and the politics of the time into the large-
scale development projects today would be inaccurate. The more significant
social and political transformations related to the use and understandings of
fossil fuels and carbon occurred during the 1960s.
This chapter articulates the transformative power of the coal leases signed
between the Navajo Nation, utilities, and energy companies during the
1960s—leases that made coal extraction on Black Mesa and elsewhere possible.
There were other leases and mining in the reservation before coal. There was oil
leasing and uranium extraction. But coal as an energy source would emerge at a
unique conjuncture of Diné history, a point of rising nationalism, growing con-
fidence in modernization and development, and the wedding of tribal political
authority with resource economies. This blend of social forces was the basis for
carbon sovereignty.
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 61

RESOURCES TO SOVEREIGNTY

The idea of resources is a colonial concept. The land, sky, water, air, and the
other nonhuman persons that inhabit our world are not objectives for devel-
opment, statecraft, or employment. They are not meant to be transformed
into commodities. They are entities and places with stories, histories, and
relationships to the people. Yet colonial authorities worked to stamp out these
ways of thinking. They confined Indigenous nations onto reservations, and
killed off caribou, whales, bison, sheep, and salmon. In the United States
and Canada, colonial authorities introduced cattle, cotton, and other cash
commodities across the western half of the continent. The transformation of
the landscape from Indigenous to colonial ensured that Indigenous peoples
couldn’t maintain traditional ways of life unaffected by new uses of rivers,
land, and animals. What was under the surface of the earth was no longer a
mystery, or a place where people didn’t go. Resources became sources of wealth
within a capitalist system. In chapter 1, I showed how colonial policies made
extraction within the Navajo Nation possible. In this chapter, I suggest that
Diné people, working through and against tribal institutions, redefined fossil
fuels in the language of sovereignty, self-determination, and sustainability—
carbon sovereignty.
Following a wave of national independence movements after 1947, nations
throughout Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East used fossil fuels as
sources of revenues for expanding state apparatuses and infrastructure devel-
opment. Often these industries were already existing and local leaders simply
continued colonial economies. Resource development was a strategy for greater
independence. Import substitution and the nationalization of key sectors of the
economy were pathways out of underdevelopment. This was influential thinking
for how political leaders in developing nations tried to move out of the colonial
nature of global capitalism. Leaders and political parties redefined resources
in the language of national independence. They aspired to recirculate wealth
among the people. Many were socialist and worked with the Soviet Union to
nationalize key sectors of their economy. The United States and the West vio-
lently attacked these efforts. The United States joined forces with former colo-
nial powers to finance right-wing military coup d’états over the nationalization
of economies critical to the postwar capitalist economy. The violent assault on
nationalization throughout the world was part of the reason resources failed to
deliver on promises of development.
 62 CHAPTER 2

Relying on colonial industries for independence inevitably preserved key

elements of colonial economies. Newly independent nations found themselves
reliant on foreign markets, which were dominated by capitalists and increasingly
hostile to independence projects. Starting in the late 1970s, capitalist interests
throughout the world organized the global dismantlement of national econo-
mies and welfare states. Through lending institutions such as the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank, capitalists in Western nations persuaded
countries throughout Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere to abolish
key protectionist institutions and markets that shielded small farmers and new
industries from larger, more profitable industries in already developed nations.
At the same time, capitalists in the West and policy makers organized new
treaties between nations to obligate “free trade” of goods (not people) and pre-
vent nations from regulating foreign business operating within their territorial
claims (Chomsky 1999). Many political and economic geographers have worked
to define this system of trade, development, finance, and influence (Dicken
1998; Harvey 2001; Klein 2000; Peck and Tickell 2002). This reorganization
of the global economy around disaggregate production and increased profit is
called neoliberalism. Whereas capitalists increasingly worked to make industry
flexible, extractive industries were immovable.
After decades of resource exploitation with little to show for it, some econ-
omists challenged modernization narratives and said resources acted more as a
“curse” than a source of wealth. Fossil fuels not only dominated national econo-
mies; they became their prime focus. Economies were structured and captured
by resources. Resource economists sometimes argue that once a nation embarks
on resource development, it becomes too difficult for it to change course. Post-
war civil sectors (where technocrats work within a state bureaucracy) and work-
ers themselves make economies path dependent. Colonial powers exert tremen-
dous pressure to keep captured nations within a global economy that benefits
that nation’s elites. These economists referred to overreliance on resources as a
“resource curse” or “Dutch disease.” When examining the economies of newly
independent African nations, resource curse analyses highlight the paradox
of pernicious underdevelopment in places with a bounty of natural resources
(Murshed 2018). Their critique was that newly independent nations invest too
much time, money, and state planning into resource sector(s), ignoring other
potential industries.
As useful as the resource curse thesis was for challenging market-oriented
orthodoxies among development economists, it still operated within the
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 63

framework of economics, which lacks context and history to a fault. The resource
curse thesis often fails to address the historic conditions that produced resource
dependency in the first place. For Indigenous nations in North America, render-
ing the natural world into “resources” was part of the state-formation experience.
In applying dependency theory to the Navajo Nation, the historian Richard
White (1983) claims that livestock reduction and the development of resources
like oil, coal, and uranium became the origins of Diné underdevelopment. More
recently, the legal scholar Ezra Rosser (2021) highlights some of the corrupting
influences of resources on tribal lawmakers and how these impact development
decisions. These explanations are all part of the dependency and resource curse
frameworks.
Inverting the resource curse thesis, the political anthropologist Timothy
Mitchell (2009) argues that resources were not the cause of underdevelopment
but made modern statecraft achievable. In places like Saudi Arabia, revenues
from oil paid for roads, schools, government employees, military personnel and
equipment, and all other things we associate with modern state making. Mitch-
ell writes that carbon democracy describes governing practices that resources
“made possible” through extraction, exploitation, and combustion. More
recently, the environmental historian Victor Seow (2022) has written about
carbon technocracy in East Asia, showing how we live in a world carbon made
possible. Seow goes on to say that the tendency to think about coal and carbon
resources as both the basis of modernity and in abundance “has often fostered
an imagined inexhaustibility and a carelessness that comes with believing that to
be true” (14). Or as Navajo Nation Council speaker LoRenzo Bates told me in
2018, “I recognize the fact that the industry is under a lot of strain, . . . given that,
we have one hundred years of a resource, one hundred years in the ground . . .
and if you research the coal industry and you look at it beyond just burning it
to create electricity . . . but coming down the path is technology that allows
for coal to be used for other purposes. . . . That technology is not here today.
Nonetheless, eventually it will get there. There’s not enough money to get back
into it, because you’ll be starting all over.”
Here I expand on this idea to think about what is increasingly made possible
and not possible with changing global understandings of carbon, especially in
Indigenous reservations against the spatial order of disaggregate production
that is part of global neoliberalism.
When looking at reservation economies, shaped and limited by colo-
nial forces, we find that carbon becomes a pathway toward development and
 64 CHAPTER 2

self-determination. Fossil fuels were foundational to the Indigenous experience

in the twentieth century. Transnational corporations partnered with tribal gov-
ernments to open lands for extraction. At the same time, national movements
for self-determination used coal, oil, and uranium as a basis for modernization.
Responding to shifting energy structures in the United States, extractive
industries emerged as the basis of sovereignty for many Native nations. This is
the nature of carbon sovereignty—a sovereignty made around changing under-
standings of carbon. The Indigenous experience in the twentieth and twenty-
first centuries is a record of assaults from all forms of resource development—
from land dispossession to water damming and diversion, the building of dams
all throughout the West’s most vital water sources, and the history of Cold
War uranium extraction and nuclear testing alongside coal, oil, and natural gas
development.
Carbon sovereignty refers to ideological understandings, pronouncements,
and governing practices of tribal nations that are conditioned by rapidly chang-
ing understandings of climate change. In the Navajo Nation, coal was made pos-
sible by waning support for damming but became an outdated energy technology
forty years later when solar, wind, and natural gas were preferred. Coal mines
were opened as a promise of development and prosperity but closed because they
were seen as too polluting, too expensive, and outdated technology. The future
becomes the past in the timescale of a lease, contract, and business cycle.

CARBON BEFORE SOVEREIGNTY

An understanding of the world as composed of resources must be learned,

shaped, and disciplined. The formation of colonial governance over and
through Diné people—with conquering institutions (Office of Indian Affairs)
and institutions designed to represent an abstract “will of the people” (tribal
governments)—created the conditions from which the idea of “resources” arose.
Over the twentieth century, Indigenous nations recovered much of their
social standing, political rights, and material land bases. This was won through
decades of toil, activism, and changing cultural attitudes in the United States and
Canada. The number of Indigenous peoples in census counts doubled (Thornton
1990). As discussed in chapter 1, in 1934 Congress passed the Indian Reorgani-
zation Act, which established constitutions and councils for tribes with existing
relationships with the federal government. This act remains the cornerstone of
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 65

tribal self-rule in U.S. colonial jurisdictions. It granted councils the ability to

establish membership criteria, pass laws, or sign mineral leases. It did not grant
full independence to tribes. For many of these decisions, the tribe still required
colonial review. As Melanie Yazzie (Diné) (2018) writes, Indigenous decoloni-
zation can’t follow the same path as decolonial movements in other parts of the
world because of the nature of settler colonialism, a permanent displacement
of Indigenous peoples and colonial land appropriation. The Bureau of Indian
Affairs stationed agents near or on reservations to ensure that its policies were
carried out. This was not the context of an independent nation but of captured
tribes. Only four years later, Congress also passed the Indian Mineral Leasing
Development Act, which granted tribes the ability to sign leasing contracts. The
act followed the logic of the 1872 Mining Law, which encouraged the establish-
ment or expansion of extractive industries on federal lands.
For more than sixty years, the search for cheap or strategic energy turned
Indigenous lands into sites of extraction, waste, and toxicity. For the Navajo
Nation, carbon sovereignty manifested in the development of oil, uranium,
coal, and even wind and solar energy. Other Indigenous nations developed coal,
oil, uranium, and natural gas. These industries accomplish vital development
goals; they provide jobs and revenues. This is perhaps the most important (and
studied) feature of resource economies. Yet there are other dimensions to a
community’s relationship with resources that are underexamined. What many
scholars, researchers, and commentators on energy and resource extraction in
Indian Country often fail to appreciate is the way resources shape attitudes,
political opinion, mobilization, and ideology in the establishment, protection,
and expansion of these industries within tribal communities. The formation
of action and ideology in favor of extractive industries is particularly true for
development projects that build on a people’s collective yearning for national
self-determination and decolonization—politics that took on new meaning
and importance across the globe from the 1940s to the 1970s during waves of
national independent movements in Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean.
Coal and oil were already important sectors in the Navajo tribal economy
before Indigenous activists mobilized to challenge the colonial authority of the
Bureau of Indian Affairs at events such as Alcatraz in 1969, the Trail of Broken
Treaties in 1970, and Second Wounded Knee in 1973. Some of the demands of
activists were to challenge federal authority over tribes and call for national
independence. Responding to these criticisms and larger calls for racial justice,
Congress convened sessions on the status of Indian economic development.
 66 CHAPTER 2

For political lawmakers in the mainstream of U.S. policy making, the lack of
development was the source of the problem. The political inequality between
tribes and colonial institutions wasn’t addressed. The narrative was that these
places were neglected. In 1975 Congress passed the American Indian Educa-
tional Assistance and Self-Determination Act. The law is sometimes referred
to as Public Law 638 (PL-638). The law didn’t create new authorities or expand
funding. The kinds of institutions tribes now run through PL-638 are police
stations, hospitals, and court systems. These institutions, some of which were
the most punitive and intrusive in everyday Indigenous people’s lives, are now
under the control of many tribal governments.
As the coal sector expanded in the Navajo Nation, coal work became founda-
tional for jobs and revenues for the tribal government and for the communities
near the sites of extraction. For those who worked at the mine in the early years,
it also introduced industrial temporal regimes. Days and nights became work
shifts. Peabody Coal distributed paychecks every two weeks. Weekends turned
into trips to border towns such as Flagstaff, Gallup, or Farmington. Coal created
the conditions for a profound social transformation in this part of the reser-
vation. After years of working in the coal industry, workers and their families
identified with it. They worked to preserve the industry, to keep it essential to
Diné development and life. At the same time, the federal government worked
to expand the authority of tribes to make decisions on contracts, resource use,
and development projects across reservations.

THE DEVELOPMENT DECADE

From the late 1950s until the early 1970s, four coal mines opened in the Navajo
Reservation. The surveys funded through the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act
found substantial coal deposits on Black Mesa in the center of the reservation.
Suddenly, the Navajo and Hopi Reservations had energy reserves. Regional
utilities like Arizona Power Service (APS) of the Salt River Project could put
this coal toward energy projects. It was during the 1960s that utilities from Ari-
zona, California, Nevada, and New Mexico partnered with mining companies
like Peabody Coal to convert the high desert lands of Diné Bikeyah into coal
fields (Needham 2014). During this period, state making for Arizona and the
Navajo Nation saw tribal reservations as opportunities, not obstacles in resource
exploration.
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 67

In 1962 the Pittsburgh Mining Company opened a smaller coal mine between
Window Rock and Gallup, New Mexico. This was the McKinley Mine, perhaps
named for the county in which it was also located. Construction on the Four
Corners Generating Station (FCGS) started in 1960 on the northeastern corner
of the Navajo Nation, near the border town of Farmington, New Mexico. The
Navajo Coal Mine was expanded south of the plant shortly thereafter. When
APS opened the Four Corners Generating Station in 1963, it was suddenly one
of the most modern and large-scale coal-producing power plants in the world.
FCGS concretized carbon ambitions. It expanded mining at the Navajo Coal
Mine in the northeastern part of the reservation. As Needham (2014, 156) writes,
the mine used the largest dragline in the world at the time.
It was during this era of termination and relocation that younger educated
Diné with lived experience outside the reservation returned to the reservation to
assume positions within a burgeoning tribal government. Many Diné men (in a
gendered military) fought for the United States in World War II and the Korean
War and had been changed by their experiences. They had traveled around the
world and back. They returned with Western educations and military discipline.
They understood, too, the double standards of the federal government toward
tribes. Diné veterans returned to the Navajo Nation dealing with trauma from
boarding schools or war. They returned to Window Rock to replace white Bureau
of Indian Affairs employees who treated tribal leaders like children. The new
kinds of tribal leaders to assume positions within the tribal government during
the 1960s and 1970s believed strongly in possibilities of renewal, resurgence, and
self-determination by taking over the functions of colonial administration.
In 1962 the Diné people elected Raymond Nakai as chairman of the Navajo
Tribe. The late historian Peter Iverson (2002, 228) described Nakai as the “first
modern Navajo political leader” in the Navajo Nation. Whereas the previous
generation of leaders tied their hair in tsilyéél (traditional buns) and wore
ranching clothes, Nakai and fellow Diné politicians dressed in business suits.
They cut their hair short and wore trim suits and skinny ties. They resembled
the BIA officials they wanted to replace (figure 5).
Nakai used media purposefully and strategically, emulating the evolving
political landscape of the 1960s (Iverson 2002, 228). His campaign practices
reflected changes happening in the United States. Two years earlier, John F.
Kennedy was elected president, narrowly defeating Vice President Richard
Nixon. Kennedy was the youngest president at the time and brandished (some
felt arrogantly) a new crop of planners and technocrats. These were (employing
 68 CHAPTER 2

FIGURE 5. Raymond Nakai reelection campaign poster, Navajo Times, November 1970.

a colonial trope) the “New Frontiersmen.”1 Kennedy was ambitious and a mod-
ernist. One of Kennedy’s key advisors was W. W. Rostow, who wrote The Stages
of Economic Growth ([1960] 1991), a text that reflected U.S. postwar development
narratives and that shaped the political mood of the early 1960s. The climate
within the Navajo Tribe reflected the overly optimistic sense of possibility in
the United States at the time.
Nakai also wanted to modernize the Navajo Nation. During his administra-
tion, the tribe built new courtrooms complete with jury boxes (although federal
law limited tribal jurisdiction to noncriminal issues). Nakai worked to update
the capital city, Window Rock. The Window Rock Community Center, con-
structed in the 1950s, hosted plays, concerts, and other events. Musicians such
as Louis Armstrong and Johnny Cash played at the center. Banks, restaurants,
and other businesses were opened in the capital city (figure 6).
One of Nakai’s first acts was to codify previous council resolutions into a gov-
erning law for the tribe, what would become the Navajo Tribal Code. The code
would become the basis for law in the Navajo Nation (Wilkins 2013). Nakai
was not the only one bringing outside civic practices into Diné lands. In 1959
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 69

FIGURE 6 . Navajo families celebrating Christmas at the Civic Center in Window Rock,
AZ, December 22, 1959, Navajo Nation Public Relations, NNM.L-0789B2. Navajo
Nation Museum. SCA Item Number: 131370.

the Diné journalist Marshall Tome took over the BIA newsletter and formed
the Navajo Times. He worked to improve it from a BIA status report on the
five agencies the BIA administred within the reservation to a news and opinion
newspaper that covered stories and events all across the reservation. Today, it
is one of the most respected newspapers in Indian Country and one of the few
papers with its own printer. The ideas of “freedom of speech” presented in the
Navajo Times reflected an emerging civil sector that accompanied the growth
of goverance and sovereign ambition in Window Rock.
Finally, the agricultural fairs that the BIA also sponsored moved from white
practices of stock competitions and beauty contests to exhibitions of jewelry and
 70 CHAPTER 2

textiles. The fairs now featured rodeos, powwows, traditional song-and-dance,

and a Miss Traditional Navajo contest, where the contestants were judged on
their language skills and cultural acumen and not Eurocentric notions of beauty
(Denetdale 2006).
In Window Rock today, one can see the remnants of this development era.
Throughout the capital, buildings are aging and roads are full of potholes. But
in the early 1960s, everything was new and built in the styles of the time. The
Navajo Nation created a forestry company in 1964 and opened a sawmill just
north of Window Rock in the community that became Navajo Pine. The tribe
helped construct houses around the sawmill as a place where workers could
settle and live. Just down the road in Fort Defiance, Arizona, the Navajo Nation
established an official “national” cemetery for Diné military veterans and other
national figures. This mimicked Arlington National Cemetery in Washington,
D.C. The place looked new and full of possibilities.
The 1960s were also when resource sectors expanded across Indigenous
communities in the western states. It was at this time that coal increased in
scope, scale, and practice within the Navajo Nation, Northern Cheyenne, and
Crow Reservations (Allison 2015). As historians of this era demonstrate, colo-
nial lawmakers and businesspeople looked at reservations as potential sites for
energy development. The postwar West needed energy, and energy was found
on reservations.
Importantly, the Navajo coal economy also emerged during a time of nascent
nationalism. Between these two mines, hundreds of Diné men entered long-
standing regimes of wage-labor work. It was gendered labor, and some of these
men had already worked in uranium mines. Others came from other infrequent
forms of employment outside the reservation, such as seasonal labor on large
farms in central or southern Arizona. For many, coal work was a first form of
wage labor. But before the decade was through, hundreds of Diné men were
dying in Vietnam or returning home with missing legs. They were drafted into
an expanding, unpopular, and polarizing war.
The coal leases were signed, and power plants built at the end of the 1960s
were more water intensive, more earth changing than what started on the east-
ern end of the reservation. To save money on transportation costs, the California
private utility Southern California Edison insisted on a water slurry over the
conventional practice of rail. Bechtel designed the slurry and Peabody Coal
operated it, but it was the utility that asked for it. This would create one of
the most damaging environmental problems on the Colorado Plateau to this
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 71

day, the depletion of drinkable aquifer water for energy production—which

served consumers outside the reservation. The next major intrusion was the
construction of the Navajo Generating Station and the Central Arizona Project
(CAP), the most important infrastructure in Arizona. CAP moves water from
the Colorado River west of Phoenix into the Salt River Valley. It assuages the
natural limitations to Phoenix’s growth. The undoing of the Colorado River
for Phoenix required the removing, transporting, and burning of coal from the
Navajo Nation. It was the reason for the power plant and mine. To understand
Navajo coal in the second half of the 1960s, we also have to understand the
colonization of the Colorado River.

COLONIAL BEACHHEADS AND THE COLORADO RIVER

The Colorado River is not a thing but an idea. The waters that flow through
the Grand Canyon and empty into the Gulf of California travel through high
plateaus to low-lying desert. These are all very different kinds of places brought
together under the concept of the river. The Colorado River is one of the most
important and disputed water sources in North America. What we normally
think of as a “river” is much vaster and broader than what colonial delimitations
allow. The river, as a thing in reference and public imagination, is a constantly
flowing body of water that snakes through lowlands of terrain, eventually drain-
ing into oceans and even larger rivers.
The Hohokam, ancestors of six Arizona tribes, lived along the Salt River,
Gila River, and other tributaries of the Colorado River. They built sedentary
communities in these low valleys, diverting water to flood fields for corn, squash,
beans, and other Native crops. When the Spanish colonists came, they stole
Indigenous crops, moved into their communities, and appropriated their knowl-
edge of water ecology to feed their own crops. They also introduced livestock
such as sheep and cattle to the region. In northern New Mexico, a culture
around the maintenance of these waterways (or “acequias”) became a core cul-
tural practice of Hispanic communities. The Hispanics were colonial, and their
land grants were land grabs. Yet they did not dramatically reshape the ecology
of Arizona and the Southwest as the white settlers from the United States
would later do (Snedden 2015; Worster 1985). It was the American colonizers
who moved into the region at the end of the nineteenth century who did the
most to disrupt desert ecologies.
 72 CHAPTER 2

The Colorado River is a colonial abstraction. It is physically defining. It

defines Arizona’s western border, creating real political barriers between Cal-
ifornia and Nevada. Within colonial law, rivers are much more than rivers;
they are the forecasted annual flows, the bases for rights of diversion, which
in turn are the foundations for past, present, and future economies. Geogra-
phers and others define rivers sometimes in expansive areas called “basins,”
which include tributaries that eventually flow into larger river systems. This
comprehensive appreciation for rivers is different from understanding the
environment according to local ecologies or sustainable economies built on
centuries of limited, minute, and often bounded environmental observations.
In the past, Indigenous environmental sciences did not limit rivers to basins
or categorize them within systems. As with observations of the land, tradi-
tional knowledge was based on a different episteme, one inclusive of land
and animals. Although these are also topics of environmental sciences, our
academic division of labor and emphasis on specialization cause us to focus
on narrow questions at the expense of holistic social, cultural, and political
considerations.
The river as a social and political construct became a site of continued colo-
nial dispossession. Aqua nullius was made onto the continent’s water sources.
Water became an unfolding legal and political resource grab. Federal legal
transformations of land and water into simple and abstract commodities made
colonialism increasingly possible. Rail, cattle, eastern meat markets, boom and
bust mining towns, and dams were colonial beachheads. These places and infra-
structure made future dispossession more achievable.
To understand carbon sovereignty in the Navajo Nation, we must also
expand our understanding of the political economy of water in the Southwest.
It was for the making of a national water infrastructure that coal became central.
It was part of state making in Arizona and made urban growth (gentrification,
displacement, and expanding carbon emissions) possible. Where land is seem-
ingly abundant, water is scarce. While the colonization of the western half
of North America was indeed a land grab, it was also a colonial enclosure on
the limited water sources in the West. Whereas white settlers moved into the
western plains in the late nineteenth century, the Southwest experienced much
of this enclosure and settlement during the early twentieth century, when the
United States funded and built massive dams.
The Colorado Compact divided the river among the states. Arizona and
New Mexico had only been states for ten years when the compact concretized
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 73

complete control over the Colorado River and Rio Grande River despite cen-
turies of Indigenous governance. Modern practices of tribal sovereignty are
informed by much longer histories of colonial violence and dispossession. Indig-
enous sovereignty is a response against colonial aggression. It is perhaps only a
rhetorical challenge against the United States or Canada. Maybe it is a set of
limited institutional practices designed to empower tribal communities. Yet it
is a real force of politics. It is both ideology and everyday governance.
The legal and political divisions of the Colorado River within Western water
law transformed the river for settler communities and tribal nations alike. To
state governments, water planners, and agriculturalists, the river consists of fif-
teen million acre-feet of usury rights for commercial and industrial activities. It
is the basis for economic growth in the state and in the region. Indigenous water
rights were deferred. They were set apart from state interests, a problem for the
federal government to resolve. Indian water interests were only mentioned to
say they were not part of the compact.
The compact builds on white settlers’ desire to transform the environment
of Arizona. The Roosevelt Dam, built at the turn of the twentieth century and
named after President Theodore Roosevelt, who helped spearhead the project,
was the first significant dam in the Arizona region (Hansen 2008). The Arizona
Water Resource Center describes dams as reflective of the moment in history
in which they are made.
The Roosevelt Dam initiated a phase of water and energy infrastructure
expansion that created the modern Arizona political and economic system. The
Salt River Valley Users’ Association was founded in 1903 to ensure that land-
owners downstream of the dam benefited from the project. The Salt River Valley
Users’ Association eventually became the overseer of the Salt River Project.2
The organization was one of the most active advocates for the Central Arizona
Project during the 1960s.
The Central Arizona Project, it should be noted, was much more ambitious
than most other water engineering initiatives to that point in time. It dwarfed
other reclamation projects in Arizona in size, scale, and costs. The CAP was
transformative of the economy and the environment. It was against this politi-
cal backdrop in the mid-1960s that the Navajo Nation committed itself to the
coal industry as a source of jobs and revenues. The tribe hesitantly agreed to its
role in the coal-energy-water nexus to protect tribal sovereignty against the
State of Arizona’s brazen threat to dam Colorado River water along the Navajo
Reservation regardless of tribal consent. Navajo sovereignty was built on fossil
 74 CHAPTER 2

fuels and turned into a form of political power against the colonizing state and
federal government. This was carbon sovereignty.

ENERGY FOR WATER

In 1961 the Arizona Power Authority (APA) applied to the Federal Power
Commission to build and operate two dams along the Colorado River near the
Grand Canyon and on the western end of the Navajo Reservation. These were
the first steps by a utility to develop energy along the Colorado River for the
purpose of supplying power to a major canal project that would take water from
the river to Phoenix. It was not the first time that settlers in central Arizona
worked to change the direction of waters and ecology of the region. But it was
a time when political officials inside and outside Arizona believed they had the
political power and force to realize the water project. Arizona’s senior senator,
Carl Hayden, was the majority leader. Stewart Udall, from St. Johns, was the
secretary of the interior. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Arizona over
California for rights to the Colorado River. For Arizona’s political class and
the managers of the state’s power utilities, the early 1960s was the time when
the state should press its case for an expensive water project that would bring
Colorado River water into Phoenix.
APA proposed two dam projects. The names of the dams would become
notorious. The Marble Canyon Dam and the Bridge Canyon Dam would hold
back water into the Grand Canyon, one of the most iconic landscapes in the
world. For the political elite in Arizona, the dams were necessary for progress,
for modernization, and for survivability. The dams weren’t simply a question of
development but reproduced colonial understandings of the environment. The
Arizona Power Authority struck a nationalistic tone, demanding the Colorado
River for Arizona’s benefit. It took on aggressive posturing toward both tribes
and other state governments.
The prospect of damming and diverting the Colorado River took on dimen-
sions of sovereignty—both national and international. Not only was there a
question about what the United States owed Mexico in annual flow of water,
but also the Colorado Compact ensured that the seven states that claimed some
interest in the river got a sizeable portion of its annual flow. Tribes were on the
bottom of a long list of interests. To this day, many tribes, including the Navajo
Tribe, still lack any kind of rights to the waters of the Colorado River.
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 75

According to the tribe’s white then-attorney, Norman Little, APA told the
Federal Power Commission that the Navajo Tribe had no right or interest in
the projects during a public hearing in Washington, D.C., in May 1961. The
Navajo attorney delayed further hearings on APA’s application and objected
to it outright. The Department of the Interior, for its part, insisted that water
rights between California and Arizona be resolved before any new dams were
considered along the Colorado River. With Little’s prodding, the Navajo Tribal
Council passed a resolution in late May 1961 opposing the Marble Canyon
Dam. In so doing, Little drafted the language to respond to the legal-political
questions along the river, appealing to arguments over jurisdiction. In the res-
olution, about a page in length, the Navajo Tribal Council resolved that the
chairman of the tribe (a) publicly oppose APA’s application before the Federal
Power Commission, (b) work with the Bureau of Reclamation on plans for a
dam, (c) get Congress to fund and build the dam and consider the Navajo Tribe
a beneficiary of the dam, and (d) make sure the Navajo Tribe had the right to
buy power generated at the dam.
All these points were in reference and in refute of APA’s project. In this res-
olution, the Navajo Tribal Council (figure 7) didn’t object to damming or power
generation on the Colorado River; it simply opposed who was doing it and at
what cost to the Navajo people. According to Little, APA was insisting it had
complete control over the project, regardless of the Navajo Tribe. It had no duty
to consult, work with, or provide power to the Navajo people. Its interest was
in generating power for settler communities. Little worked hard to make the
situation better for the Navajo Tribe. By drafting the resolution, the tribe openly
challenged APA’s plan while endorsing the role of the federal government.3
At this point, it is useful to distinguish between social analysis and historiog-
raphy. A historian would continue the chronology of events and tell you what
happened with APA’s proposal. Spoiler—it became NGS, which we will get to.
But here I want to take some time to focus on something that gets less atten-
tion than the history of energy development in the region—the tribe’s evolving
understanding of these issues. What is unique to this book is a consideration of
the transcripts of council delegates. We see the tribe’s “official” position in the
resolution that Little helped draft. But Diné understanding of these questions
was far different than the text reveals.
If we read this as the will of the council, we are missing important contextual
considerations in the making of the resolution. On the one hand, the council
was under considerable influence by the dictates of white people with power,
 76 CHAPTER 2

FIGURE 7 . Navajo Council delegates in session at the Navajo Council Chamber in Win-
dow Rock, AZ, May 1960, Navajo Nation Public Relations, NNM.L-1084G. Navajo
Nation Museum. SCA Item Number: 131552.

arrogance, and command of the English language, which was the official lan-
guage of legal and political debate. The delegates, on the other hand, experi-
enced punitive boarding schools and racist border towns, and spoke English as
a second language. They were more cautious, circumspect, and at times cunning
in thinking through the trapdoors of colonial jurisprudence.
What I analyze here is simply the recorded English testimony of delegates
who opposed APA’s project. We don’t have the behind-the-scenes conversation
in Diné bizaad that might reveal more of people’s attitudes at this time. Still, the
recorded English text is revealing. During the council debate on the resolutions
supporting the dams, Navajo council delegates recorded their own reasons for
supporting the legislation that were different from Little’s framing about state
and federal authorities. For example, the official resolution accompanying sup-
port for the Marble Canyon Dam emphasized the fact that
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 77

the existence of a state-controlled dam at Marble Canyon in between the Fed-

eral Reclamation Project at Glen Canyon, Davis, Hoover and the Parker Dams
on the Colorado River, would create a conflict of authority between the State
and Federal Governments.

How was the integrity of federal authority in the area a concern of the Navajo
Tribal Council? It was only a concern in how tribal rights were impacted by
the difference between federal and state authority. This difference was made
palatable in the early history of white settlement in the West and Southwest.
Settlers on the frontier were shock troops of expansion. They were prone to
genocidal violence. The federal government sometimes intervened in outright
killing. With water rights, the federal government protected its interest in rights
to water and, by extension, it guaranteed some rights to water for tribes.
The resolution supporting the Marble Canyon and Glen Canyon Dam proj-
ects appealed to the interests of the federal government and suggested that
preventing competing authority over the project (i.e., between the federal gov-
ernment and the state governments) would reduce the costs of these public
projects. This was the framing that Little gave. However, in recorded testimony
during deliberation, Diné delegates emphasized the callous disregard of Navajo
interests, demonstrated by Arizona trying to develop this project without con-
sulting the tribe and its council. For tribal officials, this was a question of tribal
sovereignty. Council Delegate Howard Gorman from Ganado said:

The Arizona Power Authority only wants to produce power for the Salt River
Valley and sell primarily to water users in Arizona, leaving the Navajos out,
ignoring their rights entirely. . . . Therefore, we want to endorse the Bureau of
Reclamation to build the Marble Canyon Dam because the Bureau of Reclama-
tion recognizes the rights of the Navajos. . . . I am quite sure that if the Bureau
of Reclamation builds this dam at Marble Canyon, then the western portion of
the Navajo reservation would get power; while, if the Arizona Power Authority
builds that dam, the western Navajos would be left out entirely.

The Navajo Tribal Council voted 56–0 in favor of the resolution. In so doing,
the council endorsed a hydroelectric dam project on the Colorado River because
it would prevent Arizona energy corporations from locking the Navajo people
out of access to water and land. Delegates believed federal control of the project
 78 CHAPTER 2

would provide more assurances than state authority because the federal govern-
ment would incorporate Diné claims to the area. As is evidenced in Gorman’s
testimony, the Navajo council encouraged the Bureau of Reclamation (BOR)
to take over the project for this reason. The decision by the council to side with
BOR and other federal entities was the outcome of state government hostility
toward tribes, especially in the late 1950s and early 1960s during the era of ter-
mination, when whole tribes were extinguished.
In this political context, the Bridge Canyon and Marble Canyon Dams
weren’t central; they were a means to an end, and that end was a fully funded
and powered Central Arizona Project. After the council passed the resolu-
tion supporting both the Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon Dams in 1961,
Secretary Udall pushed large federal projects meant to bring water and power
throughout the West. He envisioned a series of pipes and large water projects
that would bring water from the Columbia River Basin in the northwest to
the southwest. Udall’s ambitions were checked by the political reality of the
Colorado River, a hotly contested idea that defined state sovereignty and envi-
ronmental governance. The network of large canals was impossible, and it would
be unlikely he could get the Central Arizona Project off the ground (Einberger
2018; T. Smith 2017).

A SHIFTING POLITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS

At the beginning of the decade, sovereignty was wed to the goals of modern-
ization and development. This was part of the original vision of the Indian
Reorganization Act of 1934 that restructured federal Indian policy from forced
assimilation to nation building. For decades, this project failed. The federal
government forced livestock reduction. It also undermined the authority of
traditional leadership for partners on the ground who would implement the
government’s agenda.
The Diné people’s understanding of sovereignty changed with the rise of
Diné nationalism and the rhetoric of tribal sovereignty and self-determination
that was part of a changing political consciousness in the United States. Younger
Diné people organized across the reservation (see figure 8). They were radical-
ized by the civil rights movement and the antiwar movement. Many younger
Diné people read about the Black Panthers and Malcolm X. John Redhouse, a
Diné radical by the early 1970s, quoted Malcolm X in a Navajo Times opinion
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 79

FIGURE 8 . “Hundred March in Peaceful Protest,” Navajo Times, April 5, 1973.

editorial against the emerging coal industry. He said to then tribal chairman
Raymond Nakai, “But I don’t like the way you’ve been running our government.
You change things or we’ll change them. I don’t care. Malcom X once said,
‘The Ballot or the Bullet.’ And I say after Mr. X, let us sound off at the polls
or we’ll sound off in the streets. At any rate, the choice isn’t going to be yours
 80 CHAPTER 2

much longer.”4 Some Diné men were radicalized from the experience fighting in
Vietnam. They returned to the United States skeptical of federal Indian policy.
This emerging political consciousness within the Navajo Nation matched
developments happening in resource politics across the West. Water users from
the Upper Basin believed that the proposed dams would give Arizona users
more water than they were entitled to. They petitioned their representatives in
Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado to oppose any additional dams along the Col-
orado River. They also opposed the construction of a proposed water canal that
would bring waters from the Colorado River to Phoenix and Tucson. Up until
this point, most of the political drama over the Colorado River concerned fights
between California and Arizona. The Upper Basin states had smaller popula-
tions and less political leverage. They simply wanted to ensure downstream com-
munities didn’t take all the water—while they ignored Indigenous water needs.
For California, in the Lower Basin, the Boulder Canyon Act in 1928 initiated
the legal-political work needed to build the Hoover Dam, which included water
diversions to the Imperial and Coachella Valleys. For California, the Hoover Dam
helped guarantee the state its share of the Colorado River. Arizona got nothing
from this. The state objected to the division of waters in the Colorado Compact
six years earlier. It felt the compact leaned too heavily in favor of California. The
Boulder Canyon Act and the expansion of agricultural production in low-lying
valleys in southern California were a threat to Arizona’s water interest. In 1948
the Upper Basin states formed their own agreement over the distribution of the
Colorado River and its tributaries. This became a governing law operating within
the framework of the 1922 Colorado Compact. In 1952 Arizona sued California,
and the Supreme Court appointed a legal expert, called a special master, to work
through Arizona and California’s competing claims. The report took years to
complete but was issued in 1963 largely recognizing Arizona’s claims.
By the 1960s, the Upper Basin users were worried about Arizona’s designs
on the Colorado. This ambitious project that the state’s political elite proposed
would drain the river of most of its waters. Representative Wayne Aspinall of
southern Colorado was especially worried. He wanted better guarantees out-
side of the existing Colorado Compact. He was also the chair of the House
Interior and Insular Affairs Committee and used this position to prevent CAP
legislation from moving froward in Congress. As mentioned earlier, much was
working in Arizona’s favor at the time. Senator Hayden was the majority leader
in Congress. Stewart Udall, a former representative from southern Arizona, was
Kennedy’s secretary of the interior. The Supreme Court, after nearly a decade
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 81

of litigation between California and Arizona over rights to the Lower Basin
waters, ruled largely in favor of Arizona. The momentum toward water devel-
opment along the lower Colorado swung heavily in favor of Arizona in the
early 1960s. By that time, Arizona had overcome many of the legal and political
challenges preventing its exploitation of the Colorado River. What it didn’t
count on was the role of environmental groups in opposing Arizona’s designs.
Another difference between 1961 and 1966 was the new role of environmen-
tal groups, particularly the Sierra Club, which now vocally opposed the dam
projects. The organization launched a new style of campaigning to oppose the
project, buying an advertisement in the New York Times comparing the inun-
dation of the Grand Canyon from the proposed Bridge Canyon and Marble
Canyon Dams with the flooding of the Sistine Chapel. This was unprecedented
in U.S. environmentalism at the time. The Sierra Club asked its members to
write to their congressperson to end the dam project and to expand the official
boundaries of the Grand Canyon National Park to include sections that would
be flooded in the proposed dam projects. This was one of the most successful
and famous Sierra Club campaigns and is seen now as a milestone of U.S. envi-
ronmentalism (Gottlieb 2005).
Pressure from environmentalists created impossible barriers for the Mar-
ble Canyon and Bridge Canyon Dams. Up until 1965, Arizona’s political elite
believed California was the main threat to Arizona’s water ambitions. Sud-
denly, Upper Basin users and environmentalists added new challenges. It was
a breaking point for Arizona, and its political leadership complained loudly in
editorials in local papers.
From Phoenix, developers, representatives, and others threatened to build the
project with or without federal assistance. The state took on a bellicose attitude
even though it didn’t have the political or financial capital to go it alone. It was
emboldened reactionary politics, epitomized in Barry Goldwater and his rebrand-
ing of conservatism in his 1964 presidential run. Lyndon B. Johnson famously
insinuated Goldwater would lead the United States into a nuclear war if he was
elected. He was a threat to the country. He was also a representative from Arizona
with direct influence over Indigenous nations and federal Indian policy. The state’s
public threats to build CAP without federal approval didn’t help Udall’s efforts to
appease California’s governor at the time, Jerry Brown. Udall took an approach to
appease a more general political interest, promising funding for projects outside
Arizona alongside the building of CAP. Phoenix blasted California, the federal
government, upstream users in Colorado, and tribes.
 82 CHAPTER 2

In 1966, only five years after the tribal council voted to support the construc-
tion of the Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon Dams, the council revisited
these proposed projects. Again, Little initiated the review. He used his position
as the tribe’s main attorney to play politics in Washington, D.C. By 1966 he and
others saw the dams as a threat to tribal sovereignty. He convinced the council
that it should rescind the 1961 resolution supporting the two dams and replace it
with a resolution supporting a coal-fired power plant instead. For the first time,
the council spoke in support of a coal-fired power plant on the western end of
the reservation—what would become the Navajo Generating Station (NGS).5
By the time I did my field research nearly fifty years later, coal was an
entrenched industry in the Navajo Nation. In 1966 coal existed only on the
eastern end of the reservation and the tribe was already seeing the benefits. The
council believed the development of coal would spur more economic devel-
opment in the western end of the reservation and guarantee energy security.
The dam projects were designed in a way that would provide the tribe little
benefit. Coal, it was thought, could supply outside interests, and provide power
to Navajo homes.
On August 3, 1966, the Navajo Tribal Council considered resolution CAU-
97–66, “Opposing the Construction of Dams in Marble Gorge and Other Por-
tions of the Grand Canyon.” The resolution condemned the Udall brothers,
Representative Morris Udall (AZ) and Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall,
for not considering the interests of the Navajo people in their efforts to secure
the construction of a dam on the Colorado River. The premise of the resolution,
the “whereas” section of it, reads like a polemic against the Udall brothers and
others in the federal government. It “condemn[s] the ruthless character of the
promoters of the Lower Colorado River Basin Project.” It also emphasizes coal
as a cheaper alternative to hydroelectric power—which the resolution charac-
terizes as “a waste of public funds.” In the resolution, the Navajo Tribal Council
“urges and memorializes the Congress to consider favorably” the enlargement
of the Grand Canyon National Monument to prevent the Bureau of Recla-
mation or anyone else from constructing a dam on the western rim of the
Navajo Nation. But when Navajo Tribal Council delegates spoke in favor of it,
again they demonstrated that their own thinking on the issue often diverged in
important ways from the language of the resolution.
Carl Todacheene, a delegate from Shiprock, said in no uncertain terms, “We
have to sell our coal.” For him, coal was the primary concern. “I think we would
be jeopardizing that thing [Navajo coal] if we don’t withdraw that resolution of
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 83

1961”—the resolution that supported the Marble Canyon and Bridge Canyon
Dams. In Todacheene’s view, if hydroelectric power were developed, there would
be no place to sell the tribe’s bounty of coal reserves. Norman Little informed
the tribe that it should support coal development because coal and nuclear
energy were cheaper to produce than hydroelectric power. Little said, “Long
after all of us have left this mortal world coal will still be going strong but when
it does run out you have thermo-nuclear power which can create and generate
electric power far cheaper than hydro power.”
The resolution reversed the council’s earlier support for the dams. Council
Delegate Howard Gorman, from Ganado, spoke the most passionately in favor
of the tribe’s opposition to dams along the Colorado River. He expressed frus-
tration in colonial indifference to tribal needs. He believed the tribe needed
to act in order to preserve tribal resources, whose taking away was inherently
wrong and unfair. Gorman said:

We’re talking really about Navajo property or recognized something which

rightly belongs to the Navajo people, the river, the country. . . . The Federal
Government has been taking lands away from us right and left and it has been
repeated so many times that the Navajos have just been pressed into a small
area. . . . Everybody forgets the Navajo Tribe. Nobody remembers our interests.
For that matter these people who are promoting this have apparently no respect
for our existence or that we have a legally operated Tribal Council with legal
advisors. They ignore all of this.

