T

he challenge for this book is to say whether carbon sovereignty is something that exists beyond coal. Maybe it is not to look at other resource scholars or resource geographies, as important as it is, to answer this question, but to think about the idea of “desirable futures” As Smith and others write elsewhere, or as Bruno offers in her response, the work of Tina Campt (2017); the idea to “reassemble in dispossession” seems fitting here and operative here. It is something we can use to interpret what is left behind in the wake of a coal economy: who and what are doing the reassembling and what shape, form, and set of practices does it represent?

In her response, Dolly Kikon writes that she had difficulty concluding her book. But her own conclusion in Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics & Militarization in Northern India is instructive with where to go in our understanding of carbon resources, carbon sovereignty, or the future of hydrocarbons. In my response to the generous reviews, I want to pick up Kikon’s idea of “fantasy” to think about the contestation over the future, and where ideas like carbon sovereignty that are informed by history help us to anticipate new terrains of struggle (2022).

As Bruno points out, I think through colonial-capitalism as a shapeshifter, and here I’m drawing on the work of LaDuke and Cowen (2020), when deploying Anishinaabe concepts of the Wiindigo to understand the predatory nature of colonial-capitalism on Indigenous peoples in different geographical/historical contexts.

Jennifer Baka did an excellent job summarizing the main points of the book. I appreciate her contribution to think through where my work sits in a broader conversation of resource and energy geography, something Baka and I share (2020). In fact, we talked about the similarities of our two places, Pennsylvania and Arizona and the politics of resources we found in our communities. We can make comparison, but as she found in the text, I also argue that we need to think about sites of extraction in their specific and histories, to resist the need to generalize something that might be unique to the place. As both Baka and I know, there are important historical factors that shaped coal in Arizona and natural gas in Pennsylvania that deserve focus and attention. I am glad she found my writing on a failed National Science Foundation proposal useful; it is funny because I almost didn’t include it. Nobody likes to write about things that didn’t succeed, and I didn’t want to sound whiny, but I felt it helped the reader understand why I wasn’t doing certain things common in energy geographies that they might expect, to focus on the technical aspects of the resources, or the political economy of energy production alone and how it generates new networks and space.

This brings me to Clint Carroll’s response. I appreciate his focus on my ethnographic approach and the kind of insights this methodology allowed. I was inspired by his own work in the setup of my research. At the conclusion of Carroll’s book, and responding to critiques of