Here Gorman expresses his sense of how the Navajo Nation was treated
unfairly in mineral leases. He went on to say, “We have a right to fight for our
rights.” Gorman’s testimony suggests that the tribal council wasn’t deluded or
tricked into signing coal leases. Diné leaders made pragmatic concessions to
support one form of energy development over another in the interest of self-
determination. The political climate around energy disfavored more damming
on the Colorado River. Coal was the environmentally friendly choice and one
that had the benefit of strengthening the tribe’s position. It is the origin for
carbon sovereignty in modern practice in the reservation. Carbon sovereignty—
with its limited rights and forced partnerships with federal institutions—was
the vehicle through which the delegates exercised the Navajo people’s collective
“rights,” or sense of control, over their land and water. The need to develop
the tribe’s carbon resources in order to modernize the reservation created the
 84 CHAPTER 2

dynamics of carbon sovereignty shown here. Fifty years later, these dynamics
persist.

MOVING TOWARD SOVEREIGNTY AND SELF-DETERMINATION

The Diné people elected Peter MacDonald, a new kind of popular leader, in
1970, a year after the SRP contract was signed. He championed the differ-
ent language of activism, social justice, and tribal self-determination. It was a
discourse in conversation with radical movements forming throughout Indian
Country. Although the American Indian Movement (AIM) is the most well-
known group from this period, a new spirit of organizing and critique of the
federal government permeated throughout Indian Country and within urban
diasporic Indigenous communities. For decades, tribal leaders were ignored,
only able to voice enough opposition to mitigate the destruction of land theft,
river diversion, and ecosystem destruction that followed new settlements, tech-
nologies, and settlement. At best, tribal leaders could mitigate outright land
theft. For Diné people, the Treaty of 1868 wasn’t a compromise as much as an
ultimatum—Diné people had to live within the physical and social boundaries
established by the United States or face destruction as a people.
In 1972, three years after the Navajo council signed the lease with the Salt
River Project, AIM activists and Indigenous community members walked hun-
dreds of miles from one end of the country to the other in the “Trail of Broken
Treaties.” The march took its name from both the infamous “trail of tears”—the
1830s ethnic cleansing of Cherokee, Choctaws, Creeks, Seminoles, and Chicka-
saws from what would become the U.S. South, where slavery would expand in
new and brutal forms—and the hundreds of treaties the United States signed
with Indigenous nations but casually disregarded in imperialistic landgrabs
throughout the nineteenth century.
Tribal organizers throughout Indian Country petitioned for major reforms in
federal Indian administration. There was a growing awareness that the BIA was
paternalistic and many officials openly racist. Indigenous leaders, both old and
young, witnessed civil rights activism and antiwar protests (Wilkinson 2005). In
response to this activism, Congress passed the Indian Self-Determination and
Educational Assistance Act of 1975. The legislation allowed tribes to take over
functions of the federal government on reservation lands. Public Law 93–638
(the Indian Self-Determination and Educational Assistance Act) devolved to
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 85

the tribal government authorities and administration. This allowed tribal leaders
to oversee their own institutions. One of the first institutions that the Navajo
Nation took over were the tribal courts and police.6
In 1973 Egypt and Syria went to war against Israel to recapture territories
Israel took in 1967. The United States and other capitalist countries supported
Israel. OPEC issued an embargo against Israel’s allies to pressure them to the
negotiating table. The price of oil increased substantially in the United States
in late 1973 and early 1974. Gas stations ran out of gas. The media at the time
characterized these events as an oil crisis. For the U.S. public, the question was
one rooted in energy consumption, not colonialism.
Peter MacDonald and other Indigenous leaders in the United States saw the
power of international organizations like OPEC. They recognized that their
own nations also exported the raw materials for U.S. energy infrastructure,
including oil, coal, and natural gas. In 1975, after a series of meetings and con-
ferences, the Navajo Nation and twenty-four other tribes founded the Council
of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT). CERT was meant to act like a “cartel”
and coordinate a united voice of tribes with resources against the divide-and-
conquer approach of the federal government. CERT is an important example
of how the self-determination era ushered in a new sense of Indigenous nation-
alism with concomitant efforts to “develop” along capitalist lines.
Just as Peabody Coal started mining on Black Mesa in 1974, Congress
passed the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act. It was not just a coincidence.
Peabody needed Hopi and Diné boundaries to be established so it could enter
contracts with either and both nations to mine coal on Black Mesa. The leg-
islation created a land swap, whereby Diné families were displaced from their
homes on Black Mesa and relocated to “new lands” purchased by the federal
government and held “in trust” for the tribe. While the Navajo-Hopi Land
Settlement Act was passed in 1974, the process of relocation did not begin until
Peterson Zah took office in 1983, nine years later. The relocation was delayed
because many Diné families refused to move from their homelands onto these
new reservations created in places unknown to them. Hopi police impounded
Diné livestock and harassed Diné families who refused to leave. The BIA pre-
vented Diné people from performing routine house maintenance and from
building on family lands. This “freeze” on simple home repair amounted to
policies of ethnic cleansing that were euphemistically called the Navajo–Hopi
land dispute. With limited options, the Navajo Nation believed it could chal-
lenge colonial policies like the forced removal of Navajo families by exerting
 86 CHAPTER 2

greater control over its resources. With money from resources, the Navajo
Nation could gain leverage in the policy-making process and protect families
who resisted resettlement.
Concluding this transformative decade was a reminder of the toxic nature
of extractive industries for tribes. By this point, Diné miners who worked in
uranium mines in the 1950s and early 1960s started developing unusual cancers.
Most didn’t smoke, but they were diagnosed with lung cancer. One thing they
had in common was that they worked underground with uranium and often
without masks or any kind of protective gear other than a hard hat. The cancer
epidemic among Diné uranium workers was one of the first wake-up calls about
the dangers of extractive industries on the people. Then, in 1979, the United
Nuclear Corporation, a uranium company, spilled hundreds of gallons of radio-
active water into the Rio Puerco, which served Diné communities downstream.
The permanent contamination of this river was the greatest nuclear accident in
U.S. history. The disaster marked the end of uranium mining for the tribe. Most
of the mines from the 1950s and 1960s closed by this time (often haphazardly),
and the increasing scale of nuclear contamination was too much for the tribal
government to handle. The physical destruction of Black Mesa for coal mining
and the health implications of uranium mining shaped the practice of Diné
carbon sovereignty going forward.

NEOLIBERALISM IN THE NAVAJO NATION

The Navajo Nation renegotiated its mining lease with Peabody Coal in 1986.
It tried to rework the royalty rates for Black Mesa coal. In the 1960s and 1970s,
when the first mine leases were signed, Peabody paid eight cents per ton of coal.
This was the federal rate for mining on public lands. It was also a dismally low
rate that undervalued Diné coal for decades. In the language of sovereignty, the
tribe asserted that it wanted more from its leases. It worked to move away from
the cents-per-ton model to a percentage of the coal sold.7
In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president and reduced federal spending
toward tribes (Kotlowski 2008). At the same time, the Navajo Nation passed
its first comprehensive energy policy. This was in response to the changes in
attitudes toward both uranium and coal mining. In this new perspective, coal
was the future; uranium was poison. Energy took on new importance in the
imagination of the U.S. public following the OPEC embargo and oil crisis of
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 87

the late 1970s. A concern about the future of U.S. energy and a renewed sense
of Indigenous nationalism fueled Navajo carbon sovereignty at the time.
The language of the Navajo Nation’s 1980 energy policy was largely rhetor-
ical, but it was also assertive. The energy policy emphasized the role of tribal
sovereignty in controlling natural resources. The tribe adopted the energy pro-
posal to emerge from an era when it felt it was exploited by mineral and leasing
contracts with large energy companies like Peabody Coal and BHP Billiton.
The first assertion of sovereign power over resources was to own the means of
energy production.
In 1985 the Navajo Nation won a legal challenge against Peabody Coal for
its undervaluing of the coal extracted from the Navajo Nation, depriving the
tribe of hundreds of millions of dollars. The suit procured a windfall of money
for the tribe. Then Navajo Nation chairman Peterson Zah created a permanent
trust fund in which to invest the money. The idea was to expand the money
so that it would increase in value over time. The Navajo Nation was trying
new ways of securing its future, including new forms of financialization of its
resources and assets. The same year, the Navajo Nation Tribal Council created
the Diné Power Authority to build a coal-fired power plant and high-capacity
transmission lines. The council wanted to capture more value from the energy
economy. Leaders realized that the power plants captured most of the profit in
closed-market energy economies. If the tribe wanted to advance into a wealthier
nation, it needed to move beyond the revenues of coal.
Also that year, the tribe initiated a project to build a coal-fired power plant
on lands it was swapping via the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act from 1974.
The tribe had the right to select thirty-five thousand acres of federal land in
New Mexico to relocate Diné people who lost their homes on the expanding
boundaries of the Hopi Reservation. The tribe’s strategy was to use the land in
New Mexico to secure new sources of coal, namely at Paragon Ranch. Although
the land title and mineral rights weren’t transferred as quickly as tribal lawmak-
ers thought was possible, the tribe nonetheless created an institutional apparatus
to realize a future power plant project on this land—the Diné Power and Light
Authority, eventually Diné Power Authority (DPA). DPA evolved over the next
twenty years. Paragon Ranch faltered. New Mexico and other energy developers
challenged the tribe to the right to acquire that land. The Navajo Nation had to
wait. In the meantime, it continued to staff and fund DPA.
In 1989 the Navajo Nation Council removed Peter MacDonald as chair-
man of the Navajo Nation because of his abuses of authority. The council also
 88 CHAPTER 2

restructured the tribal government to resemble the U.S. three-branch system of

federal power, replacing the title of “chairman” with “president.” Peterson Zah
was elected again in 1992 as the first president of the Navajo Nation, and in
1994 the Navajo Nation created the Navajo Environmental Protection Agency
(Navajo EPA), mirroring the federal agency. Zah brought together organizers
working on environmental issues and asked them to form an organization. This
became the Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Environment (Diné C.A.R.E.).
Some of the members had worked against proposed projects on the reservation,
like a waste incinerator factoring on the western end of the reservation. Others
came to the organizing through work against border-town violence in Gallup—
centering social and racial justice advocacy in the work of Diné environmental
activism.
During the 1990s, the Navajo Nation created a water rights unit in its tribal
Department of Justice. The strategy of its lead attorney, Stanley Pollack, has
been to settle the Navajo Nation’s outstanding water claims. Pollack has been
both praised and criticized for his approach to water rights advocacy, relying on
negotiating settlements over court litigation. He was the lead attorney to settle
a Navajo water claim to the San Juan River in 2005. I was in the Navajo Nation
Council chambers in 2005 when the council agreed to this settlement. The goal
of these settlements has been to secure adequate amounts of water and ensure
funding for large water infrastructure in the Navajo Nation.
The Navajo tribal government responded to emerging environmental activ-
ism. It created institutions that mimicked federal environmental laws. The simi-
larity between tribal law and federal law wasn’t accidental; the tribal government
passed laws that would make it easier for the federal government to devolve its
authority to the tribal level. The Navajo Environmental Protection Agency was
the first in a series of environmental laws passed. The Navajo Nation strength-
ened its institutional authority over resource questions during this time. The
Navajo Nation Council created a version of a tribal institutional review board
within the Division of Health to protect Diné people from exploitative research.
Albert Hale, the Diné attorney who helped restructure the government in 1989,
also worked with former secretary of the interior Stewart Udall to get federal
compensation for the widows of former uranium mine workers. When he was
president, he helped initiate local governance as a political project. Local gov-
ernance referred to the more than one hundred community centers, or chapter
houses, throughout the reservation. Udall wanted to devolve certain forms of
decision-making to these governments and away from Window Rock. President
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 89

Kelsey Begaye signed the Local Governance Act (LGA), or Title 26, to the
Navajo Nation Code in 1998. LGA provided conditions for chapter houses to
do business development and land-use planning. Sovereignty was reimagined
to work at different scales, against the centralization of tribal governments and
something imagined as a “traditional” form.
These changes culminated in the 2002 passage of the Fundamental Laws of
the Diné. The laws were an attempt to codify traditional Diné teachings into the
structure of the Navajo Nation government. One-quarter of the Fundamental
Laws are dedicated to “natural laws,” or laws that deal with the Navajo peo-
ple’s traditional relationship with the environment. In 2005 the Navajo Nation
Council permanently banned uranium mining in the Navajo Nation because
of its legacy of harm to the environment and health of the Navajo people. The
Navajo Nation Council did this at the same time it pursued new and expanded
forms of coal mining in the reservation, talking about negative environmental
and health effects with respect to uranium mining but focusing on jobs and
revenues when it came to coal.
Since 2005, environmental organizations and others have developed a strong
critique of carbon sovereignty in the Navajo Nation. Much of this critique is
immersed in the changed contextual circumstances of our time. As in the 1960s,
profound social change has occurred in the early 2000s, with consequences not
fully appreciated at this time. Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the
World Trade Center, the United States has been involved in two wars across
the world, one in Afghanistan and the other in Iraq. Many members of the
Navajo Nation circulated through this military experience. It was also during
this time that the decennial census found that more self-identified “Native
American” respondents lived outside reservations than inside them. A new kind
of anxiety informed tribal lawmakers and everyday Diné people in the early
2000s: younger people weren’t speaking the Diné language, and the jobs of the
1950s and 1960s never materialized. Coal work, education, and government were
chief employment sectors (Henson 2008). Lawmakers sought new sources of
employment to keep people living on the reservation, including more coal mines
and new power plants.
Also in 2005, the Houston energy firm Sithe Global approached the Navajo
Nation with a proposal to build a power plant in the reservation. The project
immediately generated opposition. By this point, the Navajo public was largely
aware of the environmental costs of strip mining. Many Diné environmental
groups pointed out that coal power contributed a large portion to the greenhouse
 90 CHAPTER 2

gasses causing climate change. This was a different social landscape than when
coal was an exciting new source of jobs and revenues for the reservation. In 2008
the U.S. economy nearly collapsed. President Barack Obama proposed changes
to the U.S. economy that would prioritize green energy. When I started looking
at these issues of coal and development in the Navajo Nation in the mid-2000s,
this was the context of the debate.
In 2010 Navajo Nation president Ben Shelly, whose largest campaign con-
tributions came from the United Mine Workers, declared that the Navajo
Nation must invest in “sustainable” and “alternative” energy technologies. In
October 2013 the Navajo Nation Council rescinded its 1980 energy policy, which
acknowledged that the tribe must “transition” out of the coal economy. This was
a point first offered by environmental organizations in 2005. Yet this new energy
policy defined new uses of coal, such as coal liquification and clean coal tech-
nologies, as “alternative” energy technologies on par with “sustainable energy.”
The 2013 energy policy actively worked to redefine coal as an alternative to
itself. Although the policy still embraces coal, it has qualitatively changed. That
year, the Navajo Nation Council voted to change its energy policy. The rhetoric
and tone moved from the resource nationalism of the 1980s into the language
of transition and alternatives that exist today and that are part of a burgeoning
politics of alternatives. In 2019, in a desperate effort to keep NGS open, the
Navajo Nation Council briefly considered rescinding the 2013 energy policy.
These developments signify that a new Navajo nationalist resource con-
sciousness that had matured by the mid-2000s was in full practice in the Navajo
Nation. New environmental laws and regulatory agencies, such as Navajo EPA
or the Fundamental Laws of the Diné, although seemingly about conservation
of natural resources and not their exploitation, are nonetheless expressions of
this resource nationalism. Both exploitation and conservation exert a claim of
Navajo ownership over its resources that conform to the political and legal
boundaries of the tribal government. As we saw in chapter 1, Diné conceptual-
ization of space changes into the legal and political boundaries of the Navajo
Reservation that the U.S. government recognized. As we will see in the next
chapter, a critique of these practices emerged concurrent with and against this
resource nationalism that built on critiques of tribal sovereignty as both corrupt
and exploitive in nature. I discuss this emergent ideology—one actively engaged
in the construction of a culture of alternatives to both resource nationalism and
development—in the concluding chapter of this book.
 CARBON SOVEREIGNTY 91

CONCLUSION

When the federal government established the Navajo Nation as a reservation

(consistent with federal Indian law and policy), it created extractive spaces,
a territorializing that emphasized mining, leasing, and energy development.
This is the consequence of reservations and the authorities they were given. It
is easier and quicker to get a coal mine established than to build a home on
tribal lands. Other industries have not established themselves in the reservation
because of the difficult legal-political terrain they encounter that is the result
of colonial policy.
Over time, fossil fuels defined a new expression of sovereignty, a carbon sov-
ereignty that has come to define the goals and objectives of tribal governance in
the Navajo Nation. Fossil fuel extraction, primarily coal and oil, gave the Navajo
Nation the possibility to expand its governance and sense of self-determination.
Coal was defined against colonial control, an irony because it is today under-
stood as a function of colonial governance. What is important here is that
carbon sovereignty became a baseline for governance. New projects were judged
against the way coal and other extractive industries worked on the reservation.
The possibility for decades of revenue and hundreds of good-paying jobs made
coal a solution to many of the colonial problems reservations created.
 CHAPTER 3
CARBON TREATYMAKING

S
HORTLY AFTER BLACK Mesa Mine closed on January 1, 2006, then Navajo Nation
president Joe Shirley Jr. proposed that the Navajo Nation build Desert
Rock, a brand-new coal-fired power plant, on the eastern end of the res-
ervation. Coming off the heels of the Diné Natural Resource Protection Act
of 2005, which banned uranium mining in the Navajo Nation, this was seen as
contradictory. In an interview that year on Democracy Now!, president Joe Shir-
ley defended the Navajo coal economy. He said, “In the case of the uranium, we
don’t want any more companies coming in, so that’s where this ban has been
put on the books, and we’re going to stand our ground as a sovereign nation to
try to preserve our ability to not let it happen. But as far as coal and natural gas,
we’re continuing to mine those, albeit, you know, there are some things that are
not good about it” (Curley 2008, 12).
The power plant would be the most ambitious extension of the Navajo coal
economy in thirty years and in some ways was a response to the closure of the
mine earlier that year. The debate Desert Rock generated was a forerunner to
what would occur in 2013 (Curley 2018; Powell 2017a, 2017b). The tribe argued
that the plant would create more jobs for Diné workers and increase revenues in
tribal coffers. However, the project failed. The Navajo Nation Council stopped
funding studies that supported the plant and ended meetings with potential
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 93

partners. The project quietly faded from possibility and from memory. It was an
example of carbon sovereignty unfulfilled.
At the height of the debate in 2007, I was working as a research assistant
at Diné College, a tribal college whose main campus is in Tsaile. During this
time, I realized that the politics of development in our nation was between
environmental organizations and the Navajo tribal government over the issue of
mineral extraction and resource development. In the case of Desert Rock, sev-
eral environmental organizations publicly opposed the proposed power plant.
Ojibwe activist and environmentalist Winona LaDuke published an op-ed in
the Navajo Times pleading to the Navajo Nation Council to not build the plant.
As a confidential interviewee in the tribal government told me, New Mexico
killed the project in 2008 when it denied the project the necessary air permits to
operate (TG14; see table 1 for a list of 2013 interviews). This action by the State
of New Mexico, more than the protests of environmentalists or the misgivings
of the council, ended the project. With the closure of Black Mesa Mine and
the death of the Desert Rock project, the Navajo coal economy experienced its
biggest setback in its fifty-year history.

TABLE 1 . Tribal government interviews, 2013

AGE* GENDER EDUCATION OCCUPATION

TG1 40s F College Auditor

TG2 40s M Graduate Division director
TG3 40s M Graduate Advisor
TG4 40s M High school Advisor
TG5 60s M Graduate Attorney
TG6 50s M College Elected official
TG7 50s F Graduate Attorney
TG8 50s M Graduate Attorney
TG9 60s F Graduate Attorney
TG10 40s M Graduate Advisor
TG11 50s M Graduate Elected official
TG12 50s M College Elected official
TG13 60s M Graduate Attorney
TG14 50s M College Advisor

*exact age and occupation withheld

 94 CHAPTER 3

In the past, coal leases were passed almost unanimously and with little debate.
As discussed in the previous chapter, white lawyers from the Navajo Depart-
ment of Justice such as Norman Little persuaded the Navajo Tribal Council
that pursuing coal development was a good idea to preserve Diné control over
its resources. Little explicitly said that coal had a limited life in the reservation
and that the Navajo Tribe should pursue it before nuclear energy eventually
replaced it. This was before the science of climate change was well established.
For conservation groups opposing hydroelectric dams at the time, coal was a
better alternative. Once established, coal became an important source of revenue
for the tribal government and a source of livelihood for workers in the industry.
Unlike the oil industry, coal employed hundreds of workers.
In 2009, the year after New Mexico killed Desert Rock, the Chevron Cor-
poration announced that it would close the McKinley Mine, which was located
between Window Rock and Gallup and had been in operation since 1962. On
the side of the tribal government, there was no effort to save the mine from clos-
ing. The Navajo Nation accepted the closure of the mine with little ceremony.
The workers at the mine were let go. I asked a former Shirley official why the
Navajo Nation did not try to save the McKinley Mine and that person told me
coal there was “exhausted.” Some of these workers, as a Kayenta resident told
me, moved to Kayenta to look for work at the mine (KR10; see table 2, next
chapter). Others simply left the industry altogether.1
The next year, on the eve of the next presidential election, the tribe’s attention
turned to the question of government reform in the form of council reduction. As
a referendum vote, reduction would decrease the size of the tribal council from
eighty-eight members to twenty-four. Like the literature on resource curse, com-
munity members blamed governing officials for the lack of progress in the nation.
As the son of a council delegate, I was opposed to the effort. I thought it was
shortsighted and didn’t address problems more fundamental to tribal governance.
With the closing of two of the four long-standing coal mines in the Navajo
Nation in a three-year span, and the failure of the tribe to build a new power
plant on the eastern end of the reservation, it looked like coal would experience
a fast exit from the reservation. In 2010 BHP, the Australian mining company
that had operated Navajo Mine since 1963, announced that it could not come
to a coal supply agreement with the New Mexico utility PNM, which owned
and operated the Four Corners Generating Station, fifty years old at this point.
With BHP unable to come to terms with PNM, it seemed that Navajo Mine
would close alongside one of the region’s most polluting power plants.2
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 95

Unknown to outside observers at the time, including myself, outgoing pres-

ident Joe Shirley Jr. had created a negotiating team in 2010 to renew the lease
of the Navajo Generating Station (TG3). For two years, the NGS negotiating
team met in secret and negotiated the lease with the Salt River Project.3 It
was during this time that members of this team proposed the idea of buying
Navajo Mine from BHP (TG12). This was a pipe dream at the time, but a pipe
dream that complemented the ideals of an entrenched political interest in the
Navajo Nation. This dream quickly gained political momentum. Soon, it was a
reasonable position among elected lawmakers and tribal officials. According to
one council delegate, a former member of the Natural Resources and Economic
Development Committee, the president’s advisor on energy introduced this idea
of purchasing the mine for the first time in a meeting between BHP and the
Navajo Nation about the potential closure of Navajo Mine sometime in 2012
(TG12). This information was relayed to me in passing, and crucial details are
missing, such as the meeting time, date, and agenda. But information of this
sort—anecdotes, gossip, and other informal conversations—plays an import-
ant function in constructing a narrative about the behind-the-scenes politics
involved on an issue, as these backdoor politics reflect real motivations for coal
renewal.

CARBON TREATIES

The renewal of the Navajo Generating Station lease in 2013 was an example of
modern-day treatymaking. Navajo Nation Council delegates were concerned
about land leases for strip-mining, water rates for coal production, the land
lease over the railway that connected the mine to the power plant, and the land
lease for the actual power plant itself. This combination of revenues from land
leases and water leases accounted for a quarter of the Navajo Nation’s nonfederal
revenue at the time. Tribal sovereignty was understood but performed in the
context of colonial capitalism.
The Navajo Nation Council signed the original land lease for the Navajo
Generating Station in 1969. It was an agreement between the tribe and several
regional utilities, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Navajo Nation. The life of
the lease was fifty years but with the option to extend it for another twenty-five
if the utilities wanted to. An extension would take the life of the power plant
to 2044.
 96 CHAPTER 3

In 2013 the Navajo Nation and SRP were interested in extending the lease,
but other owners of NGS, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power
(LADWP) and Nevada Electric, said they would not continue with the power
plant beyond 2019 and would no longer buy power from it. LADWP and
Nevada Electric had ambitious goals to move out of coal and into renewable
energy production. LADWP was even subject to a State of California mandate
to do it.
In the previous chapter, I discussed the ideological and material basis of car-
bon sovereignty. But the flipside of sovereignty is concession. For many Indig-
enous nations in the United States, concession comes in the form of treaties.
Colonial governments and corporations looking to take advantage of the lim-
ited political power of tribes force Indigenous nations to adhere to the political,
legal, and social limitations of tribal sovereignty that are built into federal Indian
law and policy. For colonizers, these powers need to access resources in and
around reservations. I refer to this concession process between tribes and col-
onizers as carbon treatymaking—an extension of the idea of carbon sovereignty
and its inherent limitations.
Carbon treatymaking is not simply an abstract, theoretical idea but an
observable phenomenon. It is embodied in practices recognizable to anyone
who has spent any time with tribal officials trying to carry out everyday func-
tions of governance. It is not just the “agency” in a social structure; it is an expla-
nation of how agency works within a colonial context. The research and ideas in
this book are something of a grounded approach to tribal sovereignty, focusing
on how Indigenous actors understand and practice “sovereignty,” and what they
believe they can do with the powers and authorities of tribal governments.
During the nineteenth century, Indigenous nations were compelled by force
to give up land and territory and move to much smaller reservations out of
the path of westward expansion. Colonizers continued a pattern of land theft
into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries through leases, intergovernmental
agreements, and settlements. Like the treaties of the nineteenth century, these
modern agreements often involve the use of or access to natural resources. I
have written about Indian water settlements as colonial enclosures elsewhere
(Curley 2019a, 2021b).
This chapter illustrates some of the ways in which extractive industries
perpetuate colonial difference through modern forms of treatymaking that
are aimed at placing limitations and concessions around Indigenous resource
claims. Although we can look to the past for examples of outrageous colonial
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 97

indifference in the sordid history of U.S.–Indigenous relations (from the Trail of

Tears to Wounded Knee), it is in the present where the renewal, expansion, and
evolution of colonial limitations are harder to see and identify. In the present
tense, colonial institutions are in full public relations spin. This is the case in
contract renewals, water settlements, policing agreements, and land-use agree-
ments where political inequality is perpetuated and expanded.
To get a sense of this larger phenomena, we will look in detail at one such
event—the renewal of a land lease between the Navajo Nation and the owners
of the Navajo Generating Station in 2013. I suggest that the renewal of the
NGS lease in 2013 was another process of treatymaking between the Navajo
Nation and colonial governments. In the 2013 lease renewal, the Navajo Nation
was asked to forego water claims to the Colorado River. It was also asked to
exempt the owners of the power plant from Navajo Nation law, which in effect
exempted the lease site from tribal sovereignty. The renewal of the lease between
the tribe and the owners of the power plant renewed key political limitations on
the Navajo Nation. Some might rightly argue that there is a difference between
treaties and leases. Treaties are agreements often over territory between inde-
pendent nations. This is the reading of many Indigenous scholars to argue that
tribes are deserving of more political freedoms. Another reading of Indian trea-
ties is that they imposed limitations on tribes in the interest of colonial west-
ward expansion. Tribes didn’t come to the treatymaking table as equal partners
or even as willing participants. We don’t need to get into a pedantic and legal
discourse on treaties and leases to focus on one commonality: treaties and leases
set land, water, and other resource limits on the collective rights of Indigenous
nations in the interest of colonial, corporate, and capitalist expansion.
The 2013 lease between the Navajo Nation and SRP required active partici-
pation from tribal lawmakers to legitimize these limitations (figure 9). The lease,
like treaties before it, set conditions on Navajo jurisdiction and the use of Diné
resources in exchange for monetary goods and investment in infrastructure.
Functionally, the lease operated like previous treaties, but it gave fewer rights
to Diné people as benefits had temporal end points (whereas the costs became
permanent). The two major limitations the 2013 lease imposed were labor rights
for Diné workers and rights to thirty-four thousand acre-feet of Colorado River
waters. I will explain both conditions and how they were reproduced in a 2013
lease throughout the remainder of this chapter.
The land lease, which alienated tribal lands from tribal control and preserved
water for colonial institutions instead of tribal interests, had the same effect as
 98 CHAPTER 3

FIGURE 9. Former Navajo Nation attorney general Harrison Tsosie addressing a gathering
of coal workers before the Navajo Nation Council vote on April 11, 2013, to extend the
lease for the Navajo Generating Station for an additional twenty-five years. Photograph
by Andrew Curley.

nineteenth-century treaty agreements that reduced and restricted Navajo land

claims and deferred to federal policing over criminal jurisdiction issues. The 1885
Major Crimes Act built off the spirit of the “Bad Man” clause found in treaty
language and deferred policing and punishment to the criminal codes of the
federal government. The lineage of this law is in effect today—making the FBI
responsible for murders on reservations.
But the lease renewal was also a cultural event. It was an expression of the
values and ideological understandings of colonial forces against the internal
desire for enhanced rights and self-determination. The lease was a structure
through which agency was performed. The degree to which actors such as SRP
could impact the terms of the lease compared to the Navajo Nation speaks
to the power differentials existent between colonizing forces and Indigenous
resistance. SRP could walk away and abandon the lease if it didn’t like the
terms the Navajo Nation put forward. For the Diné people, much more was
at stake.
The renewal of a lease taken as a social phenomenon is intriguing because it
tells us something different about the social, cultural, and political dimensions
of the actors over time. It is different from the initial signing of the lease—in
this case nearly fifty years prior—and demonstrates social change; that is, what
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 99

were the new priorities of the tribal government in 2013 compared to 1969?
Renewal speaks to the social, political, and economic dependency, to colonial-
ism and new forms of paternalism and racism. Renewal brings in the politics of
climate change and the consideration of carbon that was not part of the debate
during the signing of the original lease in 1969. It asks uncomfortable questions
about the limitations of tribal sovereignty, as most of the terms of the lease were
unaltered in 2013 from the midcentury original. The process of renewal is the
object of analysis here. What were its social components? What does this tell
us about the state of U.S.–Indigenous relations? What does the event inform us
about the prospect for development in reservations? What is the collective but
fractured legacy of extractive industries in the Navajo Nation and how do these
inform the way different groups responded to the prospect of renewal—both
socially and politically?
Through participant-observation research in 2013, I observed Diné lawmak-
ers debate the meaning and importance “for the tribe” of the Navajo Generating
Station and coal industry in general. Tribal lawmakers described in detail the
social forces that keep coal in the reservation.

2013 COAL RENEWAL

To understand carbon treaties, we must appreciate how they are both different
and similar to nineteenth-century treaties. In the era of treatymaking between
the federal government and Indigenous nations, control over land was a key
obstacle of control. The United States was interested in expanding its absolute
territorial claims, and a key strategy was the displacement and confinement of
Indigenous nations. Tribes were confined to reservations in the process. This
history is well understood among Indigenous critiques and historians and forms
much of the basis of settler-colonial theory.
As was discussed in the previous chapter, the 1934 Indian Reorganization
Act replaced parts of the assimilationist program while replicating core assump-
tions of it. An aim of the IRA was to address tribal land loss, especially lands
lost through the 1887 General Allotment Act. The IRA consolidated territorial
rights of tribes within remaining treaty lands. This, it was believed, would pre-
vent further alienation of tribal land. However, the IRA retained Congress’s
plenary power over tribes. The IRA also ensured that title for all Indian lands
was in the hands of the federal government. Within the U.S. federal system,
 100 CHAPTER 3

tribes became use-occupants of their own lands, with the United States holding
ultimate ownership and power.
Although the United States claims title over the continent—including reser-
vation lands—in practice, within their territories Indigenous nations continued
to live socially, culturally, and politically under their own institutions. Of course,
there were continued campaigns of social and cultural intervention and each
Indigenous nation had a different configuration of settler pressures.
The land arrangements between Indigenous and settled societies were fos-
tered through treaties, which we can understand as contracts of colonialism.
The Navajo Treaty of 1868, signed almost exactly one hundred years prior to the
signing of the NGS lease, was one example of a colonial contract. Diné people,
who were forced to agree to the treaty under the threat of starvation at Bosque
Redondo, surrendered much of their former territories simply to return home.
Congress passed the Indian Reorganization Act in 1934 and the Indian Min-
eral Leasing Act in 1938. The development of resources was a kind of assimila-
tionist project. The labor historian Colleen O’Neil (2005) documents the BIA’s
efforts to place Diné men in regional mining employment during the 1930s and
1940s in an attempt to teach them how to work. Coal mining had existed in
small-scale, scattershot form throughout the reservation prior to the 1930s, but
with the introduction of coal as an industry into the Southwest, BIA officials
saw an opportunity for cultural assimilation. They encouraged Diné men to
become laborers within an expanding capitalist society. The Indian Reorgani-
zation Act and the Indian Mineral Leasing Act of 1938 imagined reservations
as sites of development. Peter Iverson (2002) writes about the expansion of
uranium mining in the 1950s as a key to Navajo economic growth. By the 1960s,
new resource challenges confronted tribes. State governments needed water for
dams, development, or other kinds of diversions. Water use and water rights
took on new importance. At the same time, settlement in the West expanded.
Cities in the Southwest such as Los Angeles, Las Vegas, and Phoenix grew
exponentially.
We often remember the IRA for setting up tribal councils. This is true and is
an important change in Indian Country. But the act also created the conditions
for modern forms of contracting throughout reservations. It made tribal
governments the official interface between an Indigenous people and the
federal government and mining companies. The IRA contained provisions
for the tribal government to start corporations. The idea was to move Indig-
enous nations out of traditional economies and into capitalist ones.
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 101

It was this function of the IRA that created the opportunities for sover-
eignty and self-determination within tribal governments but also contained
the exploitative framework for political and resource concessions. The mineral
contract extended core features of treatymaking into performative functions
of tribal governance. It set the conditions for concessions. It dealt with a
people living on a land but without title to it. It is true that mineral contracts
set conditions for any land use, but the contracts assumed unique features in
Indigenous communities compared to contracts between private actors, like
bank loans and borrowers. These contracts recognized and perpetuated U.S.
colonial control over Indigenous lands and resources. Mineral leases recog-
nized not only the authority of the new IRA tribal governments but also
the authority of the federal government as ultimate decider over the fate of
reservation lands.
During this period, all mineral and leasing contracts still required the sig-
nature of the secretary of the interior to go into effect. In contrast, no private
landowner is required to get approval from the secretary of the interior before
entering a leasing contract. This signature requirement was a form of paternal-
ism. It was a key feature of colonial administration preserved in the contract.
It built on the legacy of treaties and created the legal and political limitations
of traditional land use. The antecedent of many provisions found in mineral
contracts was in federal Indian law. Contracts were not the same, and some
contained very different kinds of provisions, restrictions, and opportunities.
The language of the 1969 lease allowed for the owners of the NGS to uni-
laterally renew the lease in 2019 for another twenty-five years. The provision to
extend the lease was described as a “right and option” for the land lessees, the
utility owners of the power plant. It was this provision in 2013 that the Salt River
Project utility said gave it authority to extend the life of the plant, even if the
Navajo Nation Council ultimately didn’t agree to continue the lease. SRP said
it was operating in good faith by seeking Navajo Nation Council approval. As
it turned out, this was largely a political performance by SRP.
A key provision of the lease that most resembled nineteenth-century treaty-
making processes was the way the lease legally removed Navajo Generating Sta-
tion from the territorial control of the reservation. The lease prevented the tribe
from enforcing the Navajo Preference in Employment Act and other tribal laws
in the areas leased for the construction and operation of the station. Removing
the land from tribal jurisdiction, even if it was still part of the Navajo Reser-
vation, had the effect of creating a zone of exception akin to export-processing
 102 CHAPTER 3

zones in developing countries abroad. Unlike the treaties of the nineteenth

century, however, the lease involved multiple actors, serving both settler-colonial
publics and private capital. These actors were utilities, such as the Salt River
Project, Tucson Electric, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power, and
Nevada Electric. The lease also created a contract between the Navajo Nation
and the Bureau of Reclamation, a desk in the Department of the Interior that
was also the department of government where the Bureau of Indian Affairs
was located. This blurred the line between lessee and the government’s “trust
responsibility” oversight role over tribes. In short, the provisions in the lease
transformed treatymaking from the nineteenth-century era of settlement and
displacement to twenty-first-century neocolonialism in anticipation of the era
of neoliberalism.

EMBEDDED WORK

During this period of the NGS lease renewal, I was living in Kayenta, Arizona,
and trying to meet with and interview coal workers. My research was initially
focused on understanding the meaning of coal and coal work for a community
that was largely understood to benefit from the industry. When designing my
research prior to returning to Arizona, I did not anticipate a lease renewal for
the Navajo Generating Station. The lease renewal was not made public until the
lease was ready for approval by the Navajo Nation Council. Prior to this point,
it was negotiated behind closed doors between representatives of the tribe and
the Salt River Project.
In 2013, as the council considered the lease renewal, I made regular trips to
Window Rock. Across the street from the council chamber are the offices of
the president and vice president. The office for the speaker of the Navajo Nation
Council, a position created in 1990 after the tumultuous 1989 Navajo govern-
ment reforms, sits between the council chamber and the president’s office. These
buildings comprise the core of the Navajo government. Modeled after the U.S.
government, the Navajo Nation government is also a three-branch govern-
ment, based on the Navajo Nation Code (the laws passed by the council) with
no constitution. I had done work prior to graduate school with Diné College
for the council. With other researchers, we wrote a series of reports about the
history of the tribal council, the president, the judicial branch, and other areas
of tribal governance.
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 103

I also remembered the council from when I lived in Window Rock in the
late 1980s. I started school down the road from the tribal complex at Window
Rock Elementary School. Of course, as a six-year-old, everything seemed bigger
and newer then. All these buildings were big and felt imposing. I saw Diné men
and women in dress clothes, looking busy and serious as they walked through
hallways or between the sandstone buildings of the capital. My mother, who is
white, worked as a secretary in the Department of Justice. This was during the
time when Peter MacDonald was chairman of the tribe. He was the most famous
and controversial tribal leader across the country—organizing the Council of
Energy Resource Tribes (CERT) in an OPEC-like model to pressure for better
energy deals for tribes. He was part of a new Navajo nationalism. In my mem-
ory, the tribal headquarters in the 1980s was a place of possibility—infused with
a sense of Diné independence, sovereignty, and national self-determination. As
a kid, I was at the tail end of the urbanization of Window Rock—an experiment
to modernize a reservation community. During that time, the grocery chain
Bashas’ opened a store in town. The grocery store was brand new and had video
cassettes for sale.
There are only a handful of large communities like Window Rock where
I lived in the Navajo Nation. These tend to be the “agency capitals,” or places
where the Bureau of Indian Affairs created managerial posts and sites to dis-
tribute food and other supplies originally mentioned in the Treaty of 1868. They
were products of long-standing efforts to centralize the life of Diné people.
The other communities comparable in size to Window Rock are Crownpoint,
Shiprock, Chinle, Tuba City, Dilkon, and Kayenta. As discussed in chapter 1,
Window Rock was created as a capital city for the reservation, the only example
of a capital city in any reservation. Today, there are many businesses that cater
to the needs of workers in the tribal government. There are two hotels, restau-
rants, and a museum with conference rooms. It is in these auxiliary places where
governing meetings are held.
By any other capital standards, these hotels would be modest. But for the
Navajo Nation, the community of Window Rock is big, and the amenities are
comfortable. The hotels also target tourists who are visiting the Navajo Nation.
People from throughout the world travel to the capital city to visit the Navajo
Nation Museum, the Window Rock sandstone arch, and the adjacent Veterans
Memorial Park dedicated to World War II Code Talkers and other veterans.
When the Navajo Nation Council holds official meetings or work sessions, it
often arranges to use one of the large conference rooms of the Quality Inn down
 104 CHAPTER 3

the street. It is as if Congress did work sessions in a Best Western. It was in these
conference rooms, for example, that the twenty-four delegates of the Navajo
Nation Council met in 2009 and came up with a new government after Diné
people voted to reduce the size of the council from eighty-eight to twenty-four.
My father was one of the delegates, elected to the first twenty-four-member
council, and I attended many of these meetings—snapping photos of the pre-
sentations and making jokes with my friends who worked at Diné College or
the Navajo Times.
In the early 2010s, the Salt River Project, the most powerful utility in Ari-
zona, combined forces with the federal government to push for a renewal of the
Navajo Generating Station—the largest source of carbon emissions for all of
Indian Country at the time. The Navajo Nation was keen on renewing the con-
tract, not wanting to lose critical revenues for the operation of the government.
Tribal officials also felt pressure from Navajo coal workers, who were insistent
that the tribe renew the lease.
From informal conversations I had with tribal officials in Window Rock,
I learned that the renewal of the 2013 leases started as early as 2010. I caught
people walking between offices, going from one meeting to the next—much like
it was in 1989, except by 2013 I had a better idea of what was happening. From
what I learned, Salt River Project management decided in 2010 that they wanted
to renew the lease and anticipated it would take some time to clear the council
and the secretary of the interior. SRP wanted to start the process early because
it takes a long time to get the lease through the tribal council and the federal
government. Later on, there was discussion as to whether SRP actually needed
the tribe’s approval as the terms of the 1969 lease can be read to suggest SRP
and the other owners of NGS can extend the lease by twenty-five years if they
want to. SRP, for whatever reason, thought it would be best to get the tribe’s
endorsement and to offer some monetary incentives to convince the council it
was a good idea. Perhaps SRP thought the federal government would turn down
the renewal without the tribe’s consent.

PRELUDE TO SETTLEMENT—APRIL 2012

This was not the first time I had seen tribal officials in the Navajo govern-
ment act in this manner. I first saw this tendency when I sat outside a high-
profile meeting about Diné and Hopi water settlements in the Hogan Family
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 105

Restaurant in Tuba City in 2012. Like the Quality Inn restaurant in Window
Rock, the Hogan Family Restaurant has a conference room kept separate from
the public where attendees can have a private, catered meeting. Although there
was no food at this event, it was a space concealed from the public. Arizona’s
then senators John McCain and Jon Kyl met with members of the Navajo
Nation Council and President Shelly to try to persuade them to agree to a water
rights settlement with the State of Arizona (figure 10). My father was in the
meeting as a council delegate and gave me his impression of the conversations.
He felt nothing was really discussed or decided.
I drove to the meeting from Flagstaff with my friend Natasha Johnson,
who worked for the environmental conservation organization Grand Canyon
Trust, was formerly a staff assistant at the office of the speaker, and knew most
of the political actors in Window Rock. We sat at a table and drank coffee
while protesters gathered outside to demonstrate against the water settlement.
They held signs that read, “No Deal” and “Stop Stealing Our Water!” The fact
that the meeting with two high-profile senators was scheduled in secret only
added to people’s suspicions about it. At that point, Johnson and I approached
the president’s chief advisor and asked him why he excluded the public from
the meeting. He said tribal leaders could not make the hard choices necessary
for the tribe if they knew the public was watching them. He said that with the

FIGURE 10 . Former Arizona senator John McCain entering a water rights meeting with
Navajo Nation Council delegates, April 5, 2012. Photograph by Andrew Curley.
 106 CHAPTER 3

media there, elected officials would grandstand and not make “tough decisions.”
This statement reflected how some in tribal government view the role of the
elected official. In his view, tribal leaders were vetted by the public to make
decisions on behalf of the tribe, but not in conversation with their constituents.
In the meeting, the senators were blunt about the meaning of the proposed
water settlement and told the Navajo Nation that they would not get a better
deal than what was offered. McCain talked in generalities, saying other tribes
were happy with their settlements, and that it was good for the Navajo Nation
(TG11). Like the later meeting on coal, this one was held in executive session
and journalists were barred from documenting it (although I managed to hear a
copy of an audio recording of the meeting). McCain and Kyl appeared surprised
by the protesters. McCain started the meeting with the following statement:

Frankly, I am amazed because we have never forced a water settlement on any

tribe. Jon and I were talking on the way up. . . . We have seven water settlements
with tribes in the State of Arizona. If you went to the tribal leadership, they
would tell you in retrospect, some as long ago as twenty years, some [a] shorter
time ago—just a couple of years ago—water settlements, that . . . they are very
happy with the results of these water settlements, thereby preventing twenty,
thirty, forty, fifty years of litigation in the courts. We have ensuing prosperity on
these reservations that has been a result of the water settlements. So, to some-
how see these demonstrators out here—everybody is free to demonstrate—but
I say, Mr. President, in all sincerity, [you] don’t want to have a water settle-
ment? Fine, stay in court. That’s [a] decision to be made by the leaders, the
elected leaders of the Navajo and Hopi tribes. We have no interest whatsoever
in imposing any kind of settlement.

Navajo tribal leaders and the senators discussed a range of topics, including a
proposed Utah Water Settlement and the long-standing Navajo–Hopi land
dispute. In this proposed settlement, Arizona wanted the Navajo Nation to
renew the lease with NGS and settle water claims to the Little Colorado River.
Although tribal lawmakers weren’t opposed to either proposition, they felt that
the items shouldn’t be combined. Council Delegate Katherine Benally put it
this way:

Two things: As long as [the Little Colorado River Settlement] truly does not
have us waiving our rights to claim the main stem of the Colorado River. . . .
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 107

The other thing is, keep Navajo Generating Station agreement out of this bill.
That’s all we ask.

Eventually this was a moot point. The settlement and its enabling legislation
failed in two tribal councils and in congress. Although the proposed settlement
existed, it didn’t go anywhere. For our purposes here, in understanding carbon
treatymaking and resource negotiations, the meeting was an example of nego-
tiations done in secret. Members of the Navajo Nation Council would conduct
the same type of negotiations with SRP nearly a year later. The secret nature of
the dialogue was made possible through the skilled coordination of Attorney
General Harrison Tsosie, President Shelly, and Speaker Naize. It was also the
overwhelming preference of private actors, such as the Salt River Project or
BHP Billiton. It was an imposed condition for the making of modern treaties.

MEETINGS BEHIND CLOSED DOORS—THE FORMATION OF NTEC

While the lease renewal of SRP loomed, the fate of Navajo Mine on the east-
ern end of the reservation was also under consideration. The mine was on the
opposite end of the reservation from Kayenta. It was owned and maintained by
the Australian company BHP Billiton. The buyers of the coal and BHP couldn’t
come to a fuel supply agreement, that is, the price at which BHP wanted to
sell its coal vis-à-vis the price power plants were willing to spend. Negotiations
between BHP and SRP had broken down. BHP was going to close the mine at
the end of its lease with the Navajo Nation and move on. The Navajo Nation,
under the leadership of Council Delegate LoRenzo Bates, worked to create a
front company that could buy the mine and sell it to the Four Corners Generat-
ing Station at a price the utilities were willing to pay. Navajo lawmakers figured
that the company would save money on taxes and be able to sell its coal cheaper.
On January 31, 2013, Harrison Tsosie met informally with delegates at the
Quality Inn in Window Rock, Arizona. The room was on the same floor as
the restaurant. But at some point, the inn added partitions to the back half of
the restaurant and made these into conference spaces that the council could
reserve for official business. Because it shares the same space as the rest of the
restaurant, one could hang out at a table just beyond the partition, order a coffee,
and see who goes in and out. Other patrons are people who work in Window
Rock, younger Diné people on strange business like me, or white tourists who
 108 CHAPTER 3

happened to stay at the inn the previous night. It always struck me as strange
that visitors were able to eat and stay so close to where our official business is
being done—they get instant access to our most important sites of deliberation.
Of course, hardly any of them knew what was happening around them. We had
also allowed this to happen, to set our meetings so close to people coming from
the outside. The half of the restaurant that was partitioned for official tribal
business had framed pictures of past tribal chairmen hanging on the wall. I
remember these same portraits from when I was in elementary school, the same
official representation of leaders from as far back as the 1920s. Their presence
in the room spoke to the continuity of governance at work. It was ideological
nation building, an imagined history, leaders from a past era setting into motion
the very structure of decision-making at work in the cheaply partitioned rooms
where consequential decisions were made.
I let myself in and sat where people were gathering, in the back row of a
long, semicircular arrangement of tables and chairs. I took out my laptop to take
notes. In the room was Suzanne Baldwin, who represented the Four Corners
Power Plant, and council delegates Alton Shepard, Roscoe Smith, Mel Begay,
and Leonard Tsosie. Also in the room were Amber Crotty and Lambert Benally,
legislative assistants to Nelson Begaye and Russell Begaye. Today, Crotty is a
three-term delegate. Representing the president’s office was the communica-
tions director, Erny Zah, and the office’s attorney, Heather Clah. Attending for
the speaker’s office was the chief of staff, Jarvis Williams, and the energy advisor,
Anthony Peterman. Also in the room was a representative for Arizona Public
Service whose name I did not catch. I sat next to him and when I introduced
myself to the audience, I joked that I represented the U.S. Environmental Pro-
tection Agency. The utility representative’s eyes nearly jumped out of his sockets.
But everyone else in the room laughed because they already knew who I was.
I learned about the meeting from my father, then a council delegate, who
said I should attend. He was probably not aware that the meeting was sup-
posed to be private because he was surprised when he learned that I was kicked
out shortly before the meeting started. I was allowed to sit in for a while and
talk with attendees, but once Harrison Tsosie recommended that the council
delegates go into “executive session,” I was forced to leave. I was the only one
who had to leave. It was mildly embarrassing. But in the privacy of a closed
space—executive session—Tsosie was able to maintain an exclusive audience
with Navajo lawmakers and push his proposals forward without countering
claims. In explaining why he wanted to move the meeting into executive session,
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 109

he said that BHP Billiton, the owner of the mine, did not want to release sen-
sitive company information that might give its rivals an advantage in the coal
market. Instead, he preferred a closed meeting with lawmakers. In my opinion,
it was a blurring of the public mission of the Navajo Nation government and
eschewed the question of democratic deliberation about an important resource
related to the long-term viability of the Navajo people. Also, what do we care if
other coal companies learn about BHP’s deal with the Navajo Nation? Maybe
they would offer us a better deal.

NGS IN COUNCIL, FIRST ATTEMPT—FEBRUARY 2013

The next month, February 2013, the Navajo Nation Council made its first attempt
to pass legislation to extend the Navajo Generating Station’s lease. Those of us
looking at the question of coal in the Navajo Nation had a vague sense that some-
thing was in the works. I talked to a council delegate in 2012 who said this was the
next big issue that the Navajo Nation Council was to consider (TG11). Up until
that point, the lease renewal was kept out of the public spotlight. Beginning in
2010, a select “negotiating team” was put in charge of working out the details of the
renewal (TG3). This lease was between the owners and operators of the Navajo
Generating Station, several public and private utilities in the region, and the
Navajo Nation. The people on the negotiating team included the Navajo Nation’s
attorney general, the president’s energy advisor, members of the Navajo tax com-
mission, and a number of others the president selected from the executive branch.
Noticeably missing were Navajo Nation Council delegates who were supposed
to be there according to Navajo Nation law. The lack of council representation
proved critical in this first attempt to pass the lease.
On any given day, the Navajo Nation Council will consider mundane issues.
Delegates might talk about spending for a particular program or even approve
a business site lease. Sometimes they are asked to enroll former members who
lost or opted out of tribal membership.4 Chairman Sam Ahkeah, in a foreword
to a book on Navajo resolutions between 1922 and 1951, wrote, “It will be noted
also that the complexity of the subject matter of resolutions increased greatly
in the latter years as we have come to grips more and more with the complex
problems of the reservation involving coal, oil, timber, water, uranium, grazing,
employment, law and order, domestic relations, and many many other subjects”
(Navajo Tribal Council 1952, i).
 110 CHAPTER 3

The Navajo Nation Council considers a wide range of issues. But mineral
leases are among the most important. In 2013 these leases constituted half of
the tribe’s income. Hundreds of members of the Navajo Nation were employed
in coal mining. Powerful regional interests applied pressure on the tribe to pass
leases and ensure the continuation of energy production on and around the
Navajo Nation.
The speaker of the Navajo Nation Council sets the council’s meeting agenda
and is the most powerful delegate. In 2013 the speaker of the Navajo Nation
Council was a two-term delegate named Johnny Naize from the community of
Cottonwood, between Chinle and Black Mesa. Naize once worked for Peabody
Coal and strongly supported the renewal of the NGS lease. By 2012, the negoti-
ating team had concluded its work and brought the completed lease agreement
to Naize, who put it in the form of legislation and scheduled it for the full
Navajo Nation Council to consider. Once proposed as legislation, the terms of
the lease were made public for the first time.
The parliamentary rules of the Navajo Nation Council require that the
speaker step down when he or she is the sponsor of legislation. They must then
select a speaker pro tempore (Latin for “for the time being” and often shortened
to “pro tem”) to take over their duties. Council delegates, including my father,
gave me their take on how politics in the council works. They felt the speaker
selects delegates whom he knows will help him pass his legislation. The speaker
or speaker pro tem controls the debate on the floor and can recognize a call
to cease debate and vote on an item. Speaker Naize was the sponsor of the
legislation to renew the NGS lease and asked Council Delegate Elmer Begay
to sit in as speaker pro tem on the legislation. Begay was a first-term delegate,
low in seniority among the delegates, and still somewhat unfamiliar with the
cumbersome rules of council.
Yet Naize selected him as speaker pro tem. Begay’s job was to move the
debate in a way to pass the legislation. Even when delegates maintain strong
reservations about a particular issue before them, the speaker and his allies can
introduce the item, limit discussion, and call for a vote. If they feel they have
the numbers to pass legislation, they prefer to vote rather than discuss. This is
not so different from what happens in other parliamentary bodies throughout
the world, including the U.S. Congress.5
Speaker Naize called up the legislation and then surrendered his seat to
Speaker Pro Tem Begay. Naize took his seat at a chair, physically a level below
the speaker’s chair, to present his legislation. He probably did not realize at the
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 111

time that several outspoken delegates would challenge the legality of the entire
lease negotiation process because no council delegate was an official part of it.
When Begay took over the speaker’s responsibility, he acted nervously. This
was consequential legislation. He looked flustered while responding to delegates
as they initiated their legalistic dance of motions, points of order, and other
forms of objections from the floor. Many of these objections were technical in
nature. Did the legislation go through the proper process to be introduced for
debate and vote on the council floor? Begay deflected many of these questions
to the council’s legal team—lawyers from the Navajo Nation’s Office of Legis-
lative Counsel who interpret the legalities of council actions for the delegates
to answer.
As soon as Begay opened the floor for debate, several council delegates
pushed the red buttons on the desks to raise a “point of order.” They asked Begay
to rule the legislation “out of order,” meaning it is not in proper form for the
council to consider and vote on because it was negotiated improperly according
to Navajo Nation law. This request required Begay to give a legal interpretation
of the process. As a freshman delegate, not quite understanding the parliamen-
tary process, and with limited legal acumen, he ruled it “out of order” probably
because this was the least controversial action he could have taken on it.
Ruling the legislation “out of order” allowed opponents of the renewal to
redouble their efforts and to mount an effective challenge to the negotiated
lease. Naize’s strategy to get this item passed as quickly as possible with the least
amount of debate and public attention had failed. The legislation returned to the
bureaucratic underground. It disappeared into the rhythm of the law-making
process in Window Rock.
The public rarely knows how legislation is drafted, considered, and passed
in the Navajo Nation. Most people do not regularly witness the legalities that
shape council actions. Legislation is discussed among delegates, lawyers, and
industry officials in private meetings, and often these meetings are held in places
outside the reservation, like in hotel conference rooms in Albuquerque or Phoe-
nix. It is here where the political reproduction of carbon sovereignty occurs.
The proposal reproduces existing industries, existing approaches, and—in this
case—much of the language of existing contracts. The spectrum of possible
development is reduced to the proposal at hand. Whereas environmental groups
prefer that the tribe think about renewable energy as an alternative to coal, these
are not the proposals that the tribe must decide on. The disconnect between
popular sentiment, or the ideas of groups like Diné C.A.R.E. or Black Mesa
 112 CHAPTER 3

Water Coalition, and the work of the tribal government are shaped by propos-
als, enabling legislation and the work of outside industries in presenting these
options to the tribe.

MARCH 2013

During these negotiations, Tsosie threatened Navajo Nation Council delegates

with legal action if they “leaked” details of the lease renewal to the public. On
Thursday, March 21, 2013, the Navajo Nation Council held a secret meeting
with representatives from SRP in Phoenix, Arizona. During this meeting, I
was told that the Salt River Project informed members of the Navajo Nation
Council that if they refused to renew the twenty-five-year lease extension, SRP
was prepared to buy energy from other facilities and would have an alternative
natural gas power plant online to compensate for the energy lost from NGS
within a couple of years (TG11).
The Navajo public was not made aware of these conditions. And it is inter-
esting to note that SRP told the U.S. EPA at the time that shutting down
the power plant would be a terrible economic loss for the region and jeopar-
dize energy for users in Phoenix. To the EPA, SRP management suggested
there would be economic catastrophe and sudden increases in water prices if
the Navajo Generating Station was forced to shut down due to environmental
regulation. But to the Navajo Nation, SRP officials said it would be easy for
them to transition out of NGS should the tribe refuse the renewal, insinuating
that the Navajo Nation was at jeopardy of losing out (TG11). According to my
interviewee, the meeting was a combination of carrots and sticks, incentives, and
threats. After the failed February meeting, the Salt River Project and its lawyers
agreed to meet confidentially with members of the Navajo Nation Council to
discuss the terms of the lease. SRP extended the deadline for a $1 million signing
bonus. They did this at SRP’s headquarters in Phoenix, Arizona, without any
public notice or input.
This makes the whole law-making process murky and suspect. During this
time, Naize lobbied skeptical delegates to support the renewal. Coal workers
in Kayenta also noticed the council’s pause and anticipated trouble. One of my
coal-worker sources told me as much. In 2005 the Navajo Nation Council failed
to renew the lease to the Black Mesa Mine because of concerns tribal members
had with the use of fresh water to slurry the coal 273 miles northwest of the
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 113

mine site to the Mohave Generating Station in Laughlin, Nevada. Due to this
pause, the lease failed, the power plant closed, and the mine shut down, putting
hundreds of miners out of work. There were other considerations, but that was
the impression of one of my informants (CW3).
It was also clear from the conversations I had with council delegates that
their concern was primarily for the revenues—jobs never seemed to be a central
issue. Some delegates disliked the tactics of the coal workers and felt that they
were already a privileged class who could afford things most Navajos could not.
Some non-coal Kayenta community members expressed similar sentiments.
There was a general impression that the families of coal workers were better
off than the rest of the Navajo Nation. Coal workers felt an equal animosity
toward council delegates.
In my interviews and conversations with tribal officials in Window Rock,
however, they spoke of a utilitarian understanding of coal—a question of cost
versus benefit of the industry. For the tribal lawmaker and governing official, the
risk of coal shutting down was too high to assert strong claims of sovereignty
over the resource. I learned this when observing the Navajo Nation Council
deliberate the lease. On the dust-filled streets of Window Rock, I stopped one
day at one of the tribe’s aged administrative buildings located a half mile down
the road from the tribe’s council chambers and president’s office. I was doing
other business and ran into Martin Ashley, executive director of the Navajo
Tax Commission and someone I had previously met through my father. I asked
him informally about coal; he told me it was important for the Navajo Nation
to renew the resource. He told me that most of the Navajo budget depended
on coal as a source of revenue. In another report prepared for the council,
coal accounted for 24 percent of the Navajo budget, with land leases making
another significant contribution. The financial importance of coal revenues for
the Navajo Nation was well understdood by tribal lawmakers.

APRIL 2013

I spoke with the Navajo Nation’s energy advisor, Sam Woods, on April 23, 2013,
after the failure of the Navajo Nation Council to renew the lease in February and
a few days before the Navajo Nation would revisit the issue in an all-night ses-
sion in which delegates made several amendments dealing with questions about
water and labor. Woods did not mention the jobs of the coal workers during my
 114 CHAPTER 3

interview with him. I did not interpret this to mean he did not care about the jobs
of the coal workers. I interpreted it to mean his interest in the renewal of the lease
dealt primarily with issues other than jobs, for example, the revenues the renewal
represented for the tribe. This was a subtle and important distinction. For Woods,
the leverage that the tribe gained in terms of the potential for ownership over the
energy infrastructure, such as power transmission lines, was key.
On Monday, April 29, 2013, Speaker Johnny Naize scheduled a special coun-
cil meeting to consider two pieces of legislation that had some urgency to them.
These were coal-related resolutions. The first involved the formation of a com-
pany, NTEC, that would buy and operate Navajo Mine on the eastern end of
the reservation after BHP Billiton left at the end of its lease with the Navajo
Nation in 2016. This was the result of planning and contracted analysis to LA-
based legal firms. It was also the result of the conversation Harrison Tsosie had
with delegates behind closed doors, mentioned previously. The second issue was
a twenty-five-year lease extension on the Navajo Generating Station.
Naize presented two coal legislations to his colleagues on that day, one
renewing the NGS lease for another twenty-five years and the other setting
into motion the purchase of Navajo Mine on the eastern end of the reservation.
These legislations would put new life in the Navajo coal economy. In controlling
the timing of the council sessions, Naize was also able to prevent “grassroots”
groups and environmental organizations from mounting an effective challenge
to them.
For Naize, as with many coal workers with whom I spoke, the bitter memory
of the 2006 closing of the Black Mesa Mine loomed large over the proceedings.
Although the closing of the mine had more to do with circumstances largely
out of the hands of the environmental groups and Navajo Nation Council,
particularly California’s move away from coal in 2006, coal workers still blamed
the environmentalists and the tribal council for the closure of the mine. At
the time, environmental groups challenged Peabody Coal’s water use on Black
Mesa, pointing out sinkholes that had developed over time. When the mine
closed, several hundred mine workers immediately lost their jobs, and some left
the reservation to look for other work. The memory from eight years earlier of
environmentalists from Black Mesa who testified to the Navajo Nation Council
about sinkholes near the mine site still burned in the memories of some of the
workers who had lost their jobs.
When the Navajo Nation Council schedules a “special session”—an ad hoc
meeting of the council—the Navajo public is given only a five-day notice of the
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 115

meeting. This makes it difficult to organize a challenge to it. But no challenge

was coming. The major environmental groups from 2005 had been noticeably
absent during the entire NGS renewal debate. Some core organizers had left the
region, leaving their organizations a shell of their former selves and with foci far
from the oppositional politics of the mid-2000s.6 The only groups present were
the coal workers and a handful of activists I knew from Diné College and who
were there to oppose the lease extension. The coal workers clearly had the power.
They chartered a bus for the 140-mile trip from Kayenta to Window Rock. They
had printed and distributed professional political signs that read, “Yes to NGS”
and “Support Families, Vote NGS.”
That morning, I left Phoenix at about 3 a.m. It is perhaps the only time
when the streets of the city appeared empty. When I finally arrived in Window
Rock seven hours later, I saw what I had seen before—coal workers gathered
in front of the council, a large Navajo police presence assembled, and tribal
workers moving quickly between buildings with bundles of papers in hand. By
this point, the social spectacle of coal had become routine in the tribe’s capital.
The Navajo Nation Police had closed the main road toward the Navajo Nation
Council chambers. The only vehicles allowed into the area were buses for the
coal miners. Everyone else had to park outside and walk in. This was already
a bias that foreshadowed how the evening would play out. The police created
these roadblocks at all the major entrances. Even the dirt paths going between
the famous sandstone formations that define Window Rock were now blocked
or monitored by police. I used to ride my bike on those trails as a child in the
late 1980s. There were never boundaries between where people lived on one side
of the rocks and the Navajo Nation Council complex on the other. On that
unusual day, police checked foot traffic and patrolled the footpaths.
Although foot traffic was allowed, everything else was restricted. I walked
over the hill to the chambers and saw that the coal miners and power-plant
workers were already gathered en masse. This was a crowd with disparate inter-
ests. There were the Kayenta coal miners supporting the extension of the NGS
lease. But BHP miners and Four Corners Generating Station employees from
the other end of the reservation were there to support the purchase of Navajo
Mine. The two groups did not know one another and they supported different
projects, but they were all there for the same reason. After I arrived to the front
of the Navajo Nation Council chamber, I spotted one of the few white people
in attendance. He held a sign supporting the acquisition of Navajo Mine. I
was curious why a non-Navajo would come to the Navajo Nation Council
 116 CHAPTER 3

chamber and ask the tribe to buy a mine in the reservation. I thought this was
(and should remain) an exclusively Navajo question. I asked him what he was
doing there and for whom he worked. He said he worked at the Four Corners
Generating Station (FCGS) based in Farmington, New Mexico, just beyond
the northeastern border of the reservation. He wanted the Navajo Nation to
buy Navajo Mine so that the power plant would remain open to keep his job.
At the time, there was already some serious doubt about the life of the future
of the FCGS plant. It was one of the oldest in the region and one of the most
polluting. Most of its technology predated federal environmental laws and made
it likely to be one of the first power plants to completely shut down soon. In fact,
part of the argument for the Navajo Nation to build a new power plant in the
area in 2007 was that it would replace the dirtier FCGS (Powell 2017a). It was
“jiní,” or “gossip,” at the time. But after the Navajo Nation agreed to buy Navajo
Mine, the utility companies who own FCGS—Public Service Company of New
Mexico (PNM) and Arizona Public Service (APS)—announced they would
shut down three of the four reactors at FCGS.7 Anticipating this shutdown
might have contributed to BHP Billiton’s decision to withdraw from the mine
when its fuel-supply contract was scheduled to end in 2016.
Opposite these circumstances was the future for the Navajo Generating Sta-
tion and the Kayenta Mine. Both operations were more politically secure. NGS
was a decade newer than FCGS and was already in compliance with several
environmental regulations, such as the U.S. Clean Air Act. It was built during
the passage of the first environmental laws in the early 1970s. The coal from
Kayenta Mine that supplies NGS is also of higher quality and is less polluting
than the coal mined in Navajo Mine. Importantly, NGS enjoys a unique con-
figuration of ownership between private and public utilities and the Bureau of
Reclamation, which use the power generated in the plant to power the Central
Arizona Project that supplies Colorado River water to Phoenix. This special ses-
sion of the council was scheduled somewhat quickly and done with little public
notice. I learned about it not from people I knew in the tribal government, who
were also somewhat oblivious to the meeting, but from a coal miner who told
me casually while I was trying to schedule an interview with him that he would
be in Window Rock that next Monday for the Navajo Nation Council meeting.
This meant that elements within the tribal government were coordinating with
the coal workers to ensure they were there to pressure otherwise hesitant Navajo
Nation Council delegates to follow through on the renewal.
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 117

Navajo Nation Council meetings can be long and sometimes boring for
audience members. I have observed people slouch, yawn, and sigh when a dele-
gate introduces a technical objection to a motion or legislation under discussion.
For audience members who are not versed in the parliamentary procedures of
the Navajo Nation Council, this process can seem excruciating and frustrating.
When I talked to coal miners standing outside the council chambers and asked
them what was happening inside, they told me, “Talking B.S.”
Several council delegates with amendments to the lease immediately voiced
objection to legislation approving it. Delegate Leonard Tsosie was the most
adamantly opposed to it. He had objections to how the language of the lease
read. Naize and his allies wanted the lease to pass as it was written. They believed
that adding amendments to it was a risk. They were not sure that SRP and the
other owners would agree to what the Navajo Nation Council amended. They
had negotiated for nearly four years before the Navajo Nation Council con-
sidered the matter. The negotiating team and the owners of the power plant
said they had talked through all the possible points. Now individual members
of the Navajo Nation Council were attempting to change the language of the
lease. This was a serious concern among proponents of the lease extension. They
thought these delegates would sabotage the lease.
When the council agreed to “discussion” on the legislation, the delegates
with concerns about the lease added their amendments to the agenda. These
amendments included a number of topics but focused primarily on “Navajo
preference” for job openings at the plant and Navajo water rights. On Navajo
preference, the owners of NGS had previously contested the Navajo Nation’s
claim that it could enforce Navajo preference laws in the Navajo Generating
Station (TG7). The facility was exempt from Navajo law even though it was
territorially in the reservation. In the original 1969 lease, the council waived
its right to enforce any form of regulation on the plant. Now Navajo Nation
Council delegates wanted to change this circumstance. Council Delegate
Russell Begaye (who was later elected Navajo Nation president and served
from 2015 to 2019) offered an amendment that read, “The Navajo Nation
hereby approves that the Navajo Business Opportunity Act will apply for all
contracts considered by Navajo Generating Station.” Basically, this amend-
ment would make Navajo hiring preference a term of the lease. Council Dele-
gate Dwight Witherspoon, from Black Mesa, offered an amendment on water
rights, which read:
 118 CHAPTER 3

The Navajo Nation hereby recommends and approves the Amendment to the
Indenture of the Lease on the condition that nothing in this lease modifica-
tion agreement hinders the Navajo Nation from legally obtaining water rights,
beyond the end of the year 2019, to the 50,000 acre feet or to assert claim to
more than 50,000 acre feet from the Arizona Allocation of the Upper Colorado
River Basin per the 1948 [sic] Compact.8

The amendment simply asked the Salt River Project utility not to challenge any
future claim to the Colorado River that the Navajo Nation intended to make.
It was a much more radical departure from existing water law than perhaps
Delegate Witherspoon realized at the time. He was not aware of the politics of
water in the 1960s and the claim that the Colorado House of Representatives
agreed, in Congress, to federal spending on the Central Arizona Project so long
as the Lower Basin states did not impede on the Upper Basin states. William
Greider (1969) wrote at the time of the original lease’s signing that the Central
Arizona Project was passed at the expense of Navajo claims to Arizona’s fifty
thousand acre-feet allocation in the 1922 Colorado River Compact. Wither-
spoon’s amendment ignored these circumstances and suggested that the Navajo
Nation might claim more than fifty thousand acre-feet, which would throw
water rights claims in both basins into chaos. It was the least politically possible
assertion of Navajo rights, and the most radical.
Naize, Shelly, and others in the Navajo Nation government trying to get the
lease passed would not tolerate it. Their perspective was that any amendment to
the lease that the NGS negotiating team had negotiated would jeopardize the
entire thing. During this special session, the Navajo Nation Council approved
a total of ten amendments to the Navajo Nation Council Legislation 0042–13
after six hours of debate, which in effect added the Navajo Nation Council’s
concerns to the lease.9 Most of these amendments were technical, having to do
with the language and phrases used in the lease. In one amendment, Council
Delegate Walter Phelps added the Bureau of Reclamation to the lease—its
absence had been an oversight in the drafting of the document. But signifi-
cant amendments pertained to water, labor, and what some delegates felt was
the conflicting role of the federal government as both trustee for tribes and
part owner of the power plant. As discussed previously, this feeling harkened
back to the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Navajo Nation, where
the Navajo Nation felt the secretary of the interior deliberately undermined
the tribe’s renegotiation of royalty rates for coal mined on Black Mesa. Now
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 119

the delegates believed that the federal government had an inherent conflict of
interest because of the role of the Bureau of Reclamation as a part owner of
NGS and the Department of the Interior maintaining ultimate control over
tribes. This was an amendment Kayenta’s council delegate Katherine Benally
made. It read:

The Navajo Nation hereby declares that the United States’ contractual interest,
held by the Salt River Project for the Bureau of Reclamation, to the power gen-
erated by 24.3 percent of the Navajo Generating Station’s capacity is in direct
conflict with the federal government’s trust responsibilities and duties to the
Navajo Nation and the Navajo people.

I sat in the east conference room of the Navajo Nation Council chamber
through the entirety of the debate. I was with friends from the Diné Policy
Institute who were there to witness the renewal of the lease.
The Navajo Nation Council passed most of these amendments pertaining
to hiring preference and water rights. It wasn’t until 11:17 p.m. that the Navajo
Nation Council passed the legislation extending the Navajo Generating Sta-
tion lease for another twenty-five years. The final vote was 21–1. Many of the
coal miners stayed until the bitter end. But by that time everyone was too
emotionally tired to celebrate or protest. Despite the momentous occasion,
everyone left unceremoniously. The single delegate who voted against the
lease extension was Dwight Witherspoon from Black Mesa. When I asked
him as he left the council chambers that night why he voted against the
lease extension, he said he was uncomfortable with how he felt the Navajo
Nation agreed to forfeit its claims to the Colorado River as part of the lease.
He was the sole delegate to vote against the lease in its fifty-year history in
the reservation.
For the next two months, members of the Navajo Nation Council and the
Salt River Project negotiated the NGS extension. But Speaker Naize was
losing his support in the Navajo Nation Council. A group of detractors in
the council was formed. They did not like the way the lease was negotiated
and did not support how the speaker was advancing it. On April 17, 2013,
Speaker Naize told the council, “We are at the crossroads. We have to make
a decision for the people. We have to keep our Nation’s economy health
and keep our dedication to the people by sustaining their jobs.” However,
Council Delegate Lorenzo Curley, my father, said, “I stand to support the
 120 CHAPTER 3

Nation to continue to have a business relationship with NGS in the form of

a lease, but maybe not this particular lease. We need to address the concerns of
the grassroots people.”10
The particulars of this “particular lease” involved rights to water and the
Navajo hiring preference. In this case, two delegates continued to amend the
lease for these purposes—Dwight Witherspoon from Black Mesa and Russell
Begaye from Shiprock. Begaye offered an amendment that simply asked the Salt
River Project not to oppose the Navajo Nation’s efforts to claim water from the
fifty thousand acre-feet allocated to the State of Arizona in the 1922 Colorado
River Compact. As before, the Navajo Nation Council debated the amend-
ments for hours. But in this case, the Salt River Project told the Navajo Nation
Council that any reference to water was a “deal killer” for the lease extension.
Delegates opposed to the amendments mentioned this several times during
the debate. As Naize put it in the memo he sent out to the council delegates
encouraging them to support the lease:

Within the legislation there are several amendments that differ from the
approved Council legislation CAP-21–13. This would include SRP’s disagree-
ment with language that refers to the potential settlement of our water rights
in the Upper Colorado Basin. SRP feels that without knowing the particulars
of a proposed settlement, they could not blindly agree to support the Nation in
this endeavor, however beneficial it may be to both parties.

For his part, supporter of the lease and current Navajo Nation speaker
LoRenzo Bates, from Upper Fruitland (between Shiprock and Farmington,
New Mexico), said that if the Navajo Generating Station shut down, it would
jeopardize the Navajo Nation’s claim to the water. In the lease, NGS uses
thirty thousand acre-feet of the fifty thousand allocated to Arizona. His point
is that when this shuts down, that thirty thousand acre-feet is suddenly up
for grabs and political actors such as the City of Page, located near the power
plant, will capitalize on it and snatch it up. These are all political uncertainties.
But these were the larger concerns rattling around in the minds of the dele-
gates. The immediate political debate was concerned about who presented the
more likely scenario: opponents of the lease who believed the Navajo Nation
was getting a bad deal, or proponents of the lease extension who felt this was
the best arrangement the Navajo Nation could get under the current political
circumstances.
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 121

THE TERMS OF THE LEASE

The legislation itself focused on two core issues. It provided “continued employ-
ment at the Peabody Kayenta Mine” and would deliver approximately $42 mil-
lion a year to the tribal government in revenues.11 Compared to water and labor
(“deal killers” for SRP), when talking about revenues, the agreement was much
more promising. It said that the Navajo Nation would receive $42 million a year
starting in 2019 compared to $3 million annually it receives currently from the
lease. In a memo to the Navajo Nation Council, President Ben Shelly wrote:

We have been told by SRP there is little, if no room to renegotiate. They con-
sider the major points of the agreement to be exhausted, such as jurisdiction and
money. Because of the mitigating circumstances the water concerns are unlikely
to be resolved before the timeframe needed to finalize the lease extension.

This is perhaps the most crucial and sobering passage in all the material on the
renegotiations. It summarizes the Navajo Nation’s weak bargaining position.
The Navajo Nation could take the $42 million a year for an additional twenty-
five years.12 Or the tribe could say no to the deal and watch the mine and power
plant close, drying up revenues and laying off hundreds of workers in the pro-
cess. The points of Navajo hiring preference and rights to the Colorado River
were not negotiable but would come up again during the debate to pass the
legislation. “Jurisdiction” had to do with the Navajo Nation’s right to enforce
Navajo labor laws in the power plant. The language in the original 1969 lease
said that the Salt River Project was exempt from local labor laws.
The other important detail of the memo was a reference to the rights to water
in the area. Since 1922, when the seven states that stake claims to the Colorado
River (California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mex-
ico) and its tributaries signed a compact allocating the entirety of the river to
non-Indian settlers, tribal claims to this water have been pushed aside or simply
ignored (TG5). In 1968, to get Congress to agree to the Central Arizona Project,
which allocated millions of dollars in federal spending over a thirty-year period
to the State of Arizona for the construction of critical water infrastructure,
Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall needed the tribe to waive a significant
portion of its rights to the Colorado River for fifty years in exchange for the
coal-fired power plant royalties and jobs associated with mining. The end of
the waiver came in 2013 as the Navajo Nation Council reconsidered the lease.
 122 CHAPTER 3

At this time, as the president of the Navajo Nation wrote, “Because of the mit-
igating circumstance the water concerns are unlikely to be resolved before the
timeframe needed to finalize the lease extension.”
When Navajo Nation Council delegates discussed the matter with the NGS
renewal negotiating team and Harrison Tsosie, they said that bringing up water
was a “deal killer.” If the Navajo Nation claimed any of the fifty thousand acre-
feet per year that the Colorado Compact provided to Arizona in the Upper
Colorado River Basin, the Salt River Project would walk away from the deal.
Water rights as a deal killer was confirmed in notes I have from private meet-
ings between the NGS negotiating team and the Navajo Nation Council. My
notes also include testimony I observed in the Navajo Nation Council chamber
when the council eventually passed the lease in April 2013. Water proved to be
a central concern for the Navajo Nation as it discussed the lease. And as men-
tioned previously, only one delegate voted against the renewal in April, when
fifteen amendments pertaining to water and labor were included in the lease;
the delegate felt the renewal was still a giveaway of Navajo water. He told me
this as he left the Navajo Nation Council chamber in disgust moments after
the April vote.
Another important provision to the lease was that it allowed the Navajo
Nation or a related enterprise to buy the 21.2 percent in shares that the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) owned of the Navajo
Generating Station. The tribe’s negotiating team was able to open possibilities
of ownership over the power plant in the lease, but not for the region’s water
resources.13 SRP suggested that if LADWP withdrew from NGS (by that time,
they had already said as much), they would buy LADWP’s shares and sell them
to the Navajo Nation. The possibility of the Navajo Nation buying shares of
the Navajo Generating Station was something SRP and the negotiating team
already knew about since they included it in the lease. In a 2012 study by the
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), the authors wrote:

While ownership positions in Navajo GS have not changed during the entire
time the plant has been operating, LADWP’s ownership interest will likely be
affected soon by legislative action in the State of California. Senate Bill 1368
(2006 legislative session) precludes a utility from making investments to extend
the life of a plant that exceeds the rate of emission of greenhouse gases for a
combined-cycle natural gas power plant. (Hurlbut et al. 2012, 10)
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 123

In 2006 California changed how it regulates energy to encourage the state’s

utilities from divesting from coal-fired power plants. In the report, NREL sim-
ply assumed that LADWP would withdraw from the plant given this political
reality. This report was distributed to council delegates at the time, and this is
how I learned about it. Foreseeing California’s utilities divesting from NGS,
it is likely that the tribe’s negotiating team included a possibility for Navajo
ownership in the power plant. This has long been a goal of resource nationalism
in the Navajo Nation. In the literature on dependency and development, for
example, the economist Lorraine Ruffing made it clear that the tribe needs to
own and control its resources, not just sell them. Others, such as Al Henderson,
former director of the Navajo Nation Division of Economic Development, said
much the same thing (R. Dunbar-Ortiz 1979; see also Aberle 1969; Reno 1981;
Ruffing 1976; Weiss 1984). As the anthropologist Dana Powell wrote in her 2011
dissertation on coal in the Navajo Nation, members of the tribal government
“work[ed] together to position the proposed power plant as the machinery for
sovereignty through its economic power to generate $50 million annually in
tribal revenue and its symbolic power to override the state of New Mexico” (271).
In 2015, two years after the lease passed the Navajo Nation Council, the Los
Angeles Department of Water and Power publicly announced it was with-
drawing from NGS when the fifty-year lease expired in 2019, and the Salt
River Project immediately said it would acquire LADWP’s shares of the power
plant.14 The Navajo Transitional Energy Company (NTEC) was also a potential
buyer of LADWP’s shares. Two prominent members of the tribe’s negotiat-
ing team, Attorney General Harrison Tsosie and former energy advisor to the
president Sam Woods, had by 2015 left their work in the tribal government
and were working for NTEC. With an ideology that defines sovereignty as
resource nationalism, owning both a mine and part of the power plant would be
a huge advancement. Tsosie’s and Woods’s actions in 2013 signal this ideology
in action. They worked hard for Navajo ownership over the power plant, which
was understood as a boost in tribal sovereignty.
The choice for the Navajo Nation Council was simple: renew the Navajo
Generating Station lease or shut it down. The tribe’s negotiating team, along
with the industry representatives, created this impression in the minds of elected
officials. As mentioned previously, every subsequent attempt of Navajo Nation
Council delegates to change this scenario was flatly denied. The term “deal killer”
became common parlance in council floor debates. Water became a central
concern for some delegates, including future Navajo Nation president Russell
 124 CHAPTER 3

Begaye. But another issue for tribal officials was the enforcement of Navajo
labor laws in the Navajo Generating Station. There were several attempts to
amend the lease. Most of these passed. The Navajo Nation had long wanted to
extend its sovereignty over its entire territory. Council delegates offered amend-
ments along these lines again and again as the lease renewal was considered.
They were added to the lease and dropped again during secretive negotiations.
For SRP, these were “deal killers.” The amendments were finally stripped from
the lease in the final version of the agreement that the Navajo Nation endorsed
in July 2013.
The central conditioning factor of carbon sovereignty in this case was the fact
that the Salt River Project could simply walk away if the Navajo Nation Council
did not renew the lease. If the Navajo Nation said no, it would lose millions of
dollars in revenue. This was not something the tribe was able to do. It could not
make up this revenue or the jobs at the mine through any existing alternative.
SRP understood this and played the tribe’s limited options to its advantage. The
federal government had no play in the negotiation. The BIA was a nonfactor.
The two entities talking to each other were the Navajo Nation Council and the
Salt River Project. In this case, the dependency theory literature proved largely
correct. The tribe had become dependent on its relationship with the outside
corporations and energy interests during its fifty-year history with the mineral.
It was maybe even more dependent since the relationships were first critiqued
in the late 1970s and early 1980s. If the lease was not renewed, the tribe would
have lost millions of dollars in annual revenue and hundreds of jobs.

JULY 2013—CEMENTING THE NAVAJO NATION’S WATER AND ENERGY FUTURE

The Navajo Nation Council passed the lease extension in April, but it was cer-
tain to be rejected by SRP. SRP had told the Navajo Nation that any movement
on renegotiating water rights or labor rights was a “deal killer.” This meant that
SRP would not renew it. There is a lot to observe about the power inequali-
ties already. The actions of SRP to automatically reject any amendment to a
fifty-year-old lease with outdated terms speaks to how the conditions of settler
colonialism are perpetuated. It wasn’t in a public forum but behind closed doors
where SRP resumed its renegotiation with the tribe. It wanted to—needed
to—convince the Navajo Nation Council that it had to return to the original
lease that the so-called negotiating team had agreed to, a lease that virtually
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 125

kept intact vague language about water rights and exempted the Navajo Nation
from labor jurisdiction over the power plant. What was gained was a signing
bonus and a promise of continued coal royalties, estimated at $10 million a year.
The lease also allowed for a potential ownership stake—meaning the Navajo
Nation could buy one of the units that was left abandoned by one of the two
utilities leaving the project.
To deal with some of these technical aspects of the lease, the speaker
organized a work session for the council. I was able to attend and took
detailed notes. This work session was held on July 17, 2013. The council had
until the end of the month to renew the lease to get a $1 million signing
bonus that SRP offered. The meeting was held where the NTEC meeting
was held months earlier, in the little conference space attached to the Qual-
ity Inn. A handful of delegates met. A projector was placed in the center
of the room, projecting PowerPoint graphs, statistics, and monetary prom-
ises. The tribe’s lead tax attorney, Marcelino Gomez, informed the Navajo
Nation Council that the royalty payments were based on how much power
NGS sold to utility companies. If the power plant sold less energy because
of climate change legislation, it would dramatically affect the amount of
money the tribe received as revenue. Delegate Witherspoon suggested that
the royalty payments should be changed to an absolute number and not based
on megawatts sold so that this money could help fund a transition out of
coal. During the discussion, Council Delegate Nelson Begay said he wanted
stronger water claims. Delegate Leonard Tsosie, who voted against the lease
renewal, thought the language protecting the tribe was weak. After two hours
of discussion, the meeting ended. Delegates drifted out of the room to get
lunch and do other things.
That afternoon, I arrived at the council chamber as the discussion on the
legislation began. Again, the room was full. There were workers, tribal members,
opponents, and industry officials mixed in the audience. Every delegate except
for Kenneth Maryboy from the Utah part of the reservation was there. I felt
fatigued by the issue at this point, and I think many other people felt the same
way. The vibrancy was dim. The mood in front of the Navajo Nation Council
chamber from April, when delegates showed up to support the lease renewal,
was gone.
Council Delegate Leonard Tsosie spoke against the lease renewal: “Unfor-
tunately, comparing what we did with [the] resolution that we passed before
[in April], I think the resolution CAP-21–13 to be the stronger resolution that
 126 CHAPTER 3

we passed. This is the weaker resolution. And we are giving up. We are giving
in. I can’t subscribe to that.” Tsosie was in the minority in his dissent against
what looked like the inevitable passage of the NGS lease renewal that now
had all the council’s amendments from April removed. These amendments
were meant to protect Navajo resources and rights. But SRP had rejected
these.
Tsosie continued, “I submit that a fatigue factor has creeped in. People
are just kind of tired and I’m tired of talking about it. So maybe that is the
strategy. Everyone is tired of it, so let’s just pass it. And I hope you don’t
do that,” Tsosie said. “In the last resolution we were trying to hold the U.S.
government responsible for its trust responsibility; that has been taken out.”
Tsosie concluded by asking “whether the cost of tribal sovereignty is worth
$40 million—I say not.”
The most critical part of the entire conversation—missed in the local press—
was when Council Delegate Russell Begaye put forward an amendment to
legally force SRP not to challenge Navajo water claims to the Colorado River.
The delegates who opposed the amendments, including Speaker Naize and
Lorenzo Bates, were opposed to it not out of principle but from fear. They feared
that SRP would reject the lease and the Navajo Nation would lose all the reve-
nues from the plant and the Kayenta Mine. Bates said power flows downward
toward Phoenix and they would take all the tribe’s water if the Navajo Nation
did not approve the lease. Delegate Witherspoon said that in the future, water
would be more valuable than gold and that the Navajo Nation should do every-
thing in its power to protect its water rights.
The water rights amendment proved to be the crucial amendment. Two fac-
tions emerged. It became such a heated issue that Speaker Pro Tem Mel Begay
brought in the Navajo Nation Department of Justice’s lead water rights attorney,
Stanley Pollack, to testify about the implications of the amendment on larger
water claims to the Colorado River. Pollack provided vague and ultimately
unhelpful answers. But bringing him in showed how uncertain tribal delegates
were about the water issue. In the end, the vote to add the amendment to the
lease was an 11–11 split. Council delegates who voted in favor of the amendment
did so in defiance of SRP’s threats to walk away. But in the case of a tie, the
speaker (who normally abstains) is allowed to vote. Speaker Pro Tem Begay
shifted in his seat and turned toward the legislative recorder, in the direction
where I was standing in the audience area, and gave a downward thumb to show
his disapproval of the amendment.
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 127

FIGURE 11 . Navajo Nation Council considering legislation, July 18, 2013. Photograph by
Andrew Curley.

As soon as the speaker did this, Council Delegate Katherine Benally yelled
out from her seat and changed her vote. It shocked everyone. She said she
wanted to vote yes, in favor of the amendment. It was an outburst rare for the
Navajo Nation Council. This action suddenly nullified the speaker pro tem’s
vote because it changed the early vote from an 11–11 split to a 12–10 majority in
favor of the amendment. Then one of the strangest things happened in the many
years that I have followed the Navajo Nation Council. Rather than accept the
amendment to the lease, the speaker pro tem called a five-minute recess for a
supposed “malfunction” of one of his voting buttons. Suddenly everyone was out
of their seats and walking around. There was loud chatter. I could see the speaker
and the speaker’s staff lobby council delegates Katherine Benally and Mel Begay
on the council floor (see figure 12). I do not know what was said to them, but
when the recess ended (after twenty minutes, not five), they both switched
their votes to “no” (against the amendment) and it ultimately failed. After the
amendment failed, the Navajo Nation Council went back to the “main motion,”
the lease renewal, and passed it 16–6. The delegates who ultimately opposed the
lease extension were Nelson Begay, Russell Begaye, Jonathan Hale, Leonard
Pete, Leonard Tsosie, and Dwight Witherspoon. Ten of the sixteen delegates
who voted in favor of the lease are no longer on the Navajo Nation Council.
 128 CHAPTER 3

FIGURE 12 . Unprecedented suspension of debate to negotiate votes on the NGS

lease, July 18, 2013. Photograph by Andrew Curley.

On social media, someone who worked in the speaker’s office (an older man)
posted a public message that read:

Nearly 3 years of negotiations and many days of Council debates and we finally
got the Navajo Generating Station lease amendments approved! This preserves
thousands of high paying Navajo jobs in a 65% unemployed area, creates billions
of dollars in revenues to our regional market, millions of annual Dollars to the
Navajo Nations budget and adds some of the most aggressive pollution controls
systems in the Nation!

In response, a critic of the deal, a younger Diné woman with training in law and
public policy who had ties to environmental organizations, responded:

I truly wish our Nation would be receiving such a windfall. Sadly, the opposite
is the case. The market for coal is not what it used to be. In less than 5 years,
we’ll be left standing with a worthless power plant that will cost us hundreds
of thousands of dollars in upgrade costs. It is my generation that will have to
clean up the mess.

Members of the Navajo Nation debated whether the lease extension was good
for the Navajo Nation. The considerations were difficult and the political terrain
hard to determine.
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 129

CONCLUSION

The significance of the Navajo Nation’s 2013 coal renewal was to highlight the
embedded moral economies (more on these in chapter 4) and structural limita-
tions operating in and around the Navajo Nation. The Salt River Project was the
power broker during the entire renewal process. It dictated the terms of the lease
almost completely. This was almost the same scenario tribal lawmakers faced
in the mid-1960s when the power plant was originally proposed. Why had the
terms of the negotiations failed to change despite years of social, political, and
ideological change among tribal lawmakers between then and now? The answer
is related to colonial difference making and the lack of meaningful options for
tribes. In other words, the lease renewal was an illusion of choice, a façade on
par with the treaties from 150 years ago that cemented land dispossession.
While ethnography helps sheds light on the deliberation of the Navajo
Nation Council lawmakers, there are limitations in this research approach. It
is restricted to the data I do have, the observations I made during the lease
renewal, and the private interviews I had with some of these lawmakers before
and after the passage of the lease. That my father was a council delegate at the
time might bias me in favor of his interpretation of events. He would regularly
give me a matter-of-fact explanation of what was going on while it was happen-
ing, which influenced how I interpreted things. There is also much to be gained
in having connections with and understandings of the people involved. Such
connections create a more in-depth and richer understanding of the process,
even if understood through the lens of one participant’s perspectives. What
we have in the colonial record from the 1960s is a complete absence of any of
this. The larger point of this chapter is not to say who was right or wrong in
the detailed questions about the passage of the lease. I had my opinions at the
time, both as a member of the Navajo Nation and as someone with a sense of
an invested future in the outcome of the decision. At the same time, I thought
about the meaning and the significance of the renewal beyond the moment and
the questions involved.
The renewal, as a political process, shone a light on some areas and hid other
things in the shadows. To this day, we know little about what was discussed
preceding the renewal between members of the Navajo Nation president’s staff
and the Salt River Project. This was where crucial decisions were made. When I
asked some of the most consequential actors about what they discussed during
this time, like then attorney general Harrison Tsosie, they were unforthcoming
 130 CHAPTER 3

in their responses. As the public face of the administration, Tsosie didn’t disclose
anything that was confidential. It was for us, the public, to interpret the mean-
ing behind the administration’s silence on questions about the lease renewal.
Why were some things restricted to “executive privilege” and others allowed to
be part of the official public discourse? In this way, the attorney general was
acting more like a corporate attorney than the lead attorney for the Navajo
Nation government. Or, put differently, perhaps this reveals that in matters of
extraction and mineral leasing, the Navajo Nation is more of a corporation than
a government. What do “citizenship” and “sovereignty” or even “membership”
mean for such an entity?
This speaks to the idea of carbon treaties, the flipside of carbon sovereignty.
In principle, the treaty should be a fair agreement between actors, but for Indig-
enous nations it was a way of adding a legal face to what was otherwise violent
dispossession. Treaties between Indigenous nations and the federal government
centered around final land statuses. I posit carbon treaties to think about sim-
ilar arrangements and political advantages and disadvantages involving issues
beyond land and the status of reservation boundaries. Carbon treaties combine
the political inequalities of treaties with the business practices of corporate
agreements. The NGS lease serves here as an example of a carbon treaty—
making the arrangements around the Navajo Nation’s use of fossil fuels.
The theoretical basis of sovereignty speaks to the powers of modern states
to control internal populations. It is a territorial claim but with extraterritorial
implications. Sovereignty defines as much of the external as internal, and this is
a legacy of statecraft and state making. The implications for carbon sovereignty
are to think about how sovereign powers are territorially reconfigured in fossil
fuel contracts. Also, what are terms of the configuration? Whereas traditional
notions of sovereignty are for forever, contracts set time limits—even if the
time limits are far into the future. A question is, what was the original purpose
of a seventy-five-year lease for the land on which the NGS was built? It was
clearly extending the life of the power plant beyond the natural lifetimes of
the people who signed the lease. As Normal Little indicated when he asked
the Navajo Tribal Council to support coal development, he acknowledged his
inevitable death and the fact that the social processes decided today would have
ramifications for future generations. The coal contract works in this liminal
understanding of time. It is not forever; neither is it un-permanent. Seventy-
five years into the future, from 1969, what did they imagine? At the time of this
writing, we are still not at this threshold in time. We are still twenty-two years
 CARBON TREATYMAKING 131

away from this arbitrary point in time, and we see so much has changed in the
span of just a few years.
There are places in the world that have (had) liminal timeframes when think-
ing about sovereignty and territorial claims. Hong Kong was originally a ninety-
nine-year lease between China and the UK in 1898. At the initial signing of
the lease, China was weak and decentralized. European powers cut it to pieces
during the Opium Wars. The lessons of imperial meddling are still fresh in the
minds of Chinese officials. By 1997, with the end of the lease, China was a very
different China. It was centralized under the authority, power, and dominance
of the Chinese Communist Party. China’s communist party was born in anti-
imperial struggle and is largely defined internally to protect China from external
threats. The retaking of Hong Kong was never in doubt when the lease expired.
The status of Hong Kong as a place, culture, and site of politics is changing.
Territorial configurations are redrawn in the column and authority of China.
The land on which NGS was built is not a Hong Kong. But it is a land that
is part of the Navajo Nation and was subjected to similar territorial exceptions.
The land was brought out of the jurisdiction of the Navajo Nation and into the
control of the Salt River Project—a nominally public utility that operates like
a private corporation. In this way, SRP’s territorial claims included parts of the
Navajo Nation. In the leased area, subject to the seventy-five-year lease, the rules
of the utility, not the tribe, were paramount.
 CHAPTER 4
WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL

I
N THE SUMMER of 2014, it was already a year since the Navajo Nation renewed its
stake in coal. By this point, I was living in Sanders, Arizona, in the southeast
corner of the reservation. I had moved from Kayenta, Arizona, where I had
lived for a year and interviewed community members and coal workers on their
thoughts on coal as a continued source of revenues, jobs, and “development.” It
was then that I was asked to moderate a forum between Navajo Nation presi-
dential candidates as they campaigned ahead of the election that fall. The forum
was called “Navajo Youth Forum” and its purpose was to hold the potential
political leaders accountable to the perspective of young Navajo people.
Since the beginning of 2014, I had watched staff of the Navajo Times (my
employer at the time) conduct presidential debates across the reservation. The
moderators were good at being systematic and structured, but to a fault. I found
that they failed to ask follow-up questions to a candidate’s rehearsed answers.
This is where I was asked to step in. Organizers felt I knew enough about the
Diné political experience to ask quick follow-up questions of the candidates. In
my case, I wanted to know what they thought about coal.
During the debate, I asked presidential candidate and former coal worker
Edison “Chip” Begay how he felt about the future of the industry given its exter-
nal pressures. I asked him if it was a viable industry for the future with climate
change regulation increasing, power plants shutting down, and young Diné
community members pursuing different kinds of work outside the reservation.
His response was indicative of a generation of Diné workers who grew up with
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 133

mining around them. He explained, “I was raised in a coal mine. I spent thirty-
three years in a coal mine. As a single parent, I got two kids that I’ve raised. This
is our national resource. Abundant natural resource.” I said, “Talk to the young
people out there who are getting degrees, other skills. Do they have a future
in the Navajo coal industry? Do you see coal as a tenable form of employment
in the future?” He replied, “Yes. To me, yes, it is. Because we [coal workers]
supported the Navajo Nation, we supported the youth with scholarships, we
supported the veterans, we support our elders with that money.”
This was the sentiment of a working-class Diné man who found opportunity,
security, and a sense of livelihood in coal work. This was the voice that is muted
in the scholarship on coal and development in the Navajo Nation. Yet it is the
coal worker who will bear the greatest costs if the industry suddenly dries up.
This chapter is the story of the Navajo coal worker and the peculiar place he or
she fills in Diné social, cultural, and political institutions. This chapter is about
the Diné coal worker and how he or she feels about life and livelihood.1

TABLE 2 . Kayenta resident and coal worker interviews

DATE AGE GENDER EDUCATION OCCUPATION

CW1 5/22/13 61 M High school Welder

CW2 5/14/13 NA M High school Electrician
CW3 5/13/13 66 M NA Administrator
CW4 7/18/13 64 M High school Truck driver
CW5 7/19/13 NA M College Dragline operator
CW6 NA 60s* M College Works for SRP
CW7 NA NA M High school Truck driver
CW8 6/22/13 NA F College Truck driver
KR9 NA 30 F College Researcher
KR10 NA 23 F College Not-for-profit
KR11 NA 35 F Graduate Government
KR12 9/1/13 34 M Graduate Government
KR13 NA 30s M Graduate Researcher
CW14 1/27/19 50s M NA Welder
CW15 1/30/19 60s M NA Loader
CW16 2/4/19 70s M NA Machine Repair
CW17 2/8/19 60s F NA —
CW18 2/8/19 60s M NA Dragline operator
 134 CHAPTER 4

THE BEGINNING OF CRISIS

In the fall of 2005, crisis splashed across the Navajo Times in headlines such as
“An Uncertain New Year: Black Mesa Workers Face Layoffs, Upheaval After
Decades of Service,” “Closure Causing Layoffs of Longtime Workers,” and
“Chapters Lament Lost Perks in Wake of Mine Closure,” with one article
explaining, “Measured in jobs, the cost will be 150 mine positions and another 31
on the slurry line.”2 As Hopi slurry worker Everett Cainimptewa said, although
the work was hard, he did not regret it because it paid for his children’s college
tuition. “I’m really grateful for that. They deserved that.”
The shutting down of the coal mine and power plant was a traumatic expe-
rience for the Navajo Nation. It was “the end of an era.” It signaled the end of
coal in the Navajo Nation. But although this was the beginning of the end, the
end was far in the distance. The Navajo coal economy has experienced a long
and painful death. At the time of this writing, one coal mine remains open, and
all the rest have closed. With them, the jobs are gone and the monies dried up.
The last remaining mine is Navajo Mine, ironically the first mine to open.
The closure of the Black Mesa Mine in 2006 was mentioned in several inter-
views with coal workers in 2013. In the lead-up to the NGS lease renewal, the
specter of Black Mesa Mine’s closure weighed heavily on the minds of Diné
coal workers. Some of the workers I interviewed had worked at the Black Mesa
Mine for decades. Suddenly, in 2005 their futures were uncertain. When the
mine closed, they were out of work and unsure if they could find work again.
More than one of the Kayenta Mine workers I interviewed had worked in the
Black Mesa Mine before it closed and then moved over to the next mine. The
fact that Peabody Coal operated both mines made the transition somewhat
easier.
Although the Black Mesa Mine and Kayenta Mines were adjacent, the
political context of the two mines was very different. The Black Mesa Mine
opened in 1968 and provided the raw fuel for the Mohave Generating Sta-
tion, a 1,500-megawatt power plant, based 273 miles away in Laughlin, Nevada.
Southern Californian Edison, the utility that owned the Mohave Generating
Station, convinced the Navajo Nation Council to slurry the coal to the power
plant rather than use rail, which was the practice at the time. Many people
don’t know this, but Southern California Edison insisted on the slurry. It was a
way for the utility to save on costs. But the Navajo Nation provided the water
for the slurry. The water was from the N-Aquifer beneath Black Mesa and was
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 135

considered by some to be pristine water capable of supplying household needs.

For the power utility, the N-Aquifer, like the Colorado River, was abstract and
made into a cost.
This was how the colonial ontology of resources entered into everyday prac-
tices in the Navajo Nation. The land and water became numbers in lease agree-
ments and contracts. The conditions of the earth were established by colonial
forces, and Diné leaders could agree to participate or not and likely see these
lands converted into resources anyway.
The Mohave Generating Station operated for decades. The water was used
once and contaminated in the movement of coal through a nearly three-
hundred-mile pipeline. While the Navajo Nation received revenues and jobs,
Arizona and California got permanent water infrastructure and decades of
cheap energy. As the previous chapter showed, the coal industry expanded and
consolidated in the Navajo Nation in the 1970s and 1980s. For residents on Black
Mesa, the people directly impacted by the mine, N-Aquifer became something
real, something that represented two fundamentally different ways of thinking
about the environment: one that was based on exploited colonial capitalism, and
the other about environmental health and sustainability.
In 1998 the Sierra Club and other environmental organizations sued South-
ern California Edison and the plant’s owners for not adhering to provisions
of the Clean Air Act. The provisions had to do with regional haze rules over
national parks and monuments like the Grand Canyon. Southern California
Edison, the owner and operator of the power plant, decided to settle the lawsuit.
Cynically, the utility agreed to retrofit the power plant by 2006 or shut down.
Southern California Edison did nothing. As SRP would do a decade later,
the utility tricked the tribe and Diné coal workers into thinking the plant and
mine would remain open. Instead, the utility managers found cheaper sources
of energy elsewhere and planned for the shutdown and demolishment of the
power plant.
Power plants and their feeder mines are complex systems, moving people,
material, and energy into capital circulations. There are state and federal regula-
tors, tribal governments, workers and contracts, unions, rate payers, transmission
lines, water rights and water sources, industrial equipment, boilers, and toxic
waste. Energy produces some of the most complicated logistical systems in the
United States. These energy systems coordinate around temporal and material
abstractions like acre-feet of water per year, tons of coal, and dollars per hour.
Then there are the long-term contracts—fifty-year terms, seventy-five-year
 136 CHAPTER 4

terms. Logistically, extraction requires temporal bending, the movement of

time from hours per week to half centuries or more of land leases. The world
dramatically changed between 1969 and 2019, but the coal contract doesn’t care
about this. It’s all about access, property, and profit. In search of this ideal, for
a time-cost calculation that is most advantageous, utilities and large energy
producers are even abandoning the long-term contract that was a feature of
coal production for decades. An underappreciated story about the death of coal
and its replacement with natural gas is the way that the latter is made more
flexible in capitalist temporal regimes—its production is less tied to permanent
extractive infrastructure associated with coal and therefore can be conditioned
as more responsive to flexible “market” purchases.
Southern California Edison did nothing for seven years. What it did, it turns
out, was buy time to find new sources of power so that it could close the coal
plant and save money. Although this bolstered the bottom line for the private
utility, it was devastating for the Navajo Nation—the worst possible outcome,
in fact. The implications of Southern California Edison’s decision were lost
jobs and revenues for the Navajo Nation—the collapse of a major part of the
economy with little warning and no sense of responsibility. The agreement the
utility made with environmental groups was little more than a stalling tactic.
The utility decided to close the power plant on the deadline of the day of the
agreement, January 1, 2006. With no one to sell coal to, Peabody Coal closed
the Black Mesa Mine. Southern California Edison received offset credits for
closing the plant and the Navajo coal workers lost their jobs. Many Diné work-
ers blamed environmental organizations for the shutdown.

T’ÁÁ HWÓ’ AJÍ T’ÉEGO

Although the circumstances leading up to the closures of both the Mohave

Generating Station and the Navajo Generating Station looked similar, there
remained important differences between both coal infrastructures. NGS was
a unique configuration of private, public, and federal ownership. It was the
only power plant that the Bureau of Reclamation owned. It was key to the
power of the Central Arizona Project for decades, supplying 90 percent of its
power. Without NGS, Phoenix and Tucson couldn’t get water from the Col-
orado River, which was vital for both cities. As was discussed in the previous
chapter, the NGS annually consumed thirty-four thousand acre-feet of water
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 137

in Arizona’s apportionment of the Upper Colorado River water. That water was
set aside in the NGS lease so that Congress would initially fund CAP (Curley
2021a), but now it’s free for any user in Arizona to claim.
NGS was different from the Mohave Generating Station in that most users
were from Arizona, not California or elsewhere. SRP owned 21.7 percent of
the power plant, Arizona Public Service (APS) 14 percent, and Tucson Electric
Power 7.5 percent. Arizona utilities own 43.2 percent of the power plant. Addi-
tionally, the Bureau of Reclamation owned 24.3 percent of the NGS. The Bureau
of Reclamation owned the power plant as part of its commitment to CAP—an
Arizona project. This puts NGS’s commitment to Arizona energy and water at
67.5 percent of the plant. The other owners were Nevada Power at 11.3 percent
and Los Angeles Department of Water and Power at 21.2 percent.
David, like many of the mine workers I interviewed, presented a consistent
understanding about his work with coal. He told me that the coal mines were
a source of jobs and livelihood in a place with few opportunities. During our
interview, almost as a passing thought, David described the importance of coal
work for people like him through the expression t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego, which means
“do it yourself ” or “it’s up to you” to take care of yourself. Referring to lessons
he learned from his parents and his grandparents about hard work, David said,
“We are doing as we were told.” Then he repeated the phrase t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego.
“We get up early in the morning and come back and we bought just a little bit
of progress” (CW2).
Diné people historically have had a strong sense of independence and self-
reliance. It is for this reason that dependency on the federal government feels
like failure for many tribal members. I suggest that this attitude of “do it your-
self ” was easily adapted to a subsistence economy reliant on sheep. In those
times, a family’s well-being depended on how hard its members worked. Prior
to colonization, Indigenous peoples did not exist in a primitive state as many
anthropologists alluded to over the years. Indigenous peoples had different
ideas of property, work, and value that were tied to ideas of personal character
and production of useful labor. In other words, in Diné notions of social and
community responsibility, expressed in idioms such as t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego, the
maintaining of a livelihood through hard work is key and it can be done in the
form of sheep herding, small-scale agriculture, or mine work.
With the expansion of colonialism and capitalism across the region, Diné
attitudes toward work did not suddenly disappear or become replaced by
capitalist logic. As the labor historian Colleen O’Neill (2005) writes, early
 138 CHAPTER 4

Diné coal mines were small, family run, and reflected traditional ideas of land
tenure, work, and reciprocity. Between the 1920s and 1940s, Diné men estab-
lished small mines where coal was near the surface. This coal was unevenly
extracted and became extra cash when it could be sold to trading posts or out-
posts for stoves. This was a small-scale version of mining that was responding
to new regional pressures and opportunities. O’Neill shows that Diné people
staked claims to mines much like they had for sheep pastures, sharing a mine
site among a family unit, with different members of the family taking turns
digging, hauling, and selling. These mines were not supported by notions of
property rights but understood ideas of family unit territorialization (O’Neill
2004). This was similar to how Diné people grazed their sheep over areas that
families informally claimed. It was this process of moving further and fur-
ther onto the Colorado Plateau in search of better grazing lands that led the
Navajo people westward from New Mexico into modern Arizona (Weisiger
2011).
Because subsistence ethics bleed into regimes of wage labor, one’s sense of
doing meaningful work is not changed. For instance, Diné weavers sell their
rugs primarily to white buyers and make small imperfections in their craft
so that their sense of personal investment does not become permanently tied
to the objects they make (Bsumek 2008). It is a way to release their invested
labor from the object. Consequently, certain things that are produced for trade
carry as much importance as things that are produced on the land and for the
family to consume. Not all work is viewed as hard work or worthy work, how-
ever, and the corresponding opposite of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego were accusations of
cheating, corruption, or sometimes even witchcraft (Kluckhohn and Leighton
[1946] 1956).
Wealth can be interpreted as the outcome of hard work and good character
or corruption and bad character. From my experience, work that moves further
and further away from physical labor is interpreted with less and less intrinsic
value. Even though government work and elected political leadership are sig-
nificant sources of income for many people, this work is easily chastised and
understood as corrupt. It is not too different from popular attitudes among
working classes generally against white-collar or desk jobs, but for the Diné
people many of these attitudes are directly related to a regime of ethics in pro-
duction that were learned in subsistence times.
The phrase t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego is popular in Diné society today and is used
regularly in conversations about self-reliance. For example, the popular summer
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 139

footrace series Just Move It, held throughout the reservation to combat obesity
and diabetes, uses the phrase t’aa hwo’ aji t’eego as the slogan for the run. The
organizers of the series translate the phrase as “It’s up to you.”3 In consecutive
State of the Nation addresses, Navajo Nation vice president Rex Lee Jim used
the phase to reiterate the importance of Navajo people taking personal respon-
sibility for their livelihoods, explaining: “I wanted to encourage Navajos to take
responsibility for their own actions and their own future.” In another example,
the Navajo Nation Department for Self Reliance (the Tribal Temporary Assis-
tance for Needy Families program) uses t’áá hwó ajítéego as a core value of
its work.4 Finally, the chief justice of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court used
the concept to reduce child support obligations to a woman who divorced her
husband. Chief Justice Herb Yazzie wrote:

Our elders have always taught the concept of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego (self-reliance).
The emphasis of this value is that one must prepare himself/herself for the dif-
ficulties in life—one needs to rise early to meet the dawn and be blessed with
the desire, commitment and capabilities necessary for a strong positive mental
attitude, physical strength and endurance and capabilities in dealing with life’s
challenges. . . . These values apply to all; particularly, to a woman who marries
and becomes a parent. Should the marriage end, the mother remains responsible
for maintaining the home and raising the children despite the difficulties she
may encounter. “Traditionally, the responsibility for a family whose male spouse
either has deserted or is deceased falls upon the family of the female.” (Navajo
Nation Supreme Court Opinion SC-CV-40–07, p. 18)

The expression is often described as something that comes from the past when
Navajo people relied mainly on sheep for subsistence. In identifying the source
of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego with “elders,” in the Supreme Court opinion quoted here,
Yazzie dates the origin of the phrase to the past when Diné people lived under
much different circumstances. Or as David explained, “it is something our
grandparents taught us.” Although the notion was related to work and life
common in a subsistence economy, it is something that has translated directly
into regimes of wage labor and settler colonialism, or colonial capitalism.
For a generation of people in Kayenta, the first wage-labor opportunities
came in the form of uranium mining, which left a terrible and tragic legacy
across the Navajo Nation. The mines were crude and irresponsibly administered.
Companies who leased land from the Navajo Nation to open these mines left
 140 CHAPTER 4

many of the mine sites contaminated (Eichstaedt 1994). One of my interviewees

who worked in the Kayenta Mine all his life learned the trade because his father
worked as a uranium miner in the 1940s and 1950s (CW1).
By the time he started work at the Kayenta Mine in the 1970s, the negative
health effects on his father, like many in the previous generation of uranium
miners, had started to metastasize. Workers who had never smoked developed
lung cancer years after they had ended their time in uranium mines. On inves-
tigation, federal officials and members of the Navajo Nation learned that the
mines were poorly insulated, and the workers did not use protective masks or
gear when digging in these radioactive sites. They were not informed of the
danger, and spread the uranium dust to their family members when they shook
off their clothes at home.
Despite these negative health effects, many young people graduating from
high school in the 1970s applied for employment at the new coal mines. As
one interviewee told me, “Uranium to coal mining, it has benefited our people”
(CW1). With little education and even less opportunity, these workers took
on coal mining as a way to provide for their families and fulfill their duties at
home. There was a sense of masculinity tied to this work. This is how an indus-
try like the coal industry, although clearly an environmental and health risk to
miners and members of the community, could quickly embed itself in the res-
ervation during the era of development. Although the work displaced families
who lived on the mine site and contributed to environmental problems in the
area, many who sought and gained employment in the industry weighed these
consequences against the benefits of providing a good living for themselves and
resources for their family.
The sociologist Rebecca R. Scott (2010) identified a similar tendency
among coal workers in West Virginia. In one interview, she talked to a
community member whose house and family land were destroyed through
the controversial mining technique “mountaintop removal,” in which entire
mountains are destroyed to expose their coal. The interviewee acknowledged
that coal displaced her family and obliterated generations of history with
the land, but at least it provided the area’s local men with jobs and sources of
livelihood (Scott 2010). Environmentalists will decry the destruction of the
land, but the interviewee in West Virginia focused on themes of work and
livelihood, which brings us back to David. He lamented the work of environ-
mentalists and the lackluster response of Navajo Nation Council delegates
to defend the industry.
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 141

To me, I did not go to the last [Navajo Nation Council session]. The only time
we went there is when we met. Because I saw the exact same thing they were
doing [when they were considering the renewal of the Black Mesa Mine in
2005]. They were giving more debates and everything to the environmentalists.
They would not listen to the workers because I heard one of the council mem-
bers say all they do is drive duallys [dual rear-wheel trucks that are usually more
expensive than regular trucks] and four-door trucks.
Already they are prejudiced because we are practicing what our great-
grandmas and great-grandpas said: t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego—“It’s going to be up to
you to be something.” We are not practicing what those councilmen over there
are doing, just sitting around and going to bars. No. We are doing what we were
told, t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego. Get up in the morning and make some money. Good
things will come to you. We get up early in the morning and come back and we
bought just a little bit of progress. (CW2)

Another interviewee, who grew up in Kayenta but not in a coal-mining fam-

ily, told me that the children of coal workers were distinguishable in the
local school because they always had new shoes and nice backpacks (KR14).
Two other people I interviewed, who were children of coal workers, told me
that the revenues from coal work were an important part of their household
income when they were growing up (KR10, KR11). Although they them-
selves had questions about the industry, they understood and emphasized
the importance of it for their parents and their parents’ generation. For some
Navajo people, dressing nicely in new clothes is a sign of a good work ethic
(KR14). Therefore, new clothes and trucks are not negative or flashy things
but the result of hard work.5 Most of the children of mine workers whom I
interviewed explained that even when they disagree with the coal economy
because it is bad for the environment or a failed approach toward economic
development, they respect their parents’ work and the material security it had
brought them. To have a job, regardless of the circumstances, meant that you
were providing for yourself and your family. As one informant who worked
in coal mining for more than thirty years told me:

You will be swept away by how much the environment is sometimes hostile and
discriminative, but for dear life, our livelihood lies within it, so the feelings that
I have through my experience working, I think through our generation, my gen-
eration, we respect how the corporations come along, they use their guns, their
 142 CHAPTER 4

money, the money and ability to maneuver. I do respect my job and I really did
enjoy working because for me and my livelihood and my kids, I would say that
it has given me a good life, but there are times when you just felt like walking
away from it. That was the source of income. That’s the only thing that I knew
was to mine. I did [my share] in training people and I did my job well and I
was praised for it. So it was good and bad.
...
I have lived in the mining environment all my life. It was the mineral source
that helped me from childhood to high school. I’m accustomed to it. I do know
the value to the family, my mom and dad when they were alive, and I was raised
as a miner. And me again, I raised my family from coal mining. . . . It is very
benefiting to be near or live on our own soil.

This idea of being close to one’s ancestral land with the means of both physical
and social reproduction weighed heavily on the minds of Diné coal workers.
This was a central rationale that was given for the support of Peabody Coal and
the jobs that exist at the mine. Although a majority of the workforce were men,
some women worked at the mine. The gender division of labor was different
from previous generations of work within the Navajo Nation. One interviewee
joked with my research assistant Majerle Lister in 2019 that the men at the mine
were lazy and the women had to push them to work (CW17).
Many of the interviewees talked about the work being close to home. White
members of Peabody use this sense of belonging to serve their own interests. In
one instance, at a public debate about coal and alternative energy during a local
chapter house meeting, I observed a Peabody official prod a former mine worker
to talk about the benefits of the mine and how working at the mine allowed him
to stay close to his home to maintain a living.
He was a member of an organization called Black Mesa United. Members of
the organization attended a meeting of the Navajo Nation Council’s Resource
and Development Committee to consider whether to allow the site of the Black
Mesa Mine to become a solar field. Under U.S. law, the land had to remain
untouched for ten years to allow it to recover. However, environmental orga-
nizers wanted to use the land as a place to develop solar energy, as a symbolic
transition from extractive industries into sustainable ones. Members of Black
Mesa United opposed this plan because they said this land was theirs before it
was used for mining. Members of this group attended this meeting to express
their concerns. They believed the land under discussion was their land and that
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 143

they still maintained grazing rights to it, even if the land was toxic. This argu-
ment was legally weak but symbolically important.
As I discussed these things with a member of this group outside the chapter
house, a white employee from Peabody Coal interrupted my interview and
asked the man to discuss the benefits of the Kayenta Mine for his community
and his family. The Peabody official asked the man to talk about how the mine
allowed him to live and work in the reservation. This was certainly a line that
employees used to justify the work at the mine. During our conversation, the
white representative from Peabody asked me if I was with the members of the
environmental group, and then he asked the man I was speaking with to talk
about how working at Peabody allowed him to stay close to home. The man
seemed to agree and repeated to me what the Peabody official had asked him
to say.
Another person I interviewed, a coal worker, told me that the population
of Kayenta declined after the Black Mesa Mine closed in 2005. He believed
that the closure of the mine created a community crisis. To him the Kayenta
Mine was the main source of livelihood for the Kayenta community (CW2).
A different coal worker I spoke with in his home told me that his daughter’s
educational success was funded through the money he earned while working at
the mine. “That is the reason why I brought you back over here to my house,”
he said. “Being closer to work and working on the reservation has produced
those things for me” (CW4). He then pointed to his daughter’s awards hung on
the wall of his living room. “And then with the money that I made she went to
college. With our help, but I had to stay right here [in Kayenta]. . . . I bring in
money right here. It’s just right there.” In a 2019 interview, a former coal worker
told Majerle Lister:

I was traveling all these years and I was away from my family, you know, all the
time. My wife was the only one, she couldn’t get my kids through school; ele-
mentary, junior year, and then high school. But me, most of the time, I was out
there working trying to provide for them. And then when I came back in 2005
I was at home with them. And I seen the younger ones go through elementary,
junior high, and then high school. Still they didn’t pay me enough money but
you know my major reason is to be with my family. (CW14)

Another coal worker told me that being in the area helped him learn tra-
ditional ceremonial knowledge, knowledge he could not have acquired had he
 144 CHAPTER 4

been out “chasing my dreams” (CW2). Because he stayed in the Kayenta area
working at the mine, he could learn ceremonial knowledge from a medicine
man and start practicing his own ceremonies. This would not have been pos-
sible if he had to live outside the reservation for work, he said. Yet another
coal worker told me that coal mining was a good form of employment. He
said it was hard to find work in the Kayenta area and that work at the mine
was secure and provided benefits (CW5). He said that at the mine one had the
opportunity for job advancement, paid leave, and so forth. For him and many
others, it was the type of work and the job benefits at the mine that distin-
guished coal work from other jobs, such as a sales clerk, in the reservation. For
these workers, coal work was a good source of income—on par with historic
forms of livelihood.
This valorization of labor, one that is rooted in providing for one’s fam-
ily, comprises the moral economy of coal on display in Window Rock. This is
the core feature of this collective sentiment, work, and livelihood in service of
self-determination. There is a significant difference between the subsistence
understanding of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego and how it has translated into modern wage
labor. Historically, work and livelihood were rooted in a concern for one’s family
unit—providing for oneself from work on the land, through food sovereignty
and security. Although this is still true in practice, rhetorically the concept has
taken on meaning for larger groups of actors.
So how do we understand t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego today? How did it gain a sense
of collective application and rights vis-à-vis the Navajo tribal government
for a community of workers? In my analysis, the role of labor in collectivizing
the voice of Diné coal workers was critical in translating this subsistence
ethic to one that represents the community. Labor is a new feature in Diné
society. It is one that is rather uncommon today. Navajo labor laws protect
tribal employees from wrongful termination, and the tribe maintains generous
benefits and retirement packages. As a former employee at Diné College and
the Navajo Times, I had full health coverage and even a retirement account.
But for most Diné people who worked in the private sector, which includes
gas stations, hotels, and other forms of services, they live precariously. They do
not enjoy union representation, health benefits, or retirement. These trappings
of the welfare state are both recent and unevenly distributed across the Navajo
Nation. In the next section, I consider the role of labor in transforming t’áá
hwó’ ají t’éego from an expression rooted in subsistence work to one that is
part of the wage-labor economy.
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 145

THE ROLE OF LABOR

Unions are not a common organization in reservation communities, and tribal

governments continue to maintain ambivalent relationships with them. Many
tribal leaders have historically viewed unions as a source of agitation and in
some cases a threat to tribal sovereignty (O’Neill 2005; Robbins 1978). In 1958
the Navajo Nation Council passed a resolution banning unions from oper-
ating within the reservation. Then in 1960 the Navajo Nation challenged the
AFL-CIO’s right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935,
claiming that treaty rights give tribes plenary power in their own lands. The U.S.
District Court said otherwise and argued Congress had the authority over labor
issues on Indian reservations. After losing the right to ban unions, tribal officials
adopted a more pragmatic view toward labor. Today, tribal officials view them as
a vehicle to gain more rights for Diné workers in off-reservation power plants
as well as at reservation coal mines. As the anthropologist Lynn A. Robbins
(1978, 23) wrote, “Although the economic impacts of energy developments are
depressingly slight, and even harmful, the introduction of huge energy projects
has strongly affected Navajo labor relations with unions and federal agencies.”
Robbins estimated that there were 6,650 union workers in the reservation in
1977. Out of these, the United Mine Workers constituted 950 members.
The United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) Local 1924 is one of two
unions that currently operate in the reservation, the other being Union of Oper-
ating Engineers Local 953, which represents the workers at Navajo Mine. Other
unions have existed in the region with Diné members, but they were based
outside the reservation and abided by state laws. For example, the union that
represented workers in the Navajo Generating Station, who were largely Diné,
was the International Brotherhood of Electric Workers Local 266. This union,
although representing workers in a power plant that operates on Navajo land,
was based in the border town of Page, Arizona, and is registered with the state.
The Navajo Nation also maintains strong labor rights within the Navajo Nation
Code to ensure grievance procedures for most types of employment disputes.
This authority is vested in the Office of Navajo Labor Relations, which is a
branch of the Navajo Nation Council.
Although I could not find documentation on the history of UMWA in
the Navajo Nation in particular, the union formed within the first five years
of operation of the two mines. The Black Mesa Mine started operations in
1968 and the Kayenta Mine in 1973. According to several of the coal workers I
 146 CHAPTER 4

interviewed, the mine had no union representation when it opened. As one of

the workers told me:

[The union] was introduced after the mine came into the area. I think [by] the
late Lauren Williams. He was an Anglo guy from Farmington [New Mexico].
He is the one who proposed the Local 1916 to be established. The local 1916
is [now] closed. That was the union for the Black Mesa Mine. Now [when]
Kayenta Mine opened [in 1973], we set up Local 1924. (CW1)

The UMWA originally had two chapters on Black Mesa, but Local 1620 closed
when the Black Mesa Mine did in 2006. The workers I interviewed expressed
mixed perspectives about Peabody Coal. On the one hand, they applauded the
opportunity to work that the company provided and the capital and resources it
has been able to mobilize in bringing industry to the reservation. On the other
hand, the workers understood that the company exploited their labor. Peabody
paid most of its Navajo employees hourly. They had to work forty hours per
week and sometimes put in many more hours to make ends meet. One inter-
viewee put it this way:

I’ve been forced to live with a lot of overtime. Being away from my family. I
work 24/7. It causes you to be away from home. Working fourteen to sixteen
hours a day. That takes a lot. . . . One day I never realized it but I stayed home
and my oldest daughter was five years old. I said, “Come here, baby.” They didn’t
know me. They ran from me. All this time I was going to work when they were
asleep, coming back when they were asleep. Spend three and four hours at home
and then take off again. (CW1)

He continued to speak about how the demanding nature of the work can split
families apart and lead to domestic disputes. The work at the mine was grueling
and wages were hourly. During the time of mining, Peabody Coal often empha-
sized the number of Native workers employed at the mine, but very few of them
were salaried employees. Most of the salaried employees were “company men”
who were white and did not live within the reservation on a full-time basis. As
another coal worker put it:

What I hear at the community level is that Peabody has grown too much
income and maybe they need to increase our wages. We make wages, not sala-
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 147

ries. We call it the hourly wage employee and the salary employee. The company
will make the salary and we make the wages. We have to work for every cent
that we get. [Conversely] there’s a base on a salary yearly.

Unions helped alleviate this difference and played an important role as medi-
ator between the Navajo people and the company. Speaking from more than
thirty years of work at the mine, one coal worker put it to me this way:

I grew up with the idea that [a] union is bad. . . . My dad was against unions.
But I am a true-blue union guy. With the different companies that I’ve worked
for, there are a lot of grievances and the union will stand behind you. Just look at
the teachers—if there was no union, then teachers would be fired left and right.

He told me that he felt that the union was a good thing and it had helped
improve working conditions since he had begun working there in the mid-
1970s. He said, “When we first joined the union, that was the only way to
get a good wage scale, and the union helped us a lot.” He continued, “They
helped secure jobs through the bidding process,” which ensures that workers
with senior rank get the jobs and shifts they want. This process was won through
union contracts and was not something Peabody Coal used prior to the union.
As he explained, “We had that Indian [hiring] preference and monetary wise
and also health wise. We are the only union that offers 100 percent health
benefits.” It was this sense of solidarity that developed in the union halls and
that translated the sense of collective responsibility among Navajo coal workers
from just family members to a community of workers with a collective sense of
well-being. The appeal to “the community” in this case was not only to Kayenta
as a place where people lived but to the town where people were socially and
culturally connected. Coal workers recognized that this form of wage work was
important for their livelihood and survival, but they also identified themselves
as a class, distinct from tribal officials and salaried employees at the mine (who
were mainly non-Native). In this way, t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego took on new spatial
and social dynamics. It was no longer rooted in the family unit but in “the
community” and among workers.
I met with a former coal worker on the front porch of his home in Kayenta,
in the Peabody trailer court. Maybe because he no longer worked at the mine, he
was more candid in his critique of the industry and even the union. He told me
he had ambivalent feelings toward the UMWA. He said that the organization
 148 CHAPTER 4

was founded in 1890, when miners worked hard and needed protection. Today,
he feels that it breeds laziness and corruption. As John Gaventa documented
in his famous book Power and Powerlessness (1982), unions become a power
unto themselves and this was the interviewee’s point: “I’ve seen documents of
overstaffing at the Union Hall. People are sleeping and drinking on the job”
(CW3). His point was to say that the union, in its grievance process, protected
bad employees. The early anthropological literature on ideas of wealth among
Diné people is interesting on this point. In their famous 1946 book, Kluckhohn
and Leighton write, “Industry is enormously valued. A family must arise and be
about their tasks early.” Kluckhohn and Leighton ([1946] 1956, 221) futher cite
the white anthropologist John Adair’s early work on Diné silversmithing to note
that “display of wealth is not a personal matter as much as it is a family matter. It
is not ‘See how much money I have,’ but ‘See how much money we have in our
family.’” Kluckhohn, Leighton, and Adair suggests that Diné people think about
wealth accumulation as something that is measured at the family level and not
at the individual level as in rational-choice theory or other assumptions found
in the work of economists. This implies an ideal form of distribution in which
the wealth one earns is normatively distributed among family and kin mem-
bers. This is a form of collectivity that does not exist in the union. Adair (1946,
98) writes, “In a similar fashion, members of a Navajo family herd their sheep
together, although every animal is owned by individual members of the family.”
The union is formed through solidarity among workers who share the same
occupation. It assumes a proletarianized worker who is supposed to subsume his
or her identity and interest into his larger organization. For some Diné workers,
this sense of collectivity exists, especially during contentious political circum-
stances, but at other times this solidarity is simply nonexistent, and each worker
fends for himself in the interest of his extended family. This measure of wealth at
the level of the family and not the individual is ironically a vulnerability for unions
in the Navajo Nation. As the sociologist Rogers Brubaker notes, group identity
is not a permanent category mobilized around events. For the Diné coal worker,
group solidarity in the form of “the coal worker” manifests during consequential
political decisions between workers and the tribal government, such as the Navajo
Generating Station lease renewal, but may disappear in everyday reservation life
that is centered more firmly around kinship networks (Brubaker 2004; Brubaker
and Cooper 2000). The weakness of this kind of collectivization is that it requires
the right kind of event to produce solidarity. In everyday coal work for those at
the Kayenta Mine, it was difference and not solidarity that was noticed.
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 149

Unionization created a system of seniority among the Kayenta workforce

that benefited more senior workers. In some cases, this protected troubled
employees. It also limited the opportunities for younger workers to find employ-
ment at the mine. To one interviewee, the seniority system did not express the
deeper meaning of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego. Instead, it created unnecessary forms of
hierarchy and authority that corrupted workers and made them lazy. This is not
a neoliberal critique of unions but one based on unique Diné cultural values. As
noted in earlier anthropological ideas of how Diné people understood the idea
of wealth, if you are too wealthy, one may suspect you of wrongdoing. In the case
of my interviewee, he felt the union had corrupted people’s work ethic. Another
worker spoke about how his father, a public official, was against unions. Robbins
(1978) showed that in the 1950s the Navajo Nation Council viewed unions as a
threat to its political authority and initially opposed unions from operating in
the reservation. Still, coal workers appreciated the power of a collective voice the
union provided. Another coal worker, speaking to Majerle Lister in 2019, said:

Well the union, they’ll speak for me if I do something wrong. By being a

company man they could let me go anytime when I make a mistake or some-
thing. . . . The union, they speak for you if you do something wrong and the
grievance and everything. They’ll speak for you and put you back on. (CW15)

When Lister asked if he had ever been a company man, he responded: “I’ve
never been a company man. I’ve always been with the union. Well, up here I
make thirty-eight, almost thirty-nine.”
In 2013 the union hall in Kayenta that represented Kayenta Mine workers
maintained six permanent employees. These people were paid through union
dues. Their jobs were to assist the workers during their negotiations against
Peabody Coal. Most of the mine workers I interviewed approved of the union
and articulated real benefits it brought to the workforce. They spoke of higher
wages, paid leave, and improved safety at the mine site. The United Mine Work-
ers of America was once the most powerful labor union in the Navajo Nation,
regularly involving itself in tribal politics and elections. It contributed funds to
the winner of the Navajo Nation presidential election for three election cycles in
a row. Its agenda was clear—to continue Navajo investment in its coal economy.
For example, when Lynda Lovejoy won the most votes in a 2010 presidential
primary and gained national attention as the first potential female president of
the Navajo Nation, the UMWA donated $6,000 to her strongest opponent, Ben
 150 CHAPTER 4

Shelly. This was about half of his entire campaign budget during the general
election. Shelly won the election later that fall. It is not hard to understand
why members of the UMWA would support Shelly over Lovejoy. On the one
hand, as a former council delegate and the Navajo Nation vice president for Joe
Shirley Jr., Shelly had a track record of supporting coal projects. Lovejoy, on the
other hand, gained a lot of support from environmental organizations. She ran
with the Diné activist Earl Tulley, a board member of Diné Citizens Against
Ruining our Environment (Diné C.A.R.E.).
The UMWA also supported the campaigns of individual Navajo Nation
council delegates with the intent of influencing their votes on coal-related
questions, especially those that might affect the Kayenta Mine. One delegate
told me that the UMWA had donated several hundred dollars to his cam-
paign (TGG6). He felt that the union’s intent was to influence his stance
on coal-related questions. He did not mind the money and ultimately was
critical of the renewal of the lease. But he questioned whether candidates
who received significant donations from the union could resist pressure to
renew the lease. The delegate ultimately voted for the renewal, but after try-
ing to amend a lot of the language of the proposed resolution as it pertained
to labor and water rights. In 2013, when the Navajo Nation Council consid-
ered the passage of legislation to extend the lease of the Kayenta Mine for
twenty-five years, UMWA Local 1924 chartered a bus to bring coal workers
from Kayenta to Window Rock to demonstrate their support of the lease
renewal (figure 13).

FIGURE 13 . Kayenta Mine workers in front of the Navajo Nation

Council chambers petitioning for the NGS lease renewal, April
11, 2013. Photograph by Andrew Curley.
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 151

Labor unions have changed the working conditions of mine work in the
Navajo Nation. Their efforts substantially increased the rights and benefits of
coal workers. Because of union activism, the company not only had to ensure fairer
treatment of its workers, but it was also obligated to pay into health insurance and
retirement funds. The company would likely not do this otherwise. In one of its
recent renegotiations with the UMWA, Peabody suggested that it should drop
its health coverage for mine workers because they could get free health service
through the Indian Health Service (IHS), which many Native people believe is
a lackluster fulfillment of treaty obligations and not an adequate replacement for
health care. The UMWA rejected this proposal and secured continued health
coverage for its workers. In these areas, the union improved the conditions for its
workers. It was also an active political organization, involving its membership in
questions that will affect the continuance of the mine.
In important ways, the union created a sense of solidarity and cohesion
among mine workers and helped define the Navajo working class. For the Kay-
enta workers who were members of the United Mine Workers of America, it
reinforced their sense of class conscience and the notion that working hard is
its own virtue expressed in t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego. The unique history of the mine,
labor unions, and an inherent Diné sense of work and livelihood created a class
consciousness among working-class Diné people whose livelihood depended
on the continuance of coal mining in the reservation. The work was not only
consistent with historic Diné values in labor; it has also merged with a sense of
class-consciousness forged through the union over the past thirty years.

IN THE SHADOW OF A CLOSED MINE

During the debate about the renewal of the NGS lease, coal workers reminded
me that they were campaigning for their jobs. They feared that if the Navajo
Nation Council rejected the lease or pushed too hard on SRP to renegotiate the
terms of the contract, the owners of the power plant would walk away and shut it
down. I asked one of the organizers outside the council chambers what he knew
about the lease. I asked him about the question of water rights that troubled
council delegates and if he agreed with the Little Colorado River Settlement
from the previous year, the settlement initially tied to the lease renewal. He
looked at me like he never heard of this issue. In fact, he didn’t seem to know the
terms of the lease. That information wasn’t shared with the Diné public. What
 152 CHAPTER 4

they knew was that their jobs and livelihood were tied to the lease renewal. They
believed the Navajo Tribal Council had agency to decide their fate. The perfor-
mance of the lease renewal would suggest all things were in the hands of the
Navajo Nation Council, but in truth SRP, CAP, and state planners had control
over the fate of the mine and the power plant, as subsequent events would reveal.
In recent years, the idea of t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego has become more visible within
tribal institutions. It was used in Navajo Nation law, in the proclamations of
tribal officials. Most famously, it was used as the slogan for a series of foot races
throughout the Navajo Nation. The coal workers I interviewed understood t’áá
hwó’ ají t’éego through the way their grandparents taught them, as a value in get-
ting up early and starting the day with hard work. This work ethic was something
they identified with and incorporated into the day-to-day work in the coal field.
T’áá hwó’ ají t’éego does not specify a mode of production. What is important
is the notion of cultural sustainability, meaningful livelihood, and national self-
determination. By 1940 Kluckhohn and Leighton ([1946] 1956, 59) estimated that
a third of Diné income came in the form of wages earned outside the reserva-
tion. Thirty years later, Ruffing (1978) found that Diné men and women moved
easily between wage labor and subsistence work: from rail and road construction
to sheep herding and small-scale farming. The latest and already dated statis-
tic on “unemployment” in the Navajo Nation was 48 percent of working adults
throughout the reservation (Choudhary 2005). It did not include Diné people
living outside the reservation; many live in faraway cities for school or work but
return home frequently. Ruffing showed in 1978 that Diné laborers left the reser-
vation in search of seasonal work and returned during planting months. O’Neill
(2005) found the same pattern in her archival work focusing on labor in the 1930s.
Diné men and women left the reservation for work on large farms outside the
reservation and returned home when they needed to maintain their own fields
and livestock. In other words, Diné people filled a labor niche that would later be
filled by migrant labor, whose presence in the United States as “illegal” allowed
for poorer work conditions and cheaper wages. They participated in large-scale
agriculture during picking season and then returned home (Iverson 2002).

CONCLUSION

For Diné coal workers, their sense of collective and social responsibility brought
them to Window Rock to petition for their jobs. Diné members of the UMWA
 WORKERS’ PERSPECTIVES ON COAL 153

turned t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego into a political cause, mobilizing their membership
for the preservation of their work and livelihood. They articulated an ideology
of cultural sustainability and responsibility for the livelihood of their kin and
family. Diné coal workers stood at the juncture of a rapidly changing energy
economy. In the politics of climate change, coal was under new kinds of scrutiny
and already in decline. Because of California’s actions in 2006, the state’s utilities
like LADWP and Southern California Edison were actively divesting from
coal. Even with the Navajo government’s renewal of NGS in 2013, the power
plant was already in decline. There was already talk that it would shut down one
or two units in 2019 when the original lease ended. This scenario would likely
lead to layoffs at the mine as production declined, regardless of what the tribal
council did. In the end, things were much worse than this. In 2017 SRP reneged
on the contract, although it would argue it never signed the renewal, and it made
plans to shut down the plant at the end of the first fifty-year lease. SRP said it
was looking toward the interest of rate payers (settler communities). The welfare
of Diné people was not SRP’s main concern. It was just something it would
promote if Diné sovereignty happened to align with its cynical calculations. It
was a structure of colonial resource relations long imposed on Diné lands. The
failure of the lease to continue to prospect Navajo coal signals the clear limita-
tions of a sovereignty imagined and understood through carbon.
 CHAPTER 5
TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION

I
T WAS MID-JUNE 2013, only a couple of months after the Navajo Nation Council
passed an extension of the NGS lease. The weather had warmed considerably
since May. It was already a season of extreme weather. There had been deadly
tornados in Oklahoma, drought in New Mexico, and a number of forest fires in
Arizona, where several firefighters were killed. Some considered these violent
expressions of weather a part of global climate change. It was in this context
that the Navajo Nation experienced its most intense debate about the future of
coal and energy as a source of jobs and revenues. This would be the year when
the tribe doubled down on coal.
By 2013 the political momentum for sustainable energy projects had signifi-
cantly changed course from only four years previously. Programs associated with
the highly touted “Navajo Green Jobs,” passed in 2009, were effectively mori-
bund. The new Navajo Nation president, Ben Shelly, had twice vetoed funding
for the commission designed to oversee the use of money associated with the
fund. Environmental groups introduced the rhetoric of “transition” from “dirty”
to “clean” energy technologies in 2006 when the Black Mesa Mine closed. In
2010 the Navajo Nation used similar language in its updated energy policy and
creation of a new Navajo-owned coal company, the Navajo Transitional Energy
Company (NTEC).
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 155

The notion of “transition” from coal to sustainable energy technology was an

accepted approach in the mainstream of Diné discourse by 2013. When envi-
ronmental organizers and activists first talked about transition in 2005, it was a
radical departure from the extractive industries that shaped carbon sovereignty
in the Navajo Nation. What environmental organizers proposed was a new kind
of technology, one that was designed to produce exportable energy but would
not release carbon emissions that contribute to global climate change. This was
a different kind of understanding of carbon and a different understanding of
tribal sovereignty.
In this way, the term carbon sovereignty still retains meaning, but with an
opposite understanding about carbon and sovereignty from previous genera-
tions of Diné leaders. It is the way this changed comprehension of energy as
something in need of transition that this chapter documents. In North America,
energy transition challenges are connected to decades of colonial policy, land
theft, and pressures to exploit resources on Indigenous lands: British Colombia
(Sloan Morgan 2020), Alberta (McCreary and Milligan 2014), North Carolina
(Emanuel 2019), and Arizona (Curley 2019b). These pressures and the need to
develop combined to create a sense of carbon sovereignty among tribal nations.
It is no surprise, therefore, that the idea of transition wasn’t revolutionary itself
but was made to fit existing governing practices.
President Shelly took the idea of “transition” and made it a major part of his
agenda. He used it during a presidential speech in the fall of 2013. He incorpo-
rated it again in his new energy policy, amended in 2013, that focused on moving
out of coal and into other kinds of resource technologies. This was the first time
the Navajo Nation’s energy policy was amended in more than thirty years and
demonstrates how sustainable energy technology was made to fit the existing
frameworks used by tribes. Although transition was still aspirational, Shelly’s
actions did signal politically where his administration was going on questions
of energy and development. When the council proposed the formation of the
Navajo Transitional Energy Company later that year, “transition” was in the
company’s name and already part of the tribe’s governing agenda.
In its incorporating language, the Navajo Nation Council required NTEC
to invest 10 percent of its profits into renewable and alternative energy research.
Renewable and “alternative” were vague enough to include a wide range of
possibilities. The chairman of the organization at the time, Steven Gunderson,
told me during an interview for the Navajo Times that NTEC could serve as
a vehicle by which the Navajo Nation might transition its economy from coal
 156 CHAPTER 5

to sustainable and alternative energy technologies such as solar and wind. In

2013, notwithstanding the fact that the Navajo Nation renewed and revamped
its stock in coal, it appears that this renewal was done in the political language
of promoting alternatives and transition.
What is important to recognize here is that for the first time in Navajo
Nation history, promoters of coal talked about the end of the industry even if
it was simply rhetorical. Carbon sovereignty couldn’t continue as it did. The
conversation acknowledged that coal no longer enjoyed the luster of its initial
promise when it came onto the reservation in the 1960s. In 2013 notions of
modernization and progress in the framework of development were replaced
with the language of “transition” and “sustainability” when tribal officials or
environmentalists promoted alternative economies. The function and authority
of the tribal government in energy development decisions remained intact. But
the vehicle toward development and prosperity had changed. How did we get to
this point where the language and understanding of “development” had changed
from progress to sustainability? Part of the answer lies in the work and politi-
cal advocacy of Diné environmental organizations over the years. This chapter
intends to document part of that history and make the connection between
environmentalism and development alternatives.

CONTINUING PARTITION, OPPOSING BLACK MESA MINE, AND NAVAJO–HOPI LAND DISPUTE

Before the ink dried on newly signed coal contracts in the late 1960s, Diné
residents near the proposed sites of extraction challenged the legitimacy of
these leases and the right of the Navajo Tribe to destroy their ancestral lands.
Diné families living in remote areas on Black Mesa near prospective coal sites
petitioned tribal leaders to reconsider these deals. In 1971 the Navajo Times
published an article that quoted a seventy-three-year-old Diné man who said,
“We the Navajos of the Black Mesa area never surrendered to Kit Carson and
never even left our land to walk to Fort Sumner.”1 The man would have been
born in 1898, only thirty years after the Navajo people returned from internment
at Bosque Redondo.
In the article, the Navajo Times reporter Verna L. Harvey wrote that the man
spoke out against Peabody Coal and the forced removal of Diné families from
their ancestral lands to make way for coal mining. This was at a time of growing
awareness about the dangers of industrialization and environmental pollution. It
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 157

was on the verge of the Red Power movement and grassroots criticism of tribal
governments. Already, before the mines opened, people on Black Mesa resisted
them. Harvey wrote, “They felt that the contract between the Navajo Tribe and
the Peabody Coal Company had been made without the true and full repre-
sentation of the Navajo people, particularly those living in the mining area.”2
The Navajo Times reported in 1971 that a resident of Black Mesa said:

Peabody made all kinds of promises and even had a local Navajo who was at
the time a councilman going around to convince people to consent to the coal
mining. . . . We were told only the good side of the story but we were never
warned about the bad side. We were told that there would be jobs and that we
wouldn’t have to go far to work. They said that the roads to every home would
be improved for us and that water wells would be built. Are these promises
fulfilled? No!3

At the time of these disagreements with Peabody Coal, critics of coal devel-
opment in reservation communities argued that modernization and capitalism
created a situation of economic dependency. By the late 1970s, only ten years
after the Navajo Tribal Council signed its coal leases, scholars and researchers
started to examine the history of development in reservations more critically. In
1971 Vice Chairman Wilson Skeet said that the Navajo Tribe recently replaced
its lawyer, and that the tribe was “reconsidering and renegotiating the contract
with Peabody.”4
While Peabody Coal opened mines across Black Mesa, the Hopi and Diné
people experienced new colonial tensions. Preceding the signing of land leases
and coal-mining contracts with the Navajo Nation, Peabody hired John Boyden,
a Mormon lawyer, who litigated on behalf of the Hopi Tribe (while secretly still
working for Peabody) (Wilkinson 1999). Boyden initially offered his services
to the Navajo Tribe, but when he was refused, he went to the Hopi Council.
Either way, Boyden was an agent provocateur. His larger agenda was to split
the Diné and Hopi along colonial boundaries and open both reservations to
coal mining. What was key for Peabody wasn’t the dispossession of Diné peo-
ple from their lands, although this was an assumed part of the mine-leasing
process. What was more critical from a capitalist standpoint was the certainty
of property rights. For the company, a boundary dispute meant uncertainty in
contracts. If history played out differently and Hopi were dispossessed of land,
coal mining would have resumed all the same. It was the mineral leasing that
 158 CHAPTER 5

served as an important economic driver to what would become the Navajo–

Hopi land dispute.
For BIA officials, the Hopi reservation was historically incorporated into the
management of the Navajo Tribe and distinguishing between the two wasn’t a
major administrative concern. The reservation was created in 1882 through an
executive order from Washington, D.C., and much of the land that was called
“Hopi” was ancestral Diné homesteads. The Hopi people historically lived in
villages on top of the high mesas near the southern edge of Black Mesa, whereas
the Diné people lived in the vast wooded rangelands below the mesas, just north
and east of these villages. The two peoples had cultural exchange for genera-
tions and lived off the land differently. It was the impetus to create boundaries,
to make the land legible to coal companies, that drove a wedge between the
political bodies nominally representing the two peoples. Following the tension
initiated by the coal-leasing process, Congress met to divide the reservations in
law. After testimony and opposition from Diné leaders and community mem-
bers, Congress nevertheless passed the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act in
1974. This was one of the worst injustices wrought on Indigenous peoples in the
twentieth century. In simple terms, the legislation was a negotiated land swap
between Navajo and Hopi tribes, regardless of who was living where.
For Peabody Coal, the settlement served its interest in solidifying bound-
aries between the two nations so that it could contract with the Navajo and
Hopi tribal governments to mine coal. The act mandated that Diné people
living “on” Hopi lands should relocate to new lands the federal government
would provide that were the equivalent to the lands lost to Hopi. This was not
acceptable for people living on the land that was swapped. The Diné people
who suddenly found themselves on the Hopi Reservation had lived on their
lands for generations. They had relatives buried nearby. Some were born to the
land, with umbilical cords buried to keep them in place. None of this mattered
to the colonial forces gathering in Phoenix and Washington, D.C. The land
was turned from something with a relation to abstract lines on a map—with
an 1882 date stamped on it. With a monopoly of violence on the side of the
federal government, Diné families were asked to relocate. This action was the
territorialization of colonists; from the partition in Palestine to Pakistan, the
drawing of lines between centuries of cultural mapping engendered difference,
opposition, and violence. With criminal indifference, then commissioner of
Indian affairs Alfred Bennett simply declared that Diné people who refused
to leave their family lands couldn’t be forced off but they would also be denied
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 159

basic infrastructure and couldn’t improve upon their existing homes until the
situation was resolved. Hopi police, funded by the BIA, enforced this freeze.
They harassed Diné residences, impounded sheep, and let Diné homes fall into
disrepair—broken windows had to remain broken.
Because of the new mines, obvious environmental destruction, and the
forced removal of Diné families from their lands, Diné people on Black Mesa
and elsewhere grew increasingly distrustful and oppositional of the actions of
the tribal council. On the ground, attitudes during this time demonstrate a gen-
eral distrust of coal companies and tribal officials. These attitudes are consistent
with what the historian James Robert Allison III (2015) found in the history of
coal mining on the reservations of the Crow and Northern Cheyenne nations.
Critics of development at the time, such as Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (1979),
Vine Deloria (1985), and Richard White (1983), built critiques of coal mining and
other extractive contracts based on the neo-Marxian idea of dependency theory.
Whereas traditional Marxists focused on the commodity relationship of extractive
industries as containing the seedbed of exploitation, the exploitation of the laborer
in their production of “surplus value” (Weiss 1984), dependency theorists focused
on the political economy of production within a regional and world-economic
system designed to serve global capitalism (Snipp 1988). Although tribal lawmak-
ers saw the money and jobs that coal and other extractive contracts brought in and
tied it to emerging ideas of sovereignty, Diné community members organized in
opposition to these development projects and identified them as colonial and a
continuation of exploitation. Diné community members moved in the direction
of an emerging environmentalism and anti-colonialism.
Carbon sovereignty, concretized in coal contracts, contained a flaw. Between
new strip mines, dying uranium workers, and forced relocation, Diné commu-
nity members started to question the wisdom and effectiveness of the tribal
government. Sovereignty wasn’t just a right to develop but a return to older
values through self-determination. Not limited by the logic and terms of mining
contracts, Diné people started imagining a life beyond and against the environ-
mentally destructive industries tribal officials had invited onto the lands.
In 1988 the tribe’s first environmental organization, Diné Citizens Against
Ruining our Environment (Diné C.A.R.E.), was formed to contest a waste
incinerator project in the western Diné community of Dilkon. From the begin-
ning, Navajo environmentalists were chiefly concerned about ongoing and pro-
posed development projects. In the case of the waste incinerator, organizers and
activists believed that it would create pollution that was unhealthy for people.
 160 CHAPTER 5

On the other side of the reservation, Diné organizers and community members
opposed the continuation of a sawmill at the base of the Chuska Mountains
that was leading to deforestation. The mill was opened in the early 1960s and an
entire town was founded around it—Navajo.5 Activists and organizers worked
to reduce the amount of logging on the mountain, but loggers took this as a
threat to their jobs and in some cases threatened violence against the activists.
At the same time, community groups in Window Rock and Gallup worked
to end the border town’s predatory selling of alcohol to Diné people suffering
from addiction. The city had an obscene number of liquor licenses, among the
most concentrated in the state. Many places sold beer right through drive-thru
windows. Diné community organizers marched from the Navajo Nation to
Santa Fe to protest this injustice. They called on the State of New Mexico to
reign in the practices of Gallup’s alcohol vendors. This was during a time when
the tribe was reworking its system of governance, following the allegations of
theft against former chairman Peter MacDonald. He was removed from office
for laundering money and the tribe adopted a three-branch government that
mimicked the divisions of powers found in the U.S. constitutional system.
Peter MacDonald’s main rival, Peterson Zah, was elected the tribe’s first “pres-
ident.” He wanted to do things differently. He wanted to tap the voices of oppo-
sition groups and get them to work toward social and political reform that was
desperately needed in the Navajo Nation. According to a recent interview with
Earl Tulley, Zah gathered the leaders from these various movements and suggested
that they work together. As with Diné C.A.R.E., these early environmental orga-
nizers started working as an oppositional voice to the development projects coming
from outside the reservation, always promising modernization but often leaving
pollution, destruction, and destitution. Zah and others in Window Rock wanted
to decenter tribal governance and return it to traditional values. This was a renewal
of cultural values along clear political lines. By the 1990s, the Navajo Nation passed
its first environmental laws and Diné C.A.R.E. took on one of the first large and
environmentally taxing development projects in the Navajo Nation—the Navajo
Forestry Services, located in the small town of Navajo, New Mexico.

LOCAL EMPOWERMENT

In the late 1980s, the conversation about development in Indian Country

shifted from Marxist critiques of underdevelopment to small-scale capitalist
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 161

development initiatives. In 1992 the economist Joseph Kalt and the sociologist
Stephen Cornell published a book on “what can tribes do,” looking at ways
tribal governments could use their existing power to advance economic devel-
opment, measured initially in improvements in per capita income. In more than
twenty years of publications, this school of thought (nation building) has been
the most institutionalized and perhaps most successfully diffused economic
framework operating throughout U.S. reservations.
Much of this work promotes the general idea of “cultural match,” in that the
institutions of governance ought to match the culture of the people they gov-
ern. The authors of this work found plenty of examples of tribal governments,
imposed on tribes in 1934, that did not conform with “traditional” notions of
Indigenous governance. For example, the Hopi had village elders who made
decisions for the villages they belonged to and not on behalf of the entire Hopi
nation. The Hopi government established in 1934 put a central and overriding
government in charge of all Hopis and did not include traditional elders in its
distribution of government power. This became a hotly contested issue in the
1960s when the traditional Hopi elders opposed coal mining on Black Mesa but
the central government signed contracts with Peabody Coal.
The traditional Hopi government, composed of leadership that went back
generations and not the elected leadership that was part of the IRA reforms,
also wanted to live cooperatively with Diné neighbors, but the central Hopi
government wanted to (and ultimately did) clear Navajos from their ancestral
lands. This led in part to the disastrous Navajo–Hopi land dispute (Benally 2011).
The nation-building approach promotes constitutions not only because they
might revive traditional and more culturally appropriate governing frameworks
but also because constitutions institute “the rule of law” across reservation com-
munities that are said to improve business conditions. They argue that rule of
law creates the stability and institutional mechanisms, such as the ability to sue a
contracting party, that Kalt and Cornell believe is necessary to attract businesses
to reservations. Tribal governments that are mired with too much instability,
such as the Navajo Nation in the 1980s, will discourage entrepreneurs from
developing commerce in reservations. Although nation building promotes a
general idea of “cultural match,” much of the work is directed toward a capital
match or creating the conditions for capitalism in reservations.
It was during this time that a new sense of Indigenous environmentalism
emerged across reservation communities. Members of these organizations
critiqued long-standing policies of their tribal governments that relied on
 162 CHAPTER 5

extractive industries almost exclusively as a form of development (Churchill and

LaDuke 1986; Gedicks 1993; LaDuke 1992, 1999, 2005, 2008; LaDuke and Cruz
2012). Although the scholarship on nation building and environmentalism was
very different, it overlapped somewhat in the scale and approach to economic
challenges in reservations. For the nation-building literature, tribes needed to
focus on constitutional reform that would demonstrate political stability and
would invite new kinds of industries into reservation communities and diver-
sify tribal economies (Cornell and Kalt 1991, 1992; Grindle 1997; Henson 2008;
Jorgensen 2007; Lemont 2006; Miller 2012; J. Taylor and Kalt 2005). Eventually
environmental organizations would adopt parts of this economic argument and
include them in proposed alternatives to coal and other extractive industries.
By the early 2000s, nation-building scholarship and Indigenous environmen-
talism were the dominant perspectives of development in reservation communi-
ties. Winona LaDuke, one of the central figures in this environmentalism, gained
national recognition when she ran with Ralph Nader on the Green Party’s 2000
presidential ticket. Diné environmentalists developed critiques that centered on
rekindled notions of “tradition” among Indigenous spokespeople. Dana E. Powell
and I argued that these groups interpreted the historical development of tribal
governments as necessary conditions for exploitation of mineral resources (Powell
and Curley 2009). I also show elsewhere that environmental organizers and activ-
ists articulate a decentered approach to development that challenges environmen-
tally taxing extractive industries and rolls out neoliberal frameworks concurrently
(Curley 2018). These recent works reflect critiques of development discourse that
make normal its objectives as both natural and non-political (Escobar 1995).

TRANSITION

In 2005, when “transition” was introduced in the Navajo Nation for the first
time, an entire generation of workers had learned how to maintain a liveli-
hood at the coal mine. This was a sociological phenomenon underappreciated in
scholarship on coal and climate change. The fact that miners mobilized around
coal in preservation of the industry was hard to explain using dependency the-
ory and resource curse frameworks.
It also highlighted the challenges of doing energy transition in places long
accustomed to the production of carbon emissions. The mine played figuratively
in narratives of moving people out of poverty. Environmental organizers and
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 163

activists recognized the social importance of coal work for coal miners and their
families. In interviews from 2012 to 2013, organizers and activists reflected on
this need in how they did their work. One of my interviewees, a young woman
who worked in a Diné environmental organization, said:

Maybe that is why [coal] is such a big thing, it’s part of our culture now, histori-
cally. . . . Natural resource development has been a huge piece of the revenue for
Navajo. A lot of us are so attached to this new—new for us—economic scheme,
maybe people are afraid that if coal is taken away that money and that revenue
would go away too. (EJ2)

Theirs was not a complete recapitulation of the narrative of coal workers, how-
ever, and I sensed that much of the professed sentiment about jobs and live-
lihood was somewhat scripted. For environmental organizers, coal impeded
on the lives of other Diné people. The organizers were quick to reaffirm that
they are also “from” these same communities and have family members directly
employed in coal work as well. Nevertheless, the entire premise in offering alter-
natives was to respond to the moral economy of coal workers and their need for
jobs and a means to producing a livelihood (EJ3).
Between 2006 and 2013, the Just Transition Coalition worked through the slow
and difficult process of petitioning the California Public Utilities Commission to
recoup money Southern California Edison gained in pollution credit for closing
the Mohave Generating Station. The coalition was assisted by attorneys working
with large environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club. Ultimately, their
effort was unsuccessful. California Public Utilities denied Just Transition’s request,
but that didn’t stop the work. The organizers continued to lobby for solar and wind
on Black Mesa. An opportunity came with the surprising win of Barack Obama
in 2008 following the financial crisis and Great Recession. Obama campaigned
on rebuilding the U.S. economy through an investment in green energy technol-
ogies. Diné environmental organizers always maintained strong connections with
people in the national environmental movement who in turn had connections
with people in the Democratic Party. With a Democratic majority in Congress
and Obama in the White House, organizers felt the opportunity for change was
suddenly available. The former members of the Just Transition Coalition shifted
toward the Navajo Nation and the federal government.
Members from these groups formed Navajo Green Jobs, which pushed for the
passage of two legislations in the Navajo Nation Council that were meant to create
 164 CHAPTER 5

the legal and political infrastructure necessary to receive money from the federal
government for alternative development projects. They promoted investment in
green jobs in the Navajo Nation. They believed that if the Navajo Nation created a
program to develop alternatives to fossil fuels, the tribe would be in an ideal posi-
tion to receive federal funds through the American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act of 2009. Navajo Green Jobs was impactful in the Navajo Nation. It partnered
with the Office of the Speaker, and I was part of these early conversations. Orga-
nizers worked hard to lobby the council. I was peripheral to many of these conver-
sations, but I could see the effort. In their campaign offices in Flagstaff, organizers
made green shirts that said “green jobs,” made signs, and planned a demonstration
from the judicial building to the council chambers in Window Rock.
Navajo Green Jobs based its approach on the Human Rights Commission.
That commission was created to put a focus on racial violence in border towns.
Green Jobs was designed to undo decades of dependency on carbon-emitting
fossil fuels. During early discussion of the enabling language, comparison was
made to the work of the Human Rights Commission and its structure in the
Navajo Nation. It would be “quasi-independent” and staffed with people who
were knowledgeable in renewable energy technologies.6 The plan was well
designed and passed the council with little opposition. I got in an obscure
argument with Council Delegate Leonard Tsosie about the role of government
on the Navajo Nation and he voted against the legislation, saying that I was
calling him an “anarchist.” My father was on the Navajo Nation Council at the
time and voted in favor of it. Still, members of Navajo Green Jobs were annoyed
with me for starting a fight with Tsosie.
After the law was passed and President Shirley signed it, the commission
was set up to start soliciting money from outside funders. Proponents of the
commission imagined that it would recruit federal grants to the Navajo Nation.
This was not such an unusual strategy. Enterprises in the Navajo Nation were
created in the 1990s to capture federal spending. This was one way of thinking
about development in the neoliberal era for tribal lawmakers. But because the
commission was focused on green energy, some powerful people in the tribal
government who have long thought through coal as the pathway toward devel-
opment were immediately skeptical. Part of the problem was that the groups
comprising Navajo Green Jobs were members of the same groups who sued the
Mohave Generating Station. Mine workers and tribal officials were still upset
about the way that the mine and power plant shut down. It was a bad lesson
for tribal officials as the closure of Kayenta Mine and NGS would also meet
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 165

the same fate and for similar reasons—because the utility no longer found it
profitable to work in coal. Because of this distrust of Navajo Green Jobs, Ben
Shelly suspended the work of the commission when he was elected president
in 2010. He killed Navajo Green Jobs and its progress.
When I returned to the Navajo Nation in 2012, I observed that the failure
of Shelly to fund Navajo Green Jobs left the tribe without a policy toward
green energy transition. Shelly wanted transition to reinvest in the tribe’s coal
resources. As a reporter for the Navajo Times in 2014, I asked Commissioner
Wahleah Johns about the status of Navajo Green Jobs; she admitted that it had
experienced difficulties over the past couple of years but that the commissioners
planned on revamping it soon. Today, hardly anyone remembers the coalition
ever existed.
After 2010, members of Diné environmental groups changed tactics. Fol-
lowing early disappointment with the Shelly administration, Diné organizers
concentrated more on work that wasn’t directly tied to the everyday practices
of the Navajo Nation. They didn’t push for more legislation or a renewal of the
commission. Some key organizers left the region and started to work on more
national campaigns. In passing, they expressed disappointment with the tribal
government. They worked hard to get Navajo Green Jobs legislation passed,
only to see the tribe completely ignore it and double down on coal. Plans for
solar fields to replace coal mines were challenged by community members
who in some cases simply wanted access to their old grazing lands long since
devoured by coal.
The main point of their work after Shelly killed the green jobs commission
was to build on the discourse of transition and to expand its meaning. They
focused on trainings, workshops, and presentations at public meetings—efforts
that do not directly influence the thinking of tribal lawmakers but focus on
educating future Diné leaders. These workshops and retreats were not a new
kind of work but took on a new kind of focus following the end of the legisla-
tive process. The work of these organizations was marked by events such as the
closure of the Black Mesa Mine and the passing of the Green Jobs Act. These
events required a focus on the legislative and executive processes in the tribal
government. But following the failure of the Navajo Green Jobs Coalition, this
process appeared difficult to amend. In retrospect, we can say they ran against
a sovereignty defined in a particular understanding of carbon that they were
challenging. Consequently, the work of the tribal government was antagonistic
and not sympathetic with their efforts.
 166 CHAPTER 5

DECOLONIZING DEVELOPMENT

Centralization and territorial integrity were central features of the federal govern-
ment’s consolidation of power for tribal nations in the United States at the time,
particularly among the Diné. It is the recognition of this history, alongside the
lived experiences of family members who worked in the industry, that led many
environmental organizations to doubt the legitimacy and intent of the central
tribal government as the best way to make decisions on behalf of the people.
As one of my interviewees suggested, if the Diné people had a different
decision-making process in the 1960s when coal leases were signed, perhaps the
history of coal and development would have played out much differently than it
did. She wondered if there had been no outside pressures to develop and mod-
ernize the Navajo Nation, would coal have been considered at all (EJ2)? These
counterfactuals are more than just thought experiments; they are premises for
a competing ideology of development and governance for Navajo people that
fundamentally differs from the resource nationalism in practice today.
“Decolonization” is an expression of a movement and ideology among Indig-
enous peoples. Broadly, it has come to mean a challenge to the discriminatory
practices of Western epistemologies, but often this usage misses the political
claims of Indigenous peoples (Tuck and Yang 2012; Yazzie and Baldy 2018). In
Canada, the resurgence of Indigenous philosophies and governing practices is a
pathway to decolonization (Alfred and Corntassel 2005; Corntassel 2012; Simp-
son 2016). In the United States, a Native “resurgence” was initially understood
as an enhancement of the powers of tribal governments and a loose descriptor
for the political solidarity that formed across Indigenous nations in response to
colonization. These bonds were strengthened by the self-determination move-
ment of the 1960s and 1970s. On the one hand, the Choctaw anthropologist
Valerie Lambert (2007) describes insurgent nationalism, advocacy for land and
water rights, and new forms and expressions of economic development within
tribal lands and towns as “resurgence” (see also Cornell 1988; Nagel 1997). On the
other hand, “liberation” is a synonymous call for decolonization that puts more
emphasis on the colonial relationship. It is a politics rooted in leftist discourse
that was part of the self-determination movement of the 1970s and also part of
critical Indigenous scholarship in the 1990s (Churchill 1995). Today, Indigenous
resistance movements in the Navajo Nation recirculate the language of liberation
as a more Marxist approach toward decolonization (Estes 2019; Lister 2017).
In 2013 Diné environmental groups took a different approach toward decol-
onization, basing their definitions in part on the work of scholars such as
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 167

Michael Yellow Bird (Wilson and Yellow Bird 2005; Yellow Bird 2012). With
an emphasis on practice over politics, opponents proposed alternative devel-
opment projects that replicated the unequal relationship between the Navajo
Nation and regional utilities in energy production. The use of “traditional” con-
cepts in contemporary Diné political discourse is fraught with challenges. The
Diné scholar Lloyd Lee (2013) highlights the contradictions of codification of
traditional concepts, such as t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego, in contemporary Indigenous
nation building.
Within the Navajo Nation, resistance to extractive industries comes primar-
ily from people and groups who opposed development projects that they felt
contributed to processes of global climate change. Diné environmental orga-
nizers often emphasize the lack of legitimacy of the Navajo tribal government
while promoting the idea of “the community” as the natural site of Navajo
politics. In some narrations I’ve heard, the tribal government pillages Diné lands
while “the community” preserves traditional relationships. The community is an
alternative. It is natural, whereas the tribal government is a colonial imposition.
In this way, environmental activists and organizers are changing develop-
ment discourse in the Navajo Nation, from one that prioritizes the exploita-
tion of natural resources to one that highlights development alternatives as
movements toward decolonization. They are reshaping the ideological premise
of “development” that is based on ideas of modernization and progress to one
that is built on sustainability and livelihood. All these activities are part of
building a movement toward decolonization among Diné people—especially
younger Navajo members living on the reservation who believe they can change
how development is understood and practiced on the reservation. Their work is
temporal bending. It is this new and nonlinear understanding of development
in the rhetoric of decolonization that simultaneously talks about the past and
the future.
Diné environmental organizers focus on the idea of “community” as the nat-
ural site of politics and development in the Navajo Nation. Under the notion of
decolonization, the community contains the inherent traditions of Diné people,
and the tribal government is an artificial creation of the federal government
that is designed to help outside mineral corporations and white interests pillage
their lands. Building on broader critiques of the colonial history of Indigenous
peoples in the United States and their unique configuration within U.S. feder-
alism, environmental organizers challenge the legitimacy of tribal government
as a part of this configuration of Western colonialism. When I asked someone
with professional experience in environmental activism about Navajo tribal
 168 CHAPTER 5

governance, she said a core problem is how Diné people do not plan for their
community anymore but expect the tribal government to do everything for
them. She said, “Prior to westernization . . . prior to this IRA [Indian Reorga-
nization Act] government for Navajo, how would they have approached coal?
Let’s say they understood its potential, and they understood a little bit of the
economic systems” (EJ2). Here, she equates westernization with the existing
tribal government, the “IRA government,” reminding me that it was a govern-
ment that was created from the framework of federal legislation in the 1930s.
She went on to say that it was the logic of development that brought Diné
people to destroy their own lands as a basis of economy. Development was
teleological and moving in the direction of capitalist exploitation. It created the
conditions for mineral extraction, coal leasing, and the wasting of water for coal
slurry. The logic of the tribal government in a regime of carbon sovereignty was
one ultimately bent on destruction of land, air, and water. The legitimacy of a
government to make this possible is directly called into question.
In my experience, the critique about the legitimacy of the tribal government
is a concern that is shared among most Diné people. Although no surveys exist
on these questions, many Diné people remain deeply dissatisfied with and crit-
ical of the tribal government. In their rhetoric, elected officials regularly defer
authority to “the people” on important questions facing the tribe, especially on
questions of government reform. Because a broad portion of the Diné public
and environmental organizations often question the legitimacy of the Navajo
Nation, organizers understand their actions as operating outside the formal
political process. Many express skepticism and distrust in the government.
When asked what the tribal government should do about climate change, one
organizer told me:

We have no idea about what the impacts are of overconsumption. This leaves
us in a very precarious situation where if we don’t plan now and create a water
budget that’s sustainable . . . we’re not going to be able to live here—screw jobs,
we’re not going to have water. That’s the reality of climate change that no one
is talking about. We are already past the tipping scale; we are in a particular
vulnerable space. (EJ13)

In this statement was both a critique of the tribal government and a reiteration
of the dangers of climate change for the Navajo Nation. Diné environmen-
tal organizers recognize that the Navajo Nation’s annual source of revenues
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 169

is highly dependent on monies coming from extractive industries. They know

that this has been the reality for more than fifty years. They are also aware that
before coal, the tribal government funded much of its operations through the
extraction of other minerals such as oil and uranium (EJ3, EJ4, EJ8). They also
realized that mineral development would not have occurred on the reservation
if it were not for the persistence of outside companies and corporations wanting
to initiate mining in the reservation. All these points were raised in personal
interviews and focus group interviews I conducted with actors in Navajo envi-
ronmental organizations (table 3). Many environmental organizers worked with
members of the tribal government on issues of coal and development only to
become frustrated by the process. They saw their language of transition co-opted
into new energy projects while the small reforms they initiated, such as the
Navajo Green Jobs Coalition, were ignored and underfunded.

TABLE 3 . Diné environmental organizer interviews

DATE AGE GENDER EDUCATION OCCUPATION

EJ1 5/3/12 and mid-40s M Graduate Not-for-

11/27/12 profit
EJ2 11/20/12 early 30s F College Student
EJ3 7/12/12 late 30s F College Not-for-
profit
EJ4 11/25/12 late 30s F High school Not-for-
profit
EJ5 11/29/12 mid-30s F College Self-
employed
EJ6 11/29/12 mid-40s M High school Organizer
EJ7 12/6/12 mid-40s M College Organizer
EJ8 12/6/12 mid-40s M Graduate Not-for-
profit
EJ9 Multiple mid-30s F College Not-for-
profit
EJ10 Multiple late 20s F College Student
EJ11 Multiple mid-30s F Graduate Government
EJ12 Multiple late 20s F College Organizer
EJ13 Multiple late 20s F College Organizer
EJ14 Multiple late 30s M Graduate Government
 170 CHAPTER 5

Some of the interviewees were originally from areas of the reservation where
there was a high degree of coal mining. They told me that the industry had split
the attitudes of their family members. Diné community members who publicly
challenged coal also had relatives who worked at the mine or NGS and who
benefited from the coal industry (EJ3, EJ4). This difference of opinion caused
tensions within families. I also interviewed direct beneficiaries of coal mining
who had family members opposed to coal mining because mining activities
impacted their land or livestock. These were the day-to-day tensions coal engen-
dered in the reservation.
The grounded knowledge of Indigenous environmental organizers makes
their work fundamentally distinct from mainstream U.S. environmentalism,
even if they coordinate with these movements to a large degree. Diné organiz-
ers knew firsthand the social terrain of coal and understood the arguments used
in support of it. Although they often disagreed with their relatives on whether
the tribe should continue to support coal mining in the reservation, they could
empathize with them. They knew how community members and the tribal
government framed and justified the industry. It was for these reasons that they
understood the Navajo Nation as a colonizing entity. They saw something of a
false consciousness operating in the minds of Navajo supporters of coal.
Diné environmentalists recognized the degree to which carbon sovereignty
was an entrenched practice in the reservation. Decolonization was a way to
challenge this regime, governing practice, and understanding of time and prog-
ress. Decolonization meant returning to a status of life that existed before col-
onization. This was the ideology at hand and constantly under construction.
As my interviewees explained, finding and using the form of governance that
existed before the imposition of a tribal government was important in realizing
what they considered real tribal sovereignty, a sovereignty beyond the carbon
sovereignty that defines tribal state building today. This form of decolonization
wasn’t a distant memory but a renewal in kinship practices: introducing oneself
by clan; relating to place and not government; and thinking about language,
culture, and tradition in ways that were inherently political. Organizers talked
about it in casual conversation. They used it as a justification for their activism.
The alternative development proposals environmental organizers brought
forward emphasized “the community” as the natural site of development and
political decision-making. The community was sometimes understood synony-
mously with chapter houses, but the overlap of popular notions of community
and the hard boundaries of chapter houses was not exact. It was understood
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 171

as something not in Window Rock, where the tribal capital is located and
where the BIA created the only national capital for a tribal nation. Repeatedly,
organizers defined their work as “community led” and for the benefit of “the
community.” Before any major decision was made, organizers would try to get
insight and authorization from the people of “the community.” For Diné orga-
nizers, in both action and intent, the community was legitimate, whereas the
tribal government was colonial.

WORKSHOPPING WITH YOUTH

We want to create an alternative economy in the Navajo Nation. There’s nothing

happening in Piñon, I spend a lot of time out there. It’s been like that for years.
We need a “green economy.” How do we create opportunity for people to stay
at home [in the reservation]? (EJ4)

One person who spoke to me about green economy had spent years working
on these issues. She was my age and traveled frequently, promoting alternative
development projects in the reservation. She was from Black Mesa and believed
that it was in the community where development should occur. But this idea
of community as the site and extent of sovereignty also implied that the cen-
tralization of power was wrong for the Diné people. Decades of colonialism
that sought to change the language, culture, religion, politics, economics, and
personal behavior of Diné people had directly informed the parameters of this
sense of sovereignty among everyday Diné people and tribal officials. In this
counterideology, it was understood that the tribal government was already sub-
ordinate to the interest of colonizers who wanted to exploit tribal resources.
Like coal workers, members of environmental groups emphasized self-
sufficiency and traditional economies that are inherent in the idea of t’áá hwó’
ají t’éego. This understanding of Diné values and social responsibility is related
to notions of cultural renewal. Some interviewees said that without the work
ethic inherent in t’áá hwó’ ají t’éego, Diné people would continue to lose their
culture, language, and independence (EJ13). For the environmentalists I inter-
viewed, this was understood as returning to the land, growing food, and disen-
gaging from modern capitalism. The ability of Diné people to be self-sufficient
was part of the framework of decolonization and understood as restoring an
original sense of sovereignty.
 172 CHAPTER 5

Acting on this notion, environmental organizers proposed several alternative

development projects that were meant to work at the community level and
not under the management of departments and offices of the tribal govern-
ment. These organizers partnered with outside foundations or companies to
bring money into projects that were small in scale and limited to a particular
community. Some groups emphasized a need to “return” to subsistence-based
livelihood that centered on livestock and agriculture. These activities were seen
as strengthening both cultural life and the Diné economy. They were also under-
stood as combating global climate change by reducing the amount of carbon
Diné people generate. The types of activities that were described in alternative
development proposals were a mix of both alternative energy technologies and
traditional subsistent activities. This merging of the traditional and the modern
appeal to younger Diné community members who grapple with a sense of cul-
tural loss but depend on school and jobs outside the reservation.
Many of these workshops and meetings were geared toward Diné youth.
There is considerable debate about what age constitutes youth, whether it is a
quantifiable age or a relational one. I learned of one instance where an organizer
accused another in a meeting out of the region of not being a youth because
he was close to thirty years old. Two interviewees told me they think about it
relationally compared to their parents, who are still the primary breadwinners in
their household. Because the work of organizing is unstable and difficult, many
organizers barely make a living and still rely on their parents for assistance.
This relational dependency defines these organizers as “youth” according to this
alternative definition. The geographer Mabel Gergan and I compared the way
youth is understood and acted upon among environmental groups in Sikkim,
India, and the Navajo Nation. We found similarities that reflected our shared
colonial experience and greater aspirations toward decolonial futures (Gergan
and Curley 2021).
Importantly, Diné environmentalists engaged in the active construction of a
counterideology. They hosted meetings, workshops, camps, educational forums,
summits, and so on that directly targeted the youth and talked to them about
the importance of investing in alternative energy technologies to combat cli-
mate change. I had participated in a couple of these workshops. I remember one
such event I attended, in 2007, when the Black Mesa Water Coalition (BMWC)
hosted a youth summit in Window Rock during the annual Navajo Nation
Fair. BMWC was a small but dedicated group of Diné organizers, many for-
mer students who challenged the coal slurry on Black Mesa. The organization
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 173

was founded in 2004 to challenge the use of pristine water for coal. To me,
these people were inspiring. I remember the first time I met some of the core
organizers and how intimidated I was of them. They were traditional, listened
to music I’ve never heard of, knew how to do ceremony, were artists or related
to famous artists, and had politics that challenged the everyday practices of the
tribal government.
The event featured thematic work sessions, a fashion show of used clothes,
and a performance by the Diné punk rock band Black Fire. I brought three
interns from Diné College to the first meeting, and we started by introducing
ourselves by clan, work, and where we were from—the “traditional” way Navajo
people introduce themselves in accordance with the kinship framework of k’é.
This type of introduction is common in Navajo tribal politics but is increas-
ingly uncommon with young Diné people. By opening the meeting with an
introduction of one’s clans, the coalition organizers acknowledged the tradition
and included it in their ideal political practices. The organizers had us sit in a
semicircle and introduce ourselves. This was different from the political prac-
tices in Window Rock. It included all of us in the conversation. It was a way to
democratize the process that also built on historic ways of conducting meetings.
Members of these groups partnered with the national Power Shift conferences
in 2007 and 2008 to educate young Diné people throughout the reservation
about the inherent dangers of climate change. I observed another such event
held in Washington, D.C., in 2009 and I got to personally know two of the
organizers who were part of this movement.
The larger point of these events was to educate younger community members
about the structural inequality inherent in energy production, the health and
environmental dangers of coal, and a need for development alternatives.

DEMONSTRATING AGAINST COAL AND CLIMATE CHANGE

There was one event during my fieldwork that articulated many of the charac-
teristics of environmental organizations I describe in this chapter. This event,
held in the summer after the Navajo Nation doubled down on coal, reflected
the ideological disagreement environmental organizers and activists had with
coal workers and tribal officials. In June 2013, I attended a series of workshops in
Piñon, Arizona, in the center of the Navajo Nation, where I saw these dynam-
ics play out both in planning and in action. These workshops were held at a
 174 CHAPTER 5

“sheep camp.”7 It was an event that served a radical environmental organization

in Oakland as well as Navajo environmentalists. This series of workshops was
designed to teach participants how to engage in direct actions. Another point
of the workshops was to talk about future strategies regarding the environment
and climate change in the Navajo Nation. Groups in the western end of the
reservation with a long history of opposing coal helped organize and sponsor
the event. The land on which these workshops were held belonged to someone
with a long history challenging the Navajo coal industry.
The workshops received outside sponsorship. Foundations and not-for-
profits often support the work of organizers working on environmental issues on
the reservation.8 In the summer of 2013, the general feeling among Diné envi-
ronmentalists was that despite the danger of climate change, the U.S. public was
not reacting to it. President Obama had largely stalled on his alternative energy
initiatives. At the time, it felt that people had become inured to uncomfortable
heat in the summer and seeing their forests burn. In many ways, the tactics had
not changed but interest had stalled. It felt like Diné environmentalists, like
those at this sheep camp in Piñon, were still building public awareness about
climate change but to declining public interest.
After the workshops concluded, coalition members who had attended the
sheep camp traveled to Phoenix to put what they had learned into practice.
Their goal, I learned later, was for some of the organizers to pump water out of
one of the canals that comprise the Central Arizona Project near downtown
Scottsdale. They used a truck and a solar generator to pump the water into a
water tank. They then drove the water back to the reservation and used it to
water some crops on the reservation. Their aim was to highlight the structural
inequality both economically and politically between the Navajo Nation and
the sprawling metropolis of Phoenix.
The organizers wanted to show how water from the Colorado River should
be used. This demonstration was a symbolic action. The night before driving to
Phoenix, workshop participants painted signs that they would use during the
march. Nearly twenty workshop participants rallied outside an outdoor mall
in Scottsdale. Meanwhile, one of the lead organizers with a couple of helpers
drove a truck hauling a small water tank. They parked on a bridge that crossed
the CAP. While we were marching around the Scottsdale fashion square, they
pumped water from CAP into the back of the water tank. The organizers wore
gray T-shirts printed with the words “Power without Pollution, Energy without
Injustice.”
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 175

The activists held banners and signs, chanted slogans, and employed a bull-
horn while others took photos. Part of the coalition’s goal was publicity. Partici-
pants chanted slogans that demanded SRP invest in solar and alternative energy
technologies. Demonstrators made a general call for “solar.” Activists shouted
their support for “green” businesses and entrepreneurship. The activists and envi-
ronmental organizers knew a lot about the finer details regarding this political
economy of coal in the Navajo Nation, but in this instance, they omitted any
consideration of how the Navajo Nation might benefit or suffer if SRP transi-
tioned to solar. As it stands now, if SRP transitioned to 100 percent alternatives,
it would cut off its ties with the Navajo Nation and all the revenues and jobs
associated with coal would dry up. Revenues associated with coal alone provided
a sizeable portion of the operating budget for the tribal government. Coal was
especially important as a source of jobs and a stimulus to the local economy in
the northern portion of the Navajo Nation. How would these changes affect
Navajo peoples in these areas? It was this fear about losing resources and jobs
that environmental activists did not address in their work, and this bred resent-
ment among people who relied on the coal industry for their livelihoods.
I observed that environmental organizers and activists were disillusioned
with tribal politics and focused most of their attention and actions on non-
Navajo actors and interests who they viewed as having more influence within
the Navajo “coal-industrial complex,” as one organizer put it during the protest
in Scottsdale. The use of the phrase was appropriate to describe how interest
in coal had become institutionalized within Navajo communities, the Navajo
Nation, and the State of Arizona. Despite this knowledge, the activists did not
specify their actions, slogans, and rhetoric to reflect different interests within
the coal-industrial complex. Rather, they treated it as a monolith. What Diné
environmentalists called the coal-industrial complex was a network made up
of different actors who shared the common interest of keeping the Navajo coal
economy intact. Sometimes “Peabody” (St. Louis–based Peabody Energy, the
mining company that operates Kayenta Mine) is seen as the leading company
in this relationship. I observed many instances in which organizers and activists
referred to “Peabody” as a blanket term when talking about the Navajo coal
economy in a general sense. They were including not just Peabody Energy but
the utility companies who owned the Navajo Generating Station that bought
Navajo coal, especially the Salt River Project, and the workers near the mine
site and the tribal officials who year after year approved leases for coal inter-
ests. Navajo environmentalists saw these disparate entities as one because they
 176 CHAPTER 5

shared the common goal of continuing the coal industry within the Navajo
Nation and in Arizona as a form of energy production.
But the coal-industrial complex is composed of actors with very different
motivations for keeping coal going. It was in the interest of the Salt River Project
to keep this coal-fired power plant in operation because it was consistent with its
mandate to provide cheap electricity to the Phoenix area and because it was obli-
gated to provide electricity to the Central Arizona Project from this power plant.
The Navajo Nation wanted this plant to remain open because it was an important
source of revenues and jobs within the reservation. Coal workers wanted coal to
continue so that they maintained their employment there. Tribal officials wanted
coal to continue so that the Navajo Nation would continue to receive millions of
dollars a year in royalty payments that funded much of the government.
The environmentalists’ call for “solar” on the streets of Scottsdale did not
address these fundamental differences and even who was the target audience.
Tribal officials, under intense lobbying and propagandizing from non-Navajo
interests, came to believe that the interests of SRP, NGS, and the Navajo Nation
were the same when they were not. For environmentalists, the point in lump-
ing all these actors into the same category was to highlight the environmental
impacts of the coal industry and the hegemony of coal. If SRP was isolated, the
environmental groups would have to talk about energy for Phoenix. For the
coal workers, they would have to talk about alternative jobs. For the tribal gov-
ernment, they would have to talk about economic development more broadly
and provide alternative development proposals. Referring to all these actors as
the coal-industrial complex had the benefit of highlighting the one thing they
shared in common: their benefit from strip-mining the Navajo Nation of sub-
terranean coal. Here, they could argue the point that motivated their work the
most—the environmental damage that this industry caused to the land, water,
air, and health of the Navajo people.
Another reason for why environmental activists and organizers collapsed the
interests of different actors in the coal network into the coal-industrial complex
had to do with the fact that they recognized something else was pushing coal
mining in the reservation—there was a culture among powerful actors in the
reservation that supported coal mining. It was not out of a purely economic
rationale that the tribe had spent millions of dollars in keeping Navajo Mine
open in the eastern end of the reservation. These actions fit within a cultural
logic that said coal was good because it provided jobs and revenues—the moral
economy of coal.
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 177

FIGURE 14 . Tom Greyeyes, Inscription House mural depicting the

hazards of NGS, July 2013. Photograph by Andrew Curley.

The work of environmental organizers and activists was to challenge this

moral economy of coal on the reservation and among Diné people. They pro-
posed a culture of alternatives in league with Michael Yellow Bird’s approach to
decolonization in his 2012 book, For Indigenous Minds Only. They were trying to
change a general attitude on the reservation that saw coal as a source of jobs and
livelihood. Environmental organizers and activists wanted to convince Navajo
people, especially younger tribal members, that coal was a dangerous industry
and should not continue as a form of development in the Navajo Nation (figure
14). This was something I recognized when I participated in the demonstrations
in Scottsdale.
The demonstration was not meant to address something external to the com-
munity of environmental activists and organizers who challenged coal (ergo its
lack of political utility), such as the Navajo Nation Council, coal workers, SRP,
or even the broader community of Phoenix. Rather, it was directed inward to
the people who participated in the demonstration. It was to give them a stake in
the conversation through direct action in which they became committed to the
greater cause of these groups. The photographs they took of one another were
part of this—the photos were meant to reaffirm the event in the realm of social
media, where new participants could be “tagged” and identified in a larger online
community on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumblr. This was part of the “commitment”
of being an activist in the Navajo Nation, where much of the public sphere
of political discourse existed online. The speeches over the bullhorn were not
 178 CHAPTER 5

only about conveying a message to the non-Native pedestrians walking around

downtown Scottsdale; they were about reaffirming in a very public way the
ideology of the organizers and activists. This is also true about the preparatory
events that preceded the demonstration, such as the direct-action workshops,
sign making, and sloganeering. The activities of environmental organizers and
activists in these arenas were meant to build a culture of alternatives. This culture
of alternatives was used to decenter the development discourse from resource
extraction to prevailing ideas of sustainability.

MURAL MAKING

In the days surrounding the passage of the April 2013 NGS lease renewal, I
experienced a very different side of the coal debate. At this time, I traveled back
and forth between Window Rock and Phoenix for a total of 957 miles across
Arizona in the span of three days. I did this to observe the dialogue between
formal political actors in Window Rock and Navajo groups opposed to coal.
There is a large Navajo population in Phoenix, the economic and political core
of Arizona. Navajos there look for opportunities they cannot find in the eco-
nomically depressed conditions of the Navajo Reservation. In the 2010 Census,
it became a demographic fact for the first time that most Indigenous peoples
in the United States live in cities and not in their reservation communities. But
this population moves back and forth quite frequently between city and reser-
vation. It is a pulsation more than a permanent displacement. My family, for
example, lived in Albuquerque, New Mexico, while I was in high school. This is
another large, urban space with a high Navajo population. But for holidays and
family events, we would regularly return to my family’s land on the reservation.
This is a common circumstance for many Navajo people, especially the younger
generations who look for work and education outside the reservation.9
The Sunday (April 28, 2013) before the Navajo Nation Council was scheduled
to consider the NGS lease for a second time (the first time was in February
2013), a group of Native artists from Phoenix met downtown and painted a
mural of an alternative landscape and energy economy for the region (figure 15).
This was in direct protest to the impending actions of the Navajo Nation Coun-
cil, and this mural centered on the importance of water for the Navajo people.
It was called tóh bi iina, or Water Is Life (part of the series Water Writes). What
the mural depicted was the destruction of the Navajo landscape and the theft of
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 179

FIGURE 15 . Diné and Tohono O’odham artists painting the Water Is

Life mural (part of the international series Water Writes) in down-
town Phoenix on April 28, 2013. Artists included Jeff Slim, Angel
Diaz, Kim Smith, Remy, Averian Chee, Xochitl Enrique, KEISR,
Jules Badoni, Mario Alba, Sinek, Ivan Garcia, Edgar Fernandez,
David Alvarez, Jeremy Fields, Ramon Aguirre, and Lalo Cota.
Photograph by Andrew Curley.

Navajo water that is produced by the Navajo coal economy. At the center of the
mural was a pregnant Indigenous woman who represented Mother Earth, or in
Navajo cosmology, Changing Woman, who gave birth to the warrior twins who
are said to have killed the monsters that had plagued the Navajo people. On
the left side of Changing Woman was an interpretation of the contemporary
situation—smog, pollution, and wasted water for Phoenix golf courses. On the
right side was life—solar panels, wind turbines, blue skies, and harmony.
I traveled to Phoenix to see the completion of the mural and get a sense of
its meaning to the young Navajo people there who put it together. I left Kay-
enta in the early morning and arrived at Phoenix at around 4:00 p.m., an hour
after the event was scheduled to begin. The mural was in downtown Phoenix,
across the street from a dorm for the sprawling Arizona State University. It was
painted on the back wall of a theater studio. In the mural, a pregnant Mother
Earth occupies the center; we can see the twin babies in her belly, each painted
blue—made of water. This was the first reference to “water is life,” a common
refrain among environmental organizers in the Navajo Nation who challenge
extractive industries and water settlements. The concept is a dichotomy or
“duality,” a notion that also figures prominently in Navajo ways of thinking (as
well as among other Indigenous peoples in the area). To Mother Earth’s right
 180 CHAPTER 5

is negative space (what my former boss Robert Yazzie referred to as naayéé’)

and to her left is a positive area called hózhó. Conventionally and true to form,
in the negative space was sketched the Navajo Generating Station and a silo
that’s used to store coal. On the right are sheep (representing the subsistence
economy), solar panels, and wind turbines. At the base of the mural are natural
fruits and vegetation. This was meant to convey optimism. The philosophy dif-
fered slightly from standard interpretations of duality; it emphasized a general
direction toward hopefulness.
At first, it was hard to integrate into the crowd of young Native activists
moving around the large mural. Nearly everyone there was younger than me—
in their late twenties and early thirties. It was hot (around 100 degrees) and all
the participants wore shorts and T-shirts. I saw others unbutton their shirts or
wrap dampened scarves around their heads. I felt awkward just standing there
while people painted. Only a few people were paid to design the mural; the rest
were volunteers. I didn’t want to be one of these anthropologist types who hang
around taking notes while doing nothing. So, I decided to help.
As I helped paint and take pictures of the mural’s progress, I walked around
and talked with people I knew and did not yet know. Most of the participants
in the mural project were young Natives who were part of an artistic community
in Phoenix. Some of the artists were professional muralists. The caliber of their
work showed in the quality of the mural’s design. The timing of the mural was
happenstance. It was not timed to occur when the Navajo Nation Council con-
sidered the lease extension. It just turned out that way. The funder, the not-for-
profit organization Estria Foundation, was based in Oakland, California. This
mural was something it paid for and was part of a series of murals throughout
the world that focused on local challenges over water security and water rights.
The organization worked with Diné environmental groups and identified this
struggle over coal and water as a key topic of water politics.
In my conversations with people at the mural site, the artists and activists
explained the message of the picture and its broader vision. The foreground
focused on the natural life of the desert and traditional Indigenous economies
like planting, hunting, and sheep herding. In the background was the rela-
tionship between the Navajo Nation, coal, and water in Arizona. Black Mesa
rose from the landscape, as well as the silo in which mined coal is stored. The
coal takes a path to the NGS and then connects to a water tunnel (depicting
the Central Arizona Project), and this water travels to Phoenix to water golf
courses. The scenario is represented as an environmental affront. On the hózhó
 TOWARD ENERGY TRANSITION 181

side of the mural are traditional economies and sustainable energy technologies
like windmills. The mural spoke in direct contrast to the politics at work in the
Navajo Nation at the same time and was part of a larger project to create a
“culture of alternatives” that I discuss in the conclusion of this book.

SHIFTING CARBON SOVEREIGNTY

Today, the Navajo Nation and Diné environmentalists have embraced a frame-
work of development that does not reflect notions of modernization and prog-
ress inherent in classic development thinking. The change was subtle, but mov-
ing away from industries such as coal, oil, and natural gas in the language of
“sustainability” and “alternatives” is still significant. There is a broad political
effort among actors in the tribal government and at the community level to
decenter development discourse and conform it to prevailing ideas of “sustain-
ability.” Sometimes these efforts are successful, in small ways.
During a focus group in 2008 and follow-up interviews in 2012–13 with key
members of the Diné environmental organizations, they informed me that they
first became aware of environmental issues facing the tribe during these train-
ings, workshops, and youth summits. Some learned about extractive industries
in the reservation for the first time during these weeklong camps. Because group
members wanted to bring youth into their ranks, they organized activities that
reflected youth culture: mural painting, hip-hop shows, rock concerts, fashion
shows, and spoken-word poetry. This is not to say that these genres of activities
appealed only to young people, but they were included in the programing of
events to attract them. This mix of culture and political education was part of
the larger process of building a culture of alternatives. When the participants in
these workshops, camps, trainings, and so on left these events, they left infused
with a critique of conventional development projects in the Navajo Nation.
The counterideology challenged carbon sovereignty in the reservation. Diné
organizers constructed a collective sense about alternative relationships with air,
land, and water. In this sense, they were advocating for alternatives to devel-
opment. They put forward strategies for solar energy plants and wind turbines.
Members of these environmental organizations believed that the Navajo Nation
had a strong potential for both forms of energy production. Their work critiqued
conventional approaches to economic development in the Navajo Nation that
had put a lot of emphasis on the coal development explored in earlier chapters.
 182 CHAPTER 5

The belief that coal was a strong contributor to processes of global climate
change and that alternative energy and development technologies must be pur-
sued was part of this ideology that the environmentalists put forward in work-
shops, meetings, and other events geared toward the youth and that instilled a
culture of alternatives in the political sentiments. Of course, these beliefs had
strong parallels with debates in U.S. politics. The ideology was to build a path
toward development that did not replicate some of the worst features of mod-
ernization narratives (of which coal was a part), but they were also advocating
for a return to “traditional” and historic ways of interacting with each other
and the natural environment. The way the meetings were held, including the
private nature of some and the purposeful use of traditional attire during public
demonstrations, spoke to this deeper yearning to return to something that had
been lost during the processes of colonization.
The environmentalists were not asking youth to give up their cell phones,
computers, music, or dramatically change their lifestyles. They were calling on
Diné people, tribal employees, and youth to build a community in which these
technologies and cultural politics could exist sustainably. One interviewee cri-
tiqued this vision on traditional grounds, believing that it replicated capitalism
in the Navajo Nation (EJ6). Another interviewee said that many of the leaders
in the environmentalist movement did not live in the communities that they
talked about and therefore their vision lacked necessary engagement with com-
munity members (EJ10). These were common critiques, often communicated
privately, but still prominent.
There were, of course, many problems, inconsistencies, and outright con-
tradictions in the counterideology. But the point was that this loose culture
of alternatives was informed by the real threat of global climate change and
other types of environmental destruction facing the Navajo Nation. It was also
informed by older trends to preserve the Navajo culture, broaden Indigenous
lifeways, and combat colonialism. It was an ideology that both recognized and
incorporated the moral economy of coal in its attempt to identify work alterna-
tives that could fulfill a broader sense of livelihood. Their work did not simply
reject development as groups had done in the past. It advocated for returning
to a life of herding, small-scale agriculture, weaving, and jewelry, which were
staple activities for social and cultural reproduction generations before extractive
industries. These activities were part of an ongoing political conflict about the
future of coal. They were a competition for the resources of the state and, impor-
tantly, the support of the Diné people.
 CONCLUSION
All That Is Solid Melts into Air

The Navajo Generating Station (NGS) was a government-owned coal-fired

power plant on the western edge of the Navajo Nation. NGS began in the
mid-1960s and ended in early 2021 when it was blown to bits—and with it, a
generation of development, work and livelihood, and economic security. It also
ended the use of pristine aquifer water for mining activities and indiscriminate
strip-mining, a harrowing violence across much of the Diné landscape. What
is telling about the NGS experience is who paid the cost of its closure; whether
that was in the form of the environment or jobs, Diné people suffered the most.
One of my last experiences on the NGS question was patiently waiting through
an all-day hearing on the potential looming effects of the closure in Kayenta.
This was during the summer of 2018, two years before the demolishment of the
plant. It was a Saturday, a day when the benefactors of energy development and
transition were enjoying the day off from work; they might even be lounging in
a pool in Phoenix while we grappled with the costs of the closure. Some people
talked about the mine’s environmental impact on the land. For decades, shovels
dug into the earth, blasted away at coal seams, and permanently changed the
look of the land.
In October of that year, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change issued an alarming statement about the future of the planet.
The world’s leading body on climate research pleaded for policy makers to make
 184 CONCLUSION

“rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” to pre-

vent global temperatures from increasing beyond 1.5 degrees centigrade. Many
climate scientists estimated that warming beyond this threshold would trigger
catastrophic droughts and flooding.1 If we were to take seriously the problem of
climate change, we also had to talk about the social, political, and colonial arrange-
ments that exacerbated these problems. These included centuries of murder and
displacement of Indigenous peoples that formed the cornerstone of national
projects in North and South America. Colonial relations begot carbon relations.
Indigenous nations became victims of mineral extraction. However, many com-
munity members had built life and identities within these industries. The United
States, the world’s most polluting country per capita, occupies the lands of more
than five hundred Indigenous nations. Although colonialism and climate change
are rarely discussed together, this book asks, “What are the colonial implications
of climate change on Indigenous nations under colonial occupation?”
This book was based on ethnographic research from 2012 to 2014 when the
Navajo Nation rededicated itself to coal. But over the course of finishing my
PhD and starting this book, the owners of NGS, the Salt River Project, decided
that it was too expensive to continue. Although the Navajo Nation Council
renewed the lease early, in 2013, SRP elected not to keep the power plant open
for another twenty-five years. Despite all the trouble, protest, late nights, threats,
and ultimatums, SRP decided to let the original lease expire in 2019 and close
the plant. In a desperate attempt to keep the plant open for what turned out to
be just six more years, the council worked out a deal to slowly decommission
the NGS and leave some of its infrastructure behind, including the rail tracks
that lead to the mine, a storage shed, and the water pump connected to Lake
Mead. The deal reduced the demolition costs to SRP. But the power plant could
not be salvaged.
There is scholarship on the impacts of climate change on Indigenous envi-
ronments (Wildcat 2013). Many of these studies are concerned about climate
change’s impacts on Indigenous subsistence practices. Fewer consider life
among tribal nations with their own political institutions and maybe some-
what their experiences with fossil fuels. It can be a way out of colonization and
a greater entrapment into capitalist processes and limitations. The sociologi-
cal questions about Indigenous peoples’ economic and political entanglements
within fossil fuel industries are rarely discussed. Indigenous nations are on the
front lines of climate change as either victims or as a reservoir of resistance
(Klein 2014). These narratives serve a politics different from those experienced
 CONCLUSION 185

in tribal communities. In my research, Diné people were as anxious about the

future of the language, culture, and ability to live on the reservation as much
as they were concerned about climate change, desertification, and water rights.
In the western half of North America, Indigenous territories are either on
top of coveted resources or in the way of transmission lines, pipelines, and
waterways that put these resources into capitalistic circulation. These realities of
geography create the conditions through which tribal governments seek remedy
for decades of colonialism and marginalization through their own participation
in resource extraction and the energy industry. For Indigenous nations, these
are anxious times.
Today, organizers and activists around climate change are calling for a green
new deal to generate economic momentum and transition the United States
toward sustainable energy technologies, but utilities control almost all U.S.
energy sources. Even Donald Trump’s declarative love in 2017 for “clean, beau-
tiful coal” could not save the Navajo Generating Station from closing. The Salt
River Project, the utility that had operated the plant for more than forty years,
reneged on an agreement it had signed with the Navajo Nation in 2013 when it
unilaterally decided to close the plant to save on costs. The tribal government’s
attempts to find a new utility owner for the power plant were unsuccessful and
both the Navajo Generating Station power plant and the Kayenta Mine closed
in the fall of 2019.
Most of the Diné workers at the mine lost their jobs, as did many from the
power plant (some were reassigned to cleanup or transferred to different mines).
The coal jobs were the sole source of income for many of these workers and
their families. These families’ tight budgets and upended lives are part of the
larger story of climate change. What is more, the closure of the mine and power
plant suggests that the transition away from fossil fuels, and especially coal,
is already well underway. This transition is dictated not by social movements
and forces of “progressive change” but by utilities like the Salt River Project
that are responding to prices, regulation, or profit. Public utilities such as the
Salt River Project add a different dynamic when thinking through the colo-
nial questions of resources in the Southwest. They are regulated by an elected
“corporate commission” that nominally works at the behest of the public. This
rate-paying public is pitted against the interests of Indigenous nations, and it is
the Indigenous interest that is ultimately sidelined. In this maturing neoliberal
energy environment, energy buyers that had been reliant on Diné coal have now
moved toward “market purchases” for new sources of power.2 In this way, the
 186 CONCLUSION

energy market—as understood and practiced by public entities—rendered the

Navajo Generation Station too expensive to maintain.
All these changes and transitions impact tribal sovereignty. Indigenous sov-
ereignty in the United States cannot simply be understood in colonial terms.
The capitalistic practices and processes that inform the actions of colonial
actors—as well as those of Indigenous peoples—must also be accounted for.
This book is an ethnography of the coal economy in the Navajo Nation, which
includes the processes of energy transition, climate change, and new notions
of carbon sovereignty. I follow different groups of Diné people, such as tribal
officials, climate activists, and coal workers, who operated in and around the
Navajo Nation during one of the most important debates in the nation’s history.
This study breaks apart a unitary account of Indigenous peoples that reduces
complex social and political arrangements to a single idea (like Diné ideas of
climate change) as if all Navajo people held one position on the issue of coal
development. This project is anti-essentialist and challenges decades of ethno-
graphic practices in the Navajo Nation.
This book examined how coal shapes attitudes and politics. For the Navajo
Nation and Diné people, coal was tangible. It is a material substance unearthed
from ancestral lands, or poison in lungs, or money in the bank. In this book, I
argued for a deeper, more nuanced understanding of these phenomena through
ethnography and in-depth interviews with the people who live in the impacted
places. Similarly, colonialism is not a unitary social force, moving across space
and time like a steamship. It is an oscillating, uneven, and inconsistent set of
practices, produced and reproduced during events, that reshapes itself across
different political, social, and cultural milieu. Colonialism is not a structure so
much as it is an amoeba, a shape-shifter.
Coal was a social and political struggle within the Navajo Nation. The topic
of coal first entered the political discourse of the Navajo Nation in the mid-
twentieth century. Coal was a project of development that was meant to modern-
ize the Navajo Nation. In this way, it was always a colonial project. Colonization,
however, cannot be our only framework for understanding the social phenomenon
of coal. Every year that coal existed in the reservation, it became more and more
socially embedded. This intertwining of interests continues today as evidenced in
the social disruption in the Navajo Nation and for coal-dependent families when
the Navajo Generating Station leases expired at the end of 2019.
The eventual social consequence of coal was not considered or planned for
when the original leases were signed in the mid-1960s. At that time, there was
 CONCLUSION 187

uncertainty about the future of coal. The original leases planned for seventy-five
years of coal, whereas some tribal lawmakers thought it was an industry that
might be overtaken by nuclear power in the near future. Coal was not antici-
pated to become a permanent feature of the landscape.
But by the 2000s, coal had become a regular source of jobs and revenues. The
tribal government worked to preserve conditions favorable for coal production,
even as the rest of the country moved away from the industry. While some
Navajo actors anticipated the decline of the coal industry, many tribal lawmak-
ers insisted on its rise. The Navajo Nation had one hundred years or more of
coal extraction left (Clay 2014). Additionally, lawmakers believed that there were
new energy technologies on the horizon that would salvage the coal market,
such as coal liquification. There were new markets to be explored, such as China.
For some tribal lawmakers, coal had to continue at all costs. Understanding this
passion for coal on the part of Navajo actors was one of my motivations for this
project. Why did the Navajo Nation continue to pursue coal despite decades of
environmental damage, employee mistreatment, and bad-faith contracts with
the tribe? It seemed as though there were unexplored forces at work.
On all sides of the debate over coal, anxiety about the prospects of the people
and the future of the Navajo Nation was a major factor. Coal workers worried
about their jobs, about the security of their families, and about the future of
work for their coworkers, children, and communities. It was their perspective
I worked hardest to understand. I felt their voices were lost in the debate on
coal mining in the Navajo Nation. The elected members of the Navajo Nation
Council, which included my father at the time, often pointed to the tribal pro-
grams and employees that coal revenues funded as the reason they supported
coal. These monies were not small change to the tribe. Leases for land and coal
mining paid the tribe hundreds of millions of dollars. These monies supported
college scholarships, salaries for employees, and small infrastructure projects.
The third group of actors, the Diné environmental organizers, understood coal
as contributing not only to local environmental affronts but also to global cli-
mate change. And yet these were only the immediate, “modern” anxieties the
Navajo coal industry produced in Diné people.
A historical reading of coal in the Navajo Nation shows that Diné attitudes
and practices were shaped by a more sinister source of anxiety—anxiety of
colonial violence. Since the 1830s, reservations were held “in trust” by the federal
government. In the 1950s, U.S. lawmakers wanted to end this relationship, extin-
guish the reservation system, and assimilate the remaining Native peoples into
 188 CONCLUSION

U.S. society. This policy was called “termination.” Despite having the largest land
base and serving as a stereotype for “Indian” in the minds of many in the U.S.
public, the Navajo Tribe was not immune from these pressures. In the 1960s,
the Navajo Tribal Council, as it was called before 1968, pursued coal leases as a
way to maintain jurisdiction over lands and minerals at a time when the federal
and state governments were terminating tribes.
The State of Arizona was jealous of the tribe’s access to the Colorado River
on the western end of the reservation and coveted the Navajo Nation’s vast coal
reserves. The state was desperate to move water from the Colorado River to the
Salt River Valley, where the capital city of Phoenix was expanding. Diné tribal
lawmakers knew the risks of thwarting Arizona’s ambitions. The state had a
well-earned reputation of being reactionary and reckless. Arizona lawmakers
had brazenly walked away from the Colorado Compact of 1922 and sued the
much larger and politically powerful State of California over access to Colorado
River waters. And in 1963 Arizona won, bolstering an already large ego.
For the Navajo Nation in the 1960s, the State of Arizona threatened to develop
energy infrastructure on tribal lands regardless of the Navajo government’s opin-
ion on the matter. It was a form of brazen racism often cast as “Western rugged-
ness.” The Department of the Interior desired to incorporate the Navajo Nation
into energy development to protect federal authority over the states (as reserva-
tions are considered federal lands). The anxiety between termination and state
control over reservation lands and resources moved Navajo tribal delegates in the
1960s to make strategic decisions about what energy projects to endorse.
Diné tribal lawmakers had good reason to fear termination of the tribe.
It informed how elected officials thought about competing resource develop-
ment proposals from the State of Arizona and from the federal government.
For elected council delegates in the 1960s, one colonial structure (the federal
government) offered more security for the future of the people than the other
(the State of Arizona). On the one hand, Arizona openly challenged Diné
sovereignty and threatened to develop energy projects on Diné lands regardless
of what Diné people had to say about it. On the other hand, the federal gov-
ernment offered to work with the tribes and offer monies in the form of jobs
and revenues for the tribe. In exchange, the Navajo Nation was asked to forgo
its claims to the Colorado River for fifty years. Between the two options, tribal
lawmakers decided that the latter was better.
From the vantage point of tribal lawmakers at the time, regional energy
development felt inevitable. Nuclear power was the technology of the future.
 CONCLUSION 189

Hydropower smacked of colonial control. On Indian land, coal was the only
kind of energy production that could materially benefit the tribe. It gave the
tribe some leverage in an emerging energy-water nexus that was becoming
increasingly important in the arid Southwest. But by 2017, the advantage of
coal had dissipated. After fifty years, coal was more a source of political and
economic dependency than control.
Looking at coal from the perspective of the twenty-first century, it is easy
to see it as a debilitating industry designed to exploit tribes. It is easy to judge
tribal lawmakers in the 1960s for agreeing to bad lease deals and for largely
being unaware of what they were doing. There is truth in this critique. Some
tribal officials paid little attention to the details of this important contract when
it came before them. But appreciating the colonial conditions at the time and
popular understandings and attitudes toward energy helps us better understand
their actions.
The story of coal will inevitably continue beyond this closure date as cancers
and other health impacts from long-term coal exposure are more widely known.
Although these things are not measured in conventional health analysis, what
might the decades of coal and environmental pollution have done to the health
of the Diné people prior to COVID-19? The decades of strip-mining have
changed the look of the land forever, and it will also take many more decades
before vegetation fully recovers. The water used for coal’s operations will never
return, a burden passed onto future generations of Diné people who want to live
on the land. However, as an active generator of revenues and jobs, the Navajo
Generating Station has clear birth and death dates. It was conceived in post-
war prosperity and shut down in an era of right-wing populism, declining U.S.
global power, and after a tumultuous term of a “pro-coal” president. In its short
life, coal mining forever transformed the Navajo Nation and landscape. It was a
catalyst for a movement away from subsistence-based livelihood toward work in
wage labor. For years, coal mining defined whole communities and the identities
of workers who participated in the industry. Today, it is gone. The labor, the
work, and the identity associated with coal will slowly disappear.
Colonial capitalism maintains a long history with a consistent logics of dis-
possession, racism, and what some characterize as racial capitalism (Pulido 2016;
Robinson 1983). Colonial capitalism turned Indigenous homelands into periph-
eries and resource colonies (Dunbar-Ortiz 1979; Snipp 1988). It was the twin
processes of colonialism and capitalism, each working together and sometimes
in counterintuitive ways, that has reduced the oldest sites of sustainable living
 190 CONCLUSION

on the continent into places of abandonment (Voyles 2015), extraction (Powell

2017a), and exploitation (S. L. Smith and Frehner 2010). To the United States,
Indigenous homelands are “reservations” valued for what they do for outside
settler communities, spurring what the Diné scholar Melanie Yazzie (2018, 29)
calls a “death drive of capitalism.” Reservations supplied cheap labor, disposable
land and waters, and raw commodities.
But capitalism and colonialism are not unchanging monolithic evils, selfishly
devouring everything in their paths. They are contradictory, evolving, and ideo-
logically diverse aggregates of events and actions, sometimes posing as benev-
olent and benign. Colonial capitalism does not unfold along a binary of the
colonizing and the colonized but instead requires active participation—in many
cases of those who ultimately suffer in the end, who are tricked, misled, and
who sometimes undermine their own communities for lack of better options.
This book has focused on the dying Navajo coal industry and the alternatives
that Diné people are working to replace it with. It highlights how an economy
and a livelihood tied to coal were maintained for decades with allusions of per-
manence, only to blow away with the winds of a changing energy market. This
book is about the combined material, social, and cultural impacts of the coal
industry on the Diné people.
For the Diné people, the landscape is not only a source of beauty; it is also a
place of survival. It is not reducible to a picture in a frame but is all-consuming
and omnipresent. It is where past, present, and future coexist. It is both a spir-
itual and a mundane plane. It is where people languish during droughts of
employment, where they struggle paycheck to paycheck to survive, but where
survival is made possible. Sometimes Diné people seek seasonal construction
work, or they sell firewood and homemade burritos. Older women weave rugs
and find temporary employment at local chapter houses. Men work at coal
mines or build things around the house. Work was not always gendered in this
way, but colonial intrusions have insisted on it.
At the same time, the Navajo Nation has fought for increased sovereignty
and self-determination since the 1960s. It has gained political and economic
power through the extraction and use of uranium, oil, coal, and natural gas—all
at tremendous physical and environmental costs for the people. Fifty years ago,
it was the high cost of natural gas that made coal attractive for regional develop-
ers. Utilities in the Southwest saw an opportunity to develop fast-growing cities
with Navajo coal (Needham 2014). Today, the low cost of natural gas makes coal
less appealing to those who care little about the impacts of a coal shutdown on
 CONCLUSION 191

Indigenous communities. The coal market has collapsed and the U.S. energy
landscape is moving like a massive tectonic plate. Like tectonic plates, those
living closest to the fault line experience the greatest impact.
Coal takes the residues of ancient life, decaying for millions of years just
below the earth’s surface, and burns the stuff for energy, emitting noxious gases
and carbon in the process. It is not just the ancestors of humans in the region
but of all life that is implicated (Freese 2016). Our modern ways of viewing the
world through ideas of modernization, capitalist expansion, and development
convert subjective relationships with the earth and coal into objective ones.
Coal becomes less of a thing, or a substance with a history and materiality. It
becomes a resource to be exploited for abstract notions of energy that are in
turn transported, stored, and used across vast amounts of space. Coal’s promise
was to bring development, jobs, modernization, and a better livelihood for Diné
people. This was a promise made at a time when the tribal nations faced great
political challenges. On these lands were vast deposits of oil, coal, natural gas,
and uranium, and the development of “the West” required some degree of access
to these resources. To get at Native resources, government officials, lawyers,
private businesspeople, reporters, and others had to work in league with each
other to create the legal-political-cultural environment for coal exploitation to
occur in Diné Bikéyah and for Diné people to agree to it.
For the Navajo Nation and Diné people, living with a massive coal plant, coal
mine, and power lines, the fault lines of national and global energy transitions
are at their feet and extend to one’s relatives between one’s homes. The tremors
shake the foundation of the economy. Stable jobs have disappeared. Industrial
infrastructure was abandoned. Revenues to the tribal government have evap-
orated. Literally, all that was solid has melted into air—coal extracted, trans-
ported, burned, and converted into carbon. When coal finally ends, as it inev-
itably will for the Navajo Nation, what will the tribe have gained or lost? This
is the existential dilemma. Was it worth it? Were there ever alternatives? Are
there still alternatives? Both the future and the past of the Navajo Nation are
bound up in the social and physical production of coal and its eventual demise.
 NOTES

INTRODUCTION
1. Throughout the book, I use Navajo Nation to refer to the name of the tribal
government after 1968. I use Navajo Tribe to refer to the official name of the gov-
ernment before 1968.
2. High Country News reporter Jonathan Thompson (2017) reported 935 permanent
employees at the Navajo Generating Station and Kayenta Mine. However, this
seems like a high calculation based on self-reported numbers from both Salt River
Project and Peabody Coal.
3. During the winter session of the Navajo Nation Council meeting on January 27,
2020, Navajo Nation president Jonathan Nez told council delegates that the tribe
would lose $30 million to $50 million in annual revenues with the closure of the
power plant and mine (Associated Press 2020).

CHAPTER 1
1. The word now abbreviated once meant “where the snow doesn’t melt.” This was
a description of the mountaintops, often covered with snow. In Diné geographic
observations, captured in the name of the mountain, the temperature was cooler,
and snow could be found on the mountain year-round.
 194 NOTES TO PAGES 68–94

CHAPTER 2
1. The “New Frontiersmen” was a phrase coined shortly after Kennedy’s election in
1960 to refer to the academics and young policy advisors who surrounded him
during his administration (Hill and Schnapper 1961).
2. “A History of Service,” Salt River Project, accessed August 3, 2020, https://www
.srpnet.com/about/history/timeline.aspx.
3. Navajo Tribal Council transcripts, May 22, 1961. The council passed the resolution
“Urging Construction of Marble Canyon Dam by the Federal Government as a
Bureau of Reclamation Project” (Appendix B).
4. Andrew Curley, letter to the editor, Navajo Times, September 24, 1970.
5. Navajo Tribal Council transcripts, August 3, 1966. The council passed the resolution
“Opposing the Construction of Dams in Marble Gorge and Other Portions of the
Grand Canyon” (Appendix C).
6. The BIA had established policing in reservations as part of its fulfillment of treaty
rights and also to adhere to the 1885 Major Crimes Act—a unilateral Congressional
decision to replace tribal institutions of justice, often restorative in nature, with
adversarial forms. Public Law 93–638 allowed for the Navajo Nation to “contract”
with the BIA to run its own police services. Navajo Nation police replaced BIA
police. To this day, the Navajo Nation maintains its own police force, with limited
authorities and resources. For members of the Navajo Nation living in remote
places, a police response might take more than an hour. Today, tribes use “638
contracting” to take over BIA-funded institutions. This is a limited, constrained,
conditioned form of sovereignty. But it does remove a layer of paternalistic over-
sight that plagued reservation governance prior to the passage of the Indian Self-
Determination and Educational Assistance Act of 1975.
7. At first, Peabody Coal agreed to the terms of the lease that the Navajo Nation
negotiated. But Peabody withdrew after Ronald Reagan’s secretary of the interior
encouraged the company to renegotiate it to a lower rate. When the Navajo Nation
learned of this, the tribe sued the Department of the Interior for violating its “trust
responsibility.” The Navajo Nation ultimately lost this case in 2009 when the U.S.
Supreme Court said the federal government was not obligated to act in the best
interest of the tribe because of the authority that the Indian Mining and Leasing
Act of 1938 granted tribes.

CHAPTER 3
1. My former landlord who worked at the McKinley Mine simply retired with the
closure of the mine.
2. This information was presented to the Navajo Nation Council on March 29, 2013,
when it considered spending $2.3 million to study the feasibility of buying Navajo
Mine.
 NOTES TO PAGES 95–133 195

3. A March 30, 2011, memorandum titled “Appointment to Salt River Negotiating

Team,” from then president Shelly’s chief of staff, Sherrick Roanhorse, to Sam
Woods, then in the Policy Unit of the Shelly administration, stated that Woods
was “assigned to sit on the Salt River Project Negotiating Team.” Included on the
NGS Negotiating Team were Harrison Tsosie, Dana Bobroff (deputy attorney
general), Fred White (executive director of the Division of Natural Resources),
Ahktar Zaman (director of the Department of Minerals), Marty Ashley (executive
director of Tax Commission), and Stephen Etsitty (executive director of Navajo
EPA).
4. I witnessed all these issues debated in the tribal council.
5. I wrote a letter to the editor to the Navajo Times in 2005 complaining about this
practice when then speaker Lawrence T. Morgan, from a New Mexico community
called Iyanbito, limited the debate on the tribe’s first water settlement and allowed
the Navajo Nation Council to vote for its passage with little debate on the issues.
At least these were my impressions at the time and what I wrote in my letter.
6. Members of these organizations submitted comments attached to the legisla-
tion and provided to the council delegates. It is clear that they coordinated their
responses, as each submission rearticulates, verbatim, the same central points. They
asked for improved studies on the health and environmental impacts of NGS and
public hearings from community members affected by the continued mining.
7. Ryan Randazzo, “APS Closes 3 Units at 4 Corners Power Plant,” Arizona Republic,
December 31, 2013.
8. The Colorado River Compact was signed in 1922.
9. “Navajo Nation Council Approves Navajo Generating Station Lease Exten-
sion,” Navajo Nation Council, press release, May 1, 2013, http://www.navajo-nsn
.gov/News%20Releases/NNCouncil/2013/may/NNC%20approves%20Navajo
%20Generating%20Station%20lease%20extension.pdf.
10. “Navajo Nation Council Votes to Table NGS Lease Extension Legislation,”
Navajo Nation Council, press release, April 24, 2013, http://www.navajo-nsn.gov/
News%20Releases/NNCouncil/2013/apr/NNC%20votes%20to%20table%20NGS
%20lease%20extension%20legislation.pdf.
11. Legislative Summary Sheet, February 15, 2013, Tracking No. 0042–13.
12. The language of Resolution 0042–13 says that the Navajo Nation will receive
“approximately” $42 million a year “annually adjusted” through 2044.
13. This provision is found in section XI of the lease agreement.
14. “SRP Seeks to Protect Future of Valuable Arizona Resource: Board Approves
Purchase of LADWP Ownership Share of NGS,” Salt River Project, press release,
May 14, 2015, https://media.srpnet.com.

CHAPTER 4
1. All coal worker interviewees were men.
 196 NOTES TO PAGES 134–174

2. Marley Shebala, “An Uncertain New Year: Black Mesa Workers Face Layoffs,
Upheaval After Decades of Service,” Navajo Times, December 15, 2005, A1. See also
Marley Shebala, “Closure Causing Layoffs of Longtime Workers,” Navajo Times,
December 15, 2005, A3; and Cindy Yurth, “Chapters Lament Lost Perks in Wake
of Mine Closure,” Navajo Times, December 22, 2005, A1.
3. “Shiprock JMI,” accessed July 27, 2022, http://www.shiprockjmi.org/.
4. Cindy Yurth, “Shelly, Jim Promise Teaching Hospital if Elected,” Navajo Times,
May 22, 2014.
5. There is a lot of anthropological work on the Diné people about jealousy derived
from an impression that someone has too much wealth, measured in the number
of sheep a family has and that they get that wealth through duplicitous means
like “witchcraft.” There is a strong antigovernment attitude against elected tribal
officials, particularly members of the Navajo Nation, because they are understood
as financially benefiting from their position of influence. One former elected offi-
cial told me he did not acquire new things because he did not want to give this
impression. The way some of my informants interpreted the phrase t’aa hwo aji
t’eego suggests the opposite, that obvious material wealth is a marker of hard work.

CHAPTER 5
1. Verna L. Harvey, “Resentment Is Expressed over Black Mesa Mining,” Navajo
Times, April 1, 1971, 12.
2. Harvey, “Resentment Is Expressed over Black Mesa Mining,” 12. See also “Black
Mesans Concerned About Relocation Program,” Navajo Times, February 12, 1970,
11.
3. Harvey, “Resentment Is Expressed over Black Mesa Mining,” 12.
4. Harvey, “Resentment Is Expressed over Black Mesa Mining,” 12.
5. Since the 1960s, the Navajo Forest Products Industry (NFPI) had employed hun-
dreds of Navajo loggers and supplied much of the income for the small town built
around an industrial sawmill. As in the dynamics in Kayenta, workers in NFPI, a
company owned by the Navajo Nation, believed logging was a source of livelihood.
When environmentalists from Diné C.A.R.E. challenged their practices, they felt
threatened. NFPI closed permanently in 1994 and the sawmill was demolished in
2013.
6. According to my notes from the Flagstaff meeting on July 7, 2008.
7. The term sheep camp was used historically to reference a place where families would
move with their sheep during the summer months to let their sheep graze. These
places are often more isolated than winter homes and have gained a reputation of
being makeshift.
8. The demonstrations and trainings I witnessed were part of “Our Power Commu-
nities,” a program of the Climate Justice Alliance. The workshop on Black Mesa
was one of the first meetings of this new coalition of not-for-profits advocating for
 NOTES TO PAGES 178–185 197

“just transition.” See “Our Power Commuties,” Climate Justice Alliance, accessed
July 27, 2022, https://climatejusticealliance.org/workgroup/our-power.
9. Consider the Diné Policy Institute’s report “Career Dilemmas Among Diné
(Navajo) College Graduates: An Exploration of the Dinétah (Navajo Nation)
Brain Drain” (McKenzie et al. 2013).

CONCLUSION
1. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, press release, October 8, 2018,
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/11/pr_181008_P48_spm_en.pdf.
2. According to the Central Arizona Project, CAP plans on purchasing nearly 80
percent of its energy on “market forward” and “market daily short-term” purchases.
 REFERENCES

Aberle, David Friend. 1969. “A Plan for Navajo Economic Development.” In Toward
Economic Development for Native American Communities: A Compendium of Papers
Submitted to the Subcommittee on Economy in Government of the Joint Economic Com-
mittee, Congress of the United States, 91st Congress, 1st Session, Joint Committee, 223–76.
Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Abrams, Philip. 1982. Historical Sociology. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.
Adair, John. 1946. The Navajo and Pueblo Silversmiths. Norman: University of Oklahoma
Press.
Alfred, Taiaiake, and Jeff Corntassel. 2005. “Being Indigenous: Resurgences Against
Contemporary Colonialism.” Government and Opposition 40 (4): 597–614.
Allison, James Robert, III. 2015. Sovereignty for Survival: American Energy Development
and Indian Self-Determination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press.
Alonso, Ana, James C. Scott, Armando Bartra, Florencia E. Mallon, Marjorie Becker,
Elsie Rockwell, Jan Rus, and Alan Knight. 1994. Everyday Forms of State Formation:
Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico. Durham, N.C.: Duke Uni-
versity Press.
Ambler, Marjane. 1990. Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Anderson, Kim, Maria Campbell, and Christi Belcourt. 2018. Keetsahnak: Our Missing
and Murdered Indigenous Sisters. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press.
Åsbrink, Elisabeth. 2017. 1947: Where Now Begins. New York: Other Press.
Associated Press. 2020. “Navajo Look to Arizona Utilities to Make Up for Coal Losses.”
AZ Central, January 28. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2020/
01/28/navajo-look-arizona-utilities-make-up-coal-financial-environmental-losses/
4602256002/.
 200 REFERENCES

Barker, Joanne. 2005. Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in

Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination. Contemporary Indigenous Issues. Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press.
Benally, Malcolm D. 2011. Bitter Water: Diné Oral Histories of the Navajo–Hopi Land
Dispute. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Biolsi, Thomas. 2005. “Imagined Geographies: Sovereignty, Indigenous Space, and
American Indian Struggle.” American Ethnologist 32 (2): 239–59.
Brubaker, Rogers. 2004. Ethnicity Without Groups. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univer-
sity Press.
Brubaker, Rogers, and Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond ‘Identity.’” Theory and Society
29 (1): 1–47.
Brugge, Doug, Timothy Benally, and Esther Yazzie-Lewis. 2006. The Navajo People and
Uranium Mining. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Bsumek, Erika Marie. 2008. Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868–1940.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Chamberlain, Kathleen. 2000. Under Sacred Ground: A History of Navajo Oil, 1922–1982.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Chomsky, Noam. 1999. Profit over People: Neoliberalism and Global Order. New York:
Seven Stories.
Choudhary, Trib. 2005. “2005–2006 Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy of
the Navajo Nation.” Navajo Nation Division of Economic Development. http://www
.navajobusiness.com/pdf/CEDS/CEDS%202005%20-%2006%20Final.pdf.
Churchill, Ward. 1995. Since Predator Came: Notes from the Struggle for American Indian
Liberation. Littleton, Colo.: Aigis Publications.
Churchill, Ward, and Winona LaDuke. 1986. “Native America: The Political Economy
of Radioactive Colonialism.” Critical Sociology 13 (3): 51–78.
Clay, Rebecca Fairfax. 2014. “Tribe at a Crossroads: The Navajo Nation Purchases a Coal
Mine.” Environmental Health Perspectives 122 (4): A104–7.
Cobb, Daniel M. 2008. Native Activism in Cold War America: The Struggle for Sovereignty.
Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Cornell, Stephen E. 1988. The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence.
New York: Oxford University Press.
Cornell, Stephen E., and Joseph P. Kalt. 1991. Where’s the Glue? Institutional Bases of
American Indian Economic Development. Cambridge, Mass.: Malcolm Wiener Center
for Social Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Cornell, Stephen E., and Joseph P. Kalt. 1992. What Can Tribes Do? Strategies and Insti-
tutions in American Indian Economic Development. American Indian Manual and
Handbook Series 4. Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center, University of
California, Los Angeles.
Corntassel, Jeff. 2012. “Re-envisioning Resurgence: Indigenous Pathways to Decoloni-
zation and Sustainable Self-Determination.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education
& Society 1 (1).
 REFERENCES 201

Curley, Andrew. 2008. “Dóó nal yea dah: Considering the Logic of the Diné Natural
Resource Protection Act of 2005 and the Desert Rock Power Plant Project.” Diné
Policy Institute, February. https://www.dinecollege.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/
04/DNRPA-and-Desert-RockII.pdf.
Curley, Andrew. 2014. “The Origin of Legibility.” In Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and
Reclaiming Navajo Thought, edited by Lloyd Lee, 129–50. Tucson: University of Ari-
zona Press.
Curley, Andrew. 2018. “A Failed Green Future: Navajo Green Jobs and Energy ‘Transi-
tion’ in the Navajo Nation.” Geoforum 88 ( January): 57–65.
Curley, Andrew. 2019a. “‘Our Winters’ Rights’: Challenging Colonial Water Laws.”
Global Environmental Politics 19 (3): 57–76.
Curley, Andrew. 2019b. “T’áá hwó ají t’éego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal
Workers.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 109 (1): 71–86.
Curley, Andrew. 2021a. “Infrastructures as Colonial Beachheads: The Central Arizona
Project and the Taking of Navajo Resources.” Environment and Planning D: Society
and Space 39 (3). https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775821991537.
Curley, Andrew. 2021b. “Unsettling Indian Water Settlements: The Little Colorado River,
the San Juan River, and Colonial Enclosures.” Antipode 53 (3): 705–23.
Davidson, Basil. 1992. The Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State.
London: James Currey.
Debo, Angie. 1973. And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes.
Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Deloria, Vine. 1985. American Indian Policy in the Twentieth Century. Norman: University
of Oklahoma Press.
Denetdale, Jennifer. 2006. “Chairmen, Presidents, and Princesses: The Navajo Nation,
Gender, and the Politics of Tradition.” Wicazo Sa Review 21 (1): 9–28.
Denetdale, Jennifer. 2007. Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito
and Juanita. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Denetdale, Jennifer. 2009. The Long Walk: The Forced Navajo Exile. New York: Chelsea
House.
Dennison, Jean. 2012. Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage
Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Dennison, Jean. 2017. “Entangled Sovereignties: The Osage Nation’s Interconnections
with Governmental and Corporate Authorities.” American Ethnologist 44 (4): 684–96.
Dicken, Peter. 1998. Global Shift: Transforming the World Economy. 3rd ed. London: Paul
Chapman.
Dorries, Heather, Robert Henry, David Hugill, Tyler McCreary, and Julie Tomiak. 2019.
Settler City Limits: Indigenous Resurgence and Colonial Violence in the Urban Prairie
West. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne, ed. 1979. Economic Development in American Indian Reserva-
tions. Development Series 1. Albuquerque: Native American Studies, University of
New Mexico.
 202 REFERENCES

Dunbar-Ortiz, Roxanne. 2014. An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States. ReVi-
sioning American History. Boston: Beacon.
Eichstaedt, Peter H. 1994. If You Poison Us: Uranium and Native Americans. Santa Fe,
N.Mex.: Red Crane Books.
Einberger, Scott. 2018. With Distance in His Eyes: The Environmental Life and Legacy of
Stewart Udall. Reno: University of Nevada Press.
Elden, Stuart. 2013. The Birth of Territory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Ellinghaus, Katherine. 2017. Blood Will Tell: Native Americans and Assimilation Policy.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Emanuel, Ryan E. 2019. “Water in the Lumbee World: A River and Its People in a Time
of Change.” Environmental History 24 (1): 25–51.
Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of Develop-
ment. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Estes, Nick. 2019. Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline,
and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance. New York: Verso.
Fanon, Frantz. 1991. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Weidenfeld.
Ferguson, James. 2006. Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press.
Fixico, Donald L. 1986. Termination and Relocation: Federal Indian Policy, 1945–1960.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Fixico, Donald Lee. 2012. The Invasion of Indian Country in the Twentieth Century: Amer-
ican Capitalism and Tribal Natural Resources. 2nd ed. Boulder: University Press of
Colorado.
Frank, Andre Gunder. 1967. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America. Histor-
ical Studies of Chile and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press.
Freese, Barbara. 2016. Coal: A Human History. New York: Basic Books.
Gaventa, John. 1982. Power and Powerlessness: Quiescence and Rebellion in an Appalachian
Valley. Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
Gedicks, Al. 1993. The New Resource Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles Against
Multinational Corporations. Boston: South End Press.
Gergan, Mabel Denzin, and Andrew Curley. 2021. “Indigenous Youth and Decolonial
Futures: Energy and Environmentalism Among the Diné in the Navajo Nation and
the Lepchas of Sikkim, India.” Antipode, July 26. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.12763.
Glaser, Leah S. 2002. “Rural Electrification in Multiethnic Arizona: A Study of Power,
Urbanization and Change.” PhD diss., Arizona State University.
Goldstein, Alyosha. 2014. Formations of United States Colonialism. Durham, N.C.: Duke
University Press.
Gottlieb, Robert. 2005. Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environ-
mental Movement. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
Grann, David. 2017. Killers of the Flower Moon. New York: Doubleday.
Grant, Soni. 2022. “Chess or Checkers? Fracking in Greater Chaco.” In The North Ameri-
can West in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Brenden Rensink. Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press.
Greider, William. 1969. “A Tribal Water Fight.” Washington Post, June 29.
 REFERENCES 203

Grindle, Merilee Serrill. 1997. Getting Good Government: Capacity Building in the Public
Sectors of Developing Countries. Harvard Studies in International Development. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard Institute for International Development.
Hansen, Brett. 2008. “Conquering the Arizona Desert: The Theodore Roosevelt Dam.”
Civil Engineering 78 (8): 44–45.
Harvey, David. 2001. “Globalization and the ‘Spatial Fix.’” Geographische Revue 2:23–30.
Henson, Eric C. 2008. The State of the Native Nations: Conditions Under U.S. Policies of
Self-Determination. The Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Develop-
ment. New York: Oxford University Press.
Hilberg, Raul. 2003. The Destruction of the European Jews. Vol. 2. New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press.
Hill, I. William, and M. B. Schnapper, eds. 1961. The New Frontiersmen: Profiles of the Men
Around Kennedy. Washington, D.C.: Public Affairs Press.
Hosmer, Brian. 2010. Native Americans and the Legacy of Harry S. Truman. Vol. 4. Kirks-
ville, Mo.: Truman State University Press.
Hosmer, Brian C., Colleen M. O’Neill, and Donald Lee Fixico. 2004. Native Pathways:
American Indian Culture and Economic Development in the Twentieth Century. Boulder:
University Press of Colorado.
Hurlbut, David J., et al. 2012. “Navajo Generating Station and Air Visibility Regula-
tions: Alternatives and Impacts.” National Renewable Energy Laboratory. https://
permanent.fdlp.gov/gpo22540/53024.pdf.
Ignatiev, Noel. 2009. How the Irish Became White. New York: Routledge.
Isenberg, Nancy. 2017. White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America. New
York: Penguin Books.
Iverson, Peter. 2002. Diné: A History of the Navajos. Photographs by Monty Roessel.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
Jorgensen, Miriam. 2007. Rebuilding Native Nations: Strategies for Governance and Devel-
opment. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Karuka, Manu. 2019. Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Trans-
continental Railroad. American Crossroads 52. Oakland: University of California
Press.
Kelley, Klara, and Harris Francis. 2019. A Diné History of Navajoland. Tucson: University
of Arizona Press.
Kelly, Lawrence C. 1963. “The Navaho Indians: Land and Oil.” New Mexico Historical
Review 38 (1): 1–28.
Kelly, Lawrence C. 1968. The Navajo Indians and Federal Indian Policy, 1900–1935. Tucson:
University of Arizona Press.
Kelly, Lawrence C. 1970. Navajo Roundup: Selected Correspondence of Kit Carson’s Expedi-
tion Against the Navajo, 1863–1865. Boulder, Colo.: Pruett.
Kelman, Ari. 2013. A Misplaced Massacre: Struggling over the Memory of Sand Creek. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
King, Farina. 2016. “The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Educational Experiences in the
Twentieth Century.” PhD diss., Arizona State University, Tempe.
Klein, Naomi. 2000. No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies. Toronto: Knopf Canada.
 204 REFERENCES

Klein, Naomi. 2014. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. New York:
Simon and Schuster.
Kluckhohn, Clyde, and Dorothea Leighton. (1946) 1956. The Navaho. Rev. ed. Cambridge,
Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Kotlowski, Dean J. 2008. “From Backlash to Bingo: Ronald Reagan and Federal Indian
Policy.” Pacific Historical Review 77 (4): 617–52.
LaDuke, Winona. 1992. “Indigenous Environmental Perspectives: A North American
Primer.” Akwe:kon Journal 9 (2): 52–71.
LaDuke, Winona. 1999. All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Boston:
South End Press.
LaDuke, Winona. 2005. Voices from White Earth: Gaa-waabaabiganikaag. Great Bar-
rington, Mass.: E.F. Schumacher Society.
LaDuke, Winona. 2008. Make a Beautiful Way: The Wisdom of Native American Women.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
LaDuke, Winona, and Deborah Cowen. 2020. “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure.” South
Atlantic Quarterly 119 (2): 243–68.
LaDuke, Winona, and Sean Aaron Cruz. 2012. The Militarization of Indian Country. The
Makwa Enewed Series. East Lansing, Mich.: Makwa Enewed.
Lambert, Valerie. 2007. Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence. Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press.
Lee, Lloyd Lance. 2013. “The Fundamental Laws: Codification for Decolonization?”
Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 2 (2).
Lee, Tiffany S. 2007. “‘If They Want Navajo to Be Learned, Then They Should Require
It in All Schools’: Navajo Teenagers’ Experiences, Choices, and Demands Regarding
Navajo Language.” Wicazo Sa Review 22 (1): 7–33.
Leibowitz, Rachel. 2008. “Constructing the Navajo Capital: Landscape, Power, and Rep-
resentation at Window Rock.” PhD diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Lemont, Eric D. 2006. American Indian Constitutional Reform and the Rebuilding of
Native Nations. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Lightfoot, Sheryl. 2016. Global Indigenous Politics: A Subtle Revolution. New York:
Routledge.
Lister, Majerle. 2017. “Considering a Navajo Name Change: Self-Identification, Land,
and Liberation.” The Red Nation, July 31. http://therednation.org/considering-a
-navajo-name-change-self-identification-land-and-liberation/.
Lyons, Scott Richard. 2010. X-marks: Native Signatures of Assent. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
McCombe, Leonard, Evon Z. Vogt, and Clyde Kluckhohn. 1951. Navaho Means People.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online 1343. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
McCreary, Tyler A., and Richard A Milligan. 2014. “Pipelines, Permits, and Protests:
Carrier Sekani Encounters with the Enbridge Northern Gateway Project.” Cultural
Geographies 21 (1): 115–29.
 REFERENCES 205

McKenzie, James, Aaron P. Jackson, Robert Yazzie, Steven A. Smith, Amber K. Crotty,
Donny Baum, Avery Denny, and Dana Bah’lgai Eldridge. “Career Dilemmas Among
Diné (Navajo) College Graduates: An Exploration of the Dinétah (Navajo Nation)
Brain Drain.” International Indigenous Policy Journal 4, no. 4 (2013).
McLerran, Jennifer. 2012. A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933–
1943. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
McMichael, Philip. 2011. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective. 5th ed.
Thousand Oaks, Calif.: SAGE.
McPherson, Robert S., and David A. Wolff. 1997. “Poverty, Politics, and Petroleum: The
Utah Navajo and the Aneth Oil Field.” American Indian Quarterly 21 (3): 451–70.
Miller, Robert J. 2012. Reservation “Capitalism”: Economic Development in Indian Country.
Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO.
Mills, C. Wright. (1959) 2000. The Sociological Imagination. New York: Oxford University
Press.
Mintz, Sidney Wilfred. 1986. Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History.
New York: Penguin Books.
Mitchell, Timothy. 2009. “Carbon Democracy.” Economy and Society 38 (3): 399–432.
Montoya, Teresa. Forthcoming. “Permeable: Diné Politics of Extraction and Exposure.”
Unpublished manuscript in author’s possession.
Murshed, Syed Mansoob. 2018. The Resource Curse. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Pub-
lishing Limited.
Nadasdy, Paul. 2017. Sovereignty’s Entailments: First Nation State Formation in the Yukon.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Nagel, Joane. 1997. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of
Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press.
Navajo Tribal Council. 1952. Navajo Tribal Council Resolutions, 1922–1951. Washington,
D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office.
Needham, Andrew. 2014. Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest.
Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Uni-
versity Press.
Nelson, Megan Kate. 2020. The Three-Cornered War: The Union, the Confederacy, and
Native Peoples in the Fight for the West. First Scribner hardcover edition. New York:
Scribner.
Neumann, Franz Leopold. 2009. Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Social-
ism, 1933–1944. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.
Nies, Judith. 2014. Unreal City: Las Vegas, Black Mesa, and the Fate of the West. New York:
Nation Books.
Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neo-colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. London: Nelson.
Olson, Joel. 2004. The Abolition of White Democracy. Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press.
Oman, Kerry R. 2002. “The Beginning of the End: The Indian Peace Commission of
1867–1868.” Great Plains Quarterly 22 (1): 35–51.
 206 REFERENCES

O’Neill, Colleen. 2005. Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Cen-
tury. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
Pasternak, Shiri. 2017. Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake Against the
State. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Peck, Jamie, and Adam Tickell. 2002. “Neoliberalizing Space.” Antipode 34 (3): 380–404.
Perdue, Theda. 2005. “Mixed Blood” Indians: Racial Construction in the Early South. Mercer
University Lamar Memorial Lectures 45. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Pevar, Stephen. 2012. The Rights of Indians and Tribes. New York: Oxford University Press.
Powell, Dana Elizabeth. 2011. “Landscapes of Power: An Ethnography of Energy Devel-
opment on the Navajo Nation.” PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel
Hill.
Powell, Dana E. 2017a. Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Powell, Dana E. 2017b. “Toward Transition? Challenging Extractivism and the Politics
of the Inevitable on the Navajo Nation.” In ExtrACTION: Impacts, Engagements,
and Alternative Futures, edited by Kirk Jalbert, Anna Willow, David Casagrande, and
Stephanie Paladino, 211–26. New York: Routledge.
Powell, Dana E., and Andrew Curley. 2009. “K’e, Hozhó, and Non-governmental Pol-
itics on the Navajo Nation: Ontologies of Difference Manifest in Environmental
Activism.” World Anthropologies Network E-Journal 4:109–38. http://ram-wan.net/old/
documents/05_e_Journal/journal-4/5-powell.pdf.
Prashad, Vijay. 2008. The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World. New York:
New Press.
Prucha, Francis Paul. 1994. American Indian Treaties: The History of a Political Anomaly.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Pulido, Laura. 2017. “Geographies of Race and Ethnicity II: Environmental Racism,
Racial Capitalism and State-Sanctioned Violence.” Progress in Human Geography 41
(4): 524–33.
Reno, Philip. 1981. Mother Earth, Father Sky, and Economic Development: Navajo Resources
and Their Use. Institute for Native American Development 3. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press.
Rist, Gilbert. 2002. The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith.
London: Zed Books.
Robbins, Lynn A. 1978. “Navajo Workers and Labor Unions.” Southwest Economy and
Society 3 (3): 4–23.
Robinson, Cedric J. 1983. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Rosser, Ezra. 2021. A Nation Within: Navajo Land and Economic Development. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rostow, W. W. (1960) 1991. The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto.
3rd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ruffing, Lorraine Turner. 1976. “Navajo Economic Development Subject to Cultural
Constraints.” Economic Development and Cultural Change 24 (3): 611–21.
 REFERENCES 207

Ruffing, Lorraine Turner. 1978. “Navajo Mineral Development.” American Indian Journal
4 (9): 28–51.
Scott, Rebecca R. 2010. Removing Mountains: Extracting Nature and Identity in the Appa-
lachian Coalfields. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Seow, Victor. 2022. Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Sewell, William H., Jr. 2005. Logics of History: Social Theory and Social Transformation.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Shoemaker, Nancy. 2006. A Strange Likeness: Becoming Red and White in Eighteenth-
Century North America. New York: Oxford University Press.
Simpson, Leanne Betasamosake. 2016. “Indigenous Resurgence and Co-resistance.”
Critical Ethnic Studies 2 (2): 19–34.
Sloan Morgan, Vanessa. 2020. “‘Why Would They Care?’: Youth, Resource Extraction,
and Climate Change in Northern British Columbia, Canada.” Canadian Geographer
/ Géographe canadien 64 (3): 445–60.
Smith, Sara. 2020. Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern
Threshold. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
Smith, Sherry L., and Brian Frehner. 2010. Indians & Energy: Exploitation and Oppor-
tunity in the American Southwest. School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar
Series. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: School for Advanced Research Press.
Smith, Thomas G. 2017. Stewart L. Udall: Steward of the Land. Albuquerque: University
of New Mexico Press.
Sneddon, Christopher. 2015. Concrete Revolution: Large Dams, Cold War Geopolitics, and
the US Bureau of Reclamation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Snipp, C. Matthew. 1986. “The Changing Political and Economic Status of the American
Indians: From Captive Nations to Internal Colonies.” American Journal of Economics
and Sociology 45, no. 2: 145–57.
Snipp, C. Matthew, ed. 1988. Public Policy Impacts on American Indian Economic Devel-
opment. Development Series 4. Albuquerque: Native American Studies, Institute for
Native American Development, University of New Mexico.
Spruhan, Paul. 2006. “A Legal History of Blood Quantum in Federal Indian Law to
1935.” South Dakota Law Review 51 (1): 1–50.
Spruhan, Paul. 2007. “The Origins, Current Status, and Future Prospects of Blood Quan-
tum as the Definition of Membership in the Navajo Nation.” Tribal Law Journal 8
(1): 1–17.
Strickland, Rennard. 1995. “Osage Oil: Mineral Law, Murder, Mayhem, and Manipula-
tion.” Natural Resources & Environment 10 (1): 39–43.
TallBear, Kim. 2013. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of
Genetic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Taylor, Graham D. 1980. The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administra-
tion of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934–45. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Taylor, Jonathan B., and Joseph P. Kalt. 2005. American Indians on Reservations: A Data-
book of Socioeconomic Change Between the 1990 and 2000 Censuses. Cambridge, Mass.:
 208 REFERENCES

Harvard Project on American Indian Economic Development, Malcolm Wiener

Center for Social Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.
Thomas, Wesley. 1997. “Navajo Cultural Constructions of Gender and Sexuality.” In
Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender Identity, Sexuality, and Spirituality, edited
by Sue-Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, 156–73. Urbana: University
of Illinois Press.
Thompson, Jonathan. 2017. “7 Things You Need to Know About Navajo Generating
Station’s 2019 Closure.” High Country News, February 14.
Thornton, Russell. 1990. American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History
Since 1492. Civilization of the American Indian Series 186. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005a. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Prince-
ton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. 2012. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decoloniza-
tion: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1 (1): 1–40.
Voyles, Traci Brynne. 2015. Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Wallerstein, Immanuel Maurice. 1974. The Modern World-System. Studies in Social Dis-
continuity. New York: Academic Press.
Weisiger, Marsha. 2011. Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country. Seattle: University of
Washington Press.
Weiss, Lawrence David. 1984. The Development of Capitalism in the Navajo Nation: A
Political-Economic History. Studies in Marxism 15. Minneapolis: MEP Publications.
White, Richard. 1983. The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change
Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Wildcat, Daniel R. 2013. “Introduction: Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples of the
USA.” In Climate Change and Indigenous Peoples in the United States, edited by Julie
Koppel Maldonado, Benedict Colombi, and Rajul Pandya, 1–7. New York: Springer.
Wilkins, David E. 1993. “Modernization, Colonialism, Dependency: How Appropriate
Are These Models for Providing an Explanation of North American Indian ‘Under-
development’?” Ethnic and Racial Studies 16 (3): 390–419.
Wilkins, David E. 2013. The Navajo Political Experience. Lanham, Md.: Rowman &
Littlefield.
Wilkinson, Charles F. 1999. Fire on the Plateau: Conflict and Endurance in the American
Southwest. Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
Wilkinson, Charles F. 2005. Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations. New York:
W. W. Norton.
Williams, Robert A., Jr. 2005. Like a Loaded Weapon: The Rehnquist Court, Indian Rights,
and the Legal History of Racism in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Wilson, Angela Cavender, and Michael Yellow Bird. 2005. For Indigenous Eyes Only: A
Decolonization Handbook. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: School of American Research.
 REFERENCES 209

Wolfe, Patrick. 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal
of Genocide Research 8, no. 4: 387–409.
Woolford, Andrew. 2015. This Benevolent Experiment: Indigenous Boarding Schools, Geno-
cide, and Redress in Canada and the United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press.
Worster, Donald. 1985. Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American
West. New York: Pantheon.
Yazzie, Melanie K. 2018. “Decolonizing Development in Diné Bikeyah: Resource
Extraction, Anti-capitalism, and Relational Futures.” Environment and Society 9 (1):
25–39.
Yazzie, Melanie K., and Cutcha Risling Baldy. 2018. “Introduction: Indigenous Peoples
and the Politics of Water.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 7 (1): 1–18.
Yellow Bird, Michael. 2012. For Indigenous Minds Only: A Decolonization Handbook. Santa
Fe, N.Mex.: School of American Research Press.
 INDEX

Ahkeah, Sam, 109 of coal in, 6, 175–76; political leaders in,

Albuquerque, New Mexico, 34, 43, 111, 178 6, 74, 80–81, 105–6; relationship between
alternatives, culture of, 90, 177–78, 181–82, regional utilities and, 6–8, 28, 137; and
190 reservation boundaries, 39, 44; state
alternative economies, 28, 90, 155–56, 171–72 making, 66, 72; and water rights, 80–81,
alternative energy: and debates on liveli- 120–22, 188
hood and revenue, 162–65; and Diné Arizona Power Authority, 74–75, 77
environmental activism, 28, 111, 155–56; Arizona Public Service (APS), 66–67, 108,
and Navajo Nation Council, 9, 90; 116, 137
mainstream Diné discourse of, 154–56; Arizona Republic, 53
and withdrawal from coal at Navajo Arizona State University, 179
Generating Station, 96 national politics Aspinall, Wayne, 80
related to, 64, 90, 191; and solar energy assimilation, 23–24, 49, 54
proposals at Black Mesa, 142–43, 163, 165
American Indian Education Assistance and Bates, LoRenzo, 63, 107, 120, 126
Self-Determination Act, 66, 84 Begay, Edison “Chip,” 132
American Indian Movement, 84 Begay, Elmer, 110
American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Begay, Mel, 108, 126–27
164 Begay, Nelson, 108, 125, 127
Anasazi peoples, 7 Begaye, Kelsey, 89
Apache peoples, 38, 40, 43 Begaye, Manuelito, 45
Arizona: Diné people and the State of, 9, 77, Begaye, Russell, 25, 108, 117, 120, 123–24, 126–27
105, 188; energy and water infrastructure Benally, Katherine, 106, 119, 127
in, 5, 13, 25, 71–74, 135; institutionalization Bennett, Alfred, 158
 212 INDEX

BHP Billiton, 87, 107, 109, 114, 116 Diné reservation, 12, 15, 46, 161, 182; and
Black Mesa: and Navajo coal economy, 33, economic dependency, 157; extractive,
66; environmental destruction in, 85, 159; 53, 61–65, 72–73; global, 17, 28, 61–63, 159;
mining in, 7, 60, 85, 92–93, 118; mural of, Keynesian welfare policies, 58; monop-
180; and Navajo-Hopi land dispute, 85, oly, 55; neoliberal, 62–63, 86, 102; and
157–59; resistance in, 9, 114, 156–57, 161, notions of work, 137–39; racial, 22, 38, 59;
172; solar and wind in, 163; as spiritual and reservations into spaces of poverty,
and historic site, 33; union chapters in, 59; and environmental health, 135; and
146; water issues in, 14, 114, 134–35 tribal sovereignty, 95, 171
Black Mesa Mine: closure of, 27, 92–93, carbon democracy, 6, 56, 63
114, 136, 154; and water, 112; and Kayenta carbon sovereignty: built on energy
community, 143; lease renewal, 141; and resources, 24, 26, 32, 58; and carbon
solar, 142; workers at, 114, 134, 145–46, 165 democracy, 6, 19; in colonial gover-
Black Mesa United, 142 nance structures, 18, 53, 91, 111, 168; and
Black Mesa Water Coalition, 111–12, 172–73 decolonization, 170; as energy history
boarding schools, 37, 44, 59, 67, 76 and tribal sovereignty, 6, 29, 46, 56, 61,
border towns, 33–34, 59, 66, 76, 164 83, 186; and climate change, 18, 64, 89,
Bosque Redondo, 38, 43–44, 46, 100, 156 155–56, 181; and Indigenous nationalism,
Boyden, John, 157 87; limitations of, 93, 96, 130, 153, 159; and
Bridge Canyon Dam, 74, 78, 81–83 oil, uranium, coal, wind, and solar, 65, 86;
Brown, Jerry, 81 as response to colonial capitalism, 12, 25,
Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA): building 59; through signing leases, 60, 124; and
of capital city by, 35, 103, 171; creation of water politics, 72–74
tribal council by, 52, 67; fairs sponsored carbon treatymaking, 25, 95–97, 99, 107, 130
by, 59; and the Navajo-Hopi land Carson, Kit, 28, 37, 156
dispute, 85, 158–59; newsletter from, 69; Central Arizona Project (CAP): and
and racism, 84; forced relocation by, activist demonstration, 174, 180; and dam
54; stationing on reservation, 65; work projects, 78; legislation on, 80–81; and
facilitated by, 33, 100 Navajo Generating Station, 71, 116, 136,
Bureau of Reclamation (BOR): and dam 152; and SRP, 73, 176; and water rights,
project, 75, 77, 82; and Navajo Nation 118, 121, 137
Council, 77–78, 95, 102; as shareholder in Changing Woman, 27, 179
Navajo Generating Station, 8, 116, 119, Christianization, 23–24, 42, 44, 59
136–37 citizenship, construction of, 41, 45
civil rights movement, 55, 78–79, 84
Cainimptewa, Everett, 134 Clean Air Act, 116, 135
California: as beneficiary, 135; and renewable climate change: and carbon sovereignty,
energy, 96, 114, 122–23, 153; utility com- 18–19, 29, 64, 186; and colonialism, 184;
panies in, 66, 70; and water rights, 74–75, and culture of alternatives, 182; Diné
80–81, 121, 188 concerns about, 27, 167–68, 173–74;
California Public Utilities Commission, 163 early understandings of, 8, 94, 99; and
capitalism, 9, 13–14; American, 22, 37, 48; greenhouse gasses, 8, 89–90, 155, 172; and
colonial, 12, 15, 17, 19, 95, 189–90; in Navajo Generating Station lease, 18;
 INDEX 213

legislation on, 125, 132; and workers and Colorado Compact: as colonization of
revenue, 9, 154, 162, 185; U.S. politics of, water, 72–73; and states’ water rights,
10, 23, 153; and water, 25, 168 80, 188; and Diné water rights, 74, 118,
coal-energy-water nexus, 13, 73, 189 120–22
coal-industrial complex, 175–76 Colorado River: as cost, 135; and activ-
coal workers, Diné: and desire to stay on ist demonstration, 174; and colonial
ancestral land, 142; and Black Mesa beachheads, 71–73; and dams, 74–75,
Mine, 134, 143; and Diné culture, 27; and 77–78, 80–83; leases and forfeiting rights
identification with coal, 66, 137, 152, 189; to, 6 , 9, 25, 77, 97, 106, 118–19, 121, 188;
and Kayenta Mine, 7, 115, 143; lost jobs, and movement to Phoenix and Tucson,
135–36, 185; and McKinley Mine, 94; 13, 74, 80, 116; and Navajo Generating
missing the perspective from, 15; support Station, 137; and SRP, 126; and farmers
for Navajo Generating Station lease, and ranchers, 35
8, 10, 104, 115–16, 150; and relationship Columbus, Christopher, 28
with environmentalists, 114, 140, 173; Cortez, Colorado, 34–35
and relationship with Navajo Nation Council of Energy Resource Tribes
Council, 113–14; and sovereignty and (CERT), 56, 85, 103
economic security, 20, 141, 144, 163; and cultural assimilation: and blood quantum,
their understanding of coal, 9, 16, 23, 26, 42; and federal policies, 47–49, 78, 99–
132–33, 186–87; and union membership, 100; and forced relocation, 54
7, 145–49, 151 Cultural survival, 153, 171–72, 182; coal as
Collier, John, 44, 48–52 supporting, 15, 27; and Diné bizaad, 26,
colonialism, 9; boundaries between Diné 76
and Hopi land, 157; and carbon sov- Curley, Lorenzo, 119
ereignty, 18–19, 25, 56; and capitalism,
15–17, 28, 95, 189–90; and climate change, Dawes Commission, 42–43, 47
184; Diné lands made into extractive decolonization: and liberation, 166; and
spaces through, 12, 32, 37, 58, 62, 91; and environmental activists, 167, 170, 177;
erasure of Indigenous names, 34; and from European empires, 56–57, 65;
forced relocation, 37, 51, 159; and gender Indigenous, through extractive indus-
constructs, 33, 37, 39, 58, 190; and land, 59, tries, 65; and Indigenous futures, 13;
65, 155; and lawmakers, 5, 66; and Navajo and sovereignty, 24, 27, 171; of the tribe’s
Nation governance, 12, 52–53, 67, 167; government, 31
neo-, 16, 24, 55, 102; and racial capitalism, Deloria, Vine, 159
38, 189; resources as concept of, 61, 64, dependency theory, 15–17, 63, 124, 157, 159, 162
135, 153; settler, 57, 99, 124; shape-shifting, Desert Rock, 92–94
14, 28, 35–36, 40, 186; as abandonment development, myth of, 15, 37
of Diné people, 29; and treaties, 39, 44, Dibé Nitsaa, 34–35
96–101, 129; and coal as a cheap energy Diné Bikéyah: displacement from, 38; as
source, 8; and work on reservation, 20, extractive space, 23, 66, 191; and family
49, 139 relationships, 45; and Spanish colonizers,
colonial beachheads, 13, 71–72, 74 20; traditional boundaries of, 32–34; and
Colorado, 34–35, 80–81, 121 tribal peoples, 40
 214 INDEX

Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Envi- General Allotment Act, 47–48, 99
ronment (Diné C.A.R.E), 88, 111, 150, Glen Canyon Dam, 77
159–60 Glittering World, 31, 33
Diné nationalism, 24–25, 78, 85, 87, 90, 103, Goldwater, Barry, 25, 28, 81
123 Gomez, Marcelino, 125
Diné Natural Resource Protection Act, 92 Gorman, Howard, 77–78, 83
Diné Power Authority, 87 Grand Canyon, 71, 74, 81- 82, 135
Dook’o’ooslííd, 34 Grants, New Mexico, 34
Durango, Colorado, 34–35 Grant, Ulysses S., 38, 42–43, 56
green economy, 90, 171, 175
emissions, carbon, 10, 72, 104, 155, 162 green jobs, Navajo, 9, 154, 164–65, 169
environmental activists and organizations: green new deal, 185
and alternative economies, 156, 162, Gunderson, Steven, 155
165–67, 170–72, 178; and greenhouse gas
emissions, 10, 89, 155, 187; and transition Hale, Albert, 88
away from coal, 27, 90, 93, 111, 142, 154, Hale, Jonathan, 127
163; and the moral economy of coal, 176– Harvey, Verna L., 156–57
77; and carbon sovereignty, 89; resent- Hayden, Carl, 74, 80
ment toward, 136, 140, 175; and social and Henderson, Al, 123
racial justice, 88; and sovereignty, 25, 155, Hohokam peoples, 71
170–71, 181; and dam campaigns, 81; and Hoover Dam, 77, 80
water politics, 179–80 Hopi peoples, 40, 157–58, 161
Environmental Protection Agency, Navajo, hózhó, 33, 180
88, 90 Human Rights Commission, 164
Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. Hwéeldi, 28, 32, 37, 51
(EPA), 112 hydroelectric power, 8, 77, 82–83, 94

Fall, Albert, 47 Ickes, Harold L., 48, 52

Farmington, New Mexico, 66–67, 116, 146 Indigenous environmental science, 72
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 47, Indigenous social movements, 56, 65, 84,
58, 98 166
Federal Power Commission, 74–75 Indian Mineral Leasing Development Act,
Flagstaff, Arizona, 34, 66, 164 35, 65, 100
Fort Defiance, Arizona, 70 Indian Peace Commission, 42–43
Fort Sumner, 37, 156 Indian Reorganization Act: and identity
Four Corners Generating Station, 67, 94, making, 41, 43, 45; and land, 99–100; and
107–8, 115–16 shape-shifting colonialism, 35–36; and
Fundamental Laws of the Diné, 89–90 tribal governance, 49–51, 58, 64, 78, 168
Indian Self-Determination and Educa-
Gallup, New Mexico, 66–67, 88, 94, 160 tional Assistance Act, 35, 84–85
gender: and colonialism, 58, 190; and labor, International Brotherhood of Electric
37, 59, 70, 142, 190; and leadership, 39; Workers, 145
and the military, 67; violence, 47 International Monetary Fund, 55, 62
 INDEX 215

Jim, Rex Lee, 139 Nader, Ralph, 162

Johnson, Natasha, 105 Nailor, Gerald, Sr., 35–36, 39
Johns, Wahleah, 165 Naize, Johnny, 110–12, 114, 117–20, 126–27
Just Transition Coalition, 163 Nakai, Raymond, 67–68, 79
National Renewable Energy Laboratory,
Kayenta, Arizona: and Navajo Mine, 107; 122–23
non-coal community in, 113, 141; oppor- N-Aquifer, 13, 134–35
tunities for jobs in, 94, 139, 143, 144 Navajo Business Opportunity Act, 117
Kayenta Mine: closure of, 165, 183, 185; as Navajo-Hopi land dispute, 54, 85, 106, 157–
economic pillar, 10; and Navajo Gener- 58, 161
ating Station, 7, 13, 116; and revenue, 121, Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act, 85, 87, 158
126; union at, 145–50; workers from, 7, Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Act, 54, 57–59, 66
112, 115, 134, 140, 143, 147 Navajo Mine, 67, 94–95, 107, 114–16, 134, 145
Kennedy, John. F., 67–68 Navajo Nation Code, 31, 50, 68, 89, 102, 145
Kluckhohn, Clyde, 50 Navajo Nation’s Office of Legislative Coun-
Kyl, Jon, 28, 105–6 sel, 111
Navajo Nation Department for Self Reli-
labor rights, 97, 121–22, 124, 144–45, 150–51 ance, 139
Lake Mead, 184 Navajo Preference in Employment Act, 101
Leighton, Dorothea, 50 Navajo Times, 78–79; and Desert Rock, 93;
Little Colorado River, 106, 151 and Marshall Tome, 69; and resistance
Little, Norman, 75, 82–83, 94, 130 to Peabody Coal, 156–57; and worker
livestock reduction, 21, 46, 50–52, 63, 78 layoffs, 134
Los Angeles, California, 16, 24, 100 Navajo Transitional Energy Company, 123,
Los Angeles Department of Water and 154–55
Power, 96, 102, 122–23, 137, 153 Navajo Treaty of 1868: and citizenship, 41, 45;
Los Vegas, Nevada, 24, 100 as colonial contract, 100; and creation of
Lovejoy, Lynda, 149–50 the Navajo Indian Reservation, 40, 44,
47, 84, 103; and forced removal, 37, 51; and
MacDonald, Peter, 25, 84–85, 87, 103, 160 mural, 36; and Sherman, William, 43
Major Crimes Act, 43, 47, 98 New Deal, 23, 35, 48
Marble Canyon Dam, 74–78, 80, 82–83 Nevada, 15, 66, 72, 113, 121, 134
Marx, Karl, 21–22, 28, 38, 46, 160, 166 Nevada Electric, 96, 102, 137
McCain, John, 105–6 New Mexico: and Diné Bikéyah, 34, 138;
McCombe, Leonard, 50 and coal economy, 15, 66–67, 93–94, 116;
McKinley Mine, 67, 94 and forced walk to Bosque Redondo,
Merriam Report, 48 38; and reservation, 39, 44–45, 47, 87; and
Mineral Leasing Act, 35, 47, 64, 100 water, 71–72
Mohave Generating Station, 113, 134–37, Nkrumah, Kwame, 24, 55–56
163–64
moral economy, 129, 144, 163, 176, 182 Obama, Barack, 90, 163, 174
murals, 24, 27–28, 35–39, 177–81 Office of Indian Affairs, 44, 47–49, 64
Myer, Dillion S., 54 Oklahoma, 38, 46
 216 INDEX

origin story, Diné, 33–34 closure, 150–53, 184–85; and first lease
Osage peoples, 46 with Navajo Generating Station, 84;
and Navajo Generating Station lease
Page, Arizona, 120, 145 renewal, 6–8, 95–98, 101–4, 119, 124; and
Paragon Ranch, 87 secret negotiations, 107, 112, 129; and
Peabody Coal: and mining on Black Mesa, territorial claims, 131; and water rights,
66, 85, 134, 136, 156–57; and opposition to, 118, 120–22
161, 175; and undervaluing coal, 86–67; Salt River Valley, 71, 77, 188
and unions, 146–47, 149, 151; and water, Salt River Valley Users’ Association, 73
13, 70, 114; and workers, 66, 110, 142–43 San Juan River, 88
Pete, Leonard, 127 Santa Fe, New Mexico, 160
Phelps, Walter, 118 Second Wounded Knee, 65
Phoenix, Arizona: and activist demonstra- sheep, 51, 137–39, 148, 159, 180
tion, 174; and CAP, 71, 80–81, 116, 136; as Shelly, Ben: and end of Navajo Green Jobs,
colonial beachhead, 13, 74, 126, 179; and 165; and Navajo Generating Station
economic benefits, 24, 112; and energy lease, 118; and secret negotiations, 107;
and water infrastructure, 12, 176; and and support of “sustainable” energy, 90,
growth, 100, 188 154–55; and support from union, 150; and
Piñon, Arizona, 173 water rights, 105, 121
Pittsburgh Mining Company, 67 Sherman, William, 38, 43
Piute peoples, 40 Shiprock, Arizona, 47, 82, 103
Pollack, Stanley, 88, 126 Shirley, Joe, Jr., 92, 95, 150
Power Shift, 173 Sierra Club, 81, 135, 163
Public Service Company of New Mexico, Sisnaajíní, 34–35
116 Sithe Global, 89
Pueblo peoples, 7, 40 Skeet, Wilson, 157
Southern California Edison, 70, 134–36,
racializing Indigenous people, 21, 41–42, 153, 163
45–46 Standard Oil, 60
Reagan, Ronald, 86
Redhouse, John, 78 T’áá hwó’ ají t’éego: and coal workers, 26–27,
relocation, forced, 54, 37, 51, 159 137, 141 153; as common phrase, 138; and
resources: as colonial concept, 60–61, 63–64, environmentalists, 27–28, 171; in tribal
72; as curse, 62–63, 94; and economies, institutions, 139, 152, 167; and wage labor,
62–65, 90–91; and resource nationalism, 144, 147, 149, 151
122–23, 166 Teapot Dome scandal, 47–48
Rio Puerco, 86 Todacheene, Carl, 82–83
Roosevelt Dam, 73 tóh bi iina, 178–79
Roosevelt, Theodore, 73 Tome, Marshall, 69
toxic waste, 135, 139–40
Salt River Project (SRP): and APS, 66; Trail of Broken Treaties, 65, 84
acquirement of shares, 123; and CAP, Trail of Tears, 84, 97
73, 176; and Navajo Generating Station Truman, Harry S., 54–55
 INDEX 217

Trump, Donald, 185 water, cultural relationships with, 71

tsilyéél, 67 water rights: amendments to lease for, 117–
Tsoodził, 34 26, 150–51; between Arizona and Cal-
Tsosie, Harrison, 107–8, 122–23, 129–30 ifornia, 75; and carbon sovereignty, 25,
Tsosie, Leonard, 117, 125–27, 164 83; colonial notion of, 43, 72; and federal
Tucson, Arizona, 12–13, 24, 80, 136 versus state authority, 77; and mural, 180;
Tucson Electric Power, 102, 137 and the State of Arizona, 105–6; and
Tulley, Earl, 150, 160 shape-shifting colonialism, 9, 35, 73–74,
97; in the Navajo Nation, 88
Udall, Morris, 82 West Virginia, 140
Udall, Stewart, 74, 78, 80–82, 88, 121 Window Rock, 7; and political power, 51–52,
Union of Operating Engineers, 145 67, 88, 107; and coal workers, 115–16, 144,
United Mine Workers of America, 7, 90, 150, 152; council chambers in, 35–36, 102,
145, 147, 149–52 104–5, 111, 113, 164; and tribal governance,
United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel 160; as reservation capital, 49, 68–70, 103,
on Climate Change, 183 171; youth summit in, 172
United Nuclear Corporation, 86 Window Rock Community Center, 68–69
United States Army, 38–39, 41 Witherspoon, Dwight, 117–20, 125–27
uranium mining: banning of, 92; illnesses Woods, Sam, 113, 123
from, 86, 88–89, 140, 159; impacts on World Bank, 55, 62
the land from, 10, 89; and reservation Wounded Knee, 97
economies, 19, 63–65, 100, 169, 190; as Wyoming, 121
precursor to coal industry, 60, 70, 139–
40; and uranium boom, 34 X., Malcolm, 78–79
Utah, 80, 106, 121, 125
Ute peoples, 34, 40 Yazzie, Herb, 139
youth, 132–33, 172, 181–82
veterans, Diné, 67, 70, 80, 103, 133
Zah, Peterson, 85, 87–88, 160
Water is Life, 178–80 Zuni peoples, 40
water contamination and depletion, 70, 86
 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrew Curley is a member of the Navajo Nation and an assistant professor

in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of
Arizona. He has studied the social, cultural, and political implications of coal
mining on the Navajo Nation. His current research is on the environmental
history of water diversions on the Colorado River and the impact of colonial
infrastructures on tribal nations.
CARBON SOVEREIGNTY
MAP 1 . Current Navajo Reservation boundaries.
MAP 2 . Traditional Diné territory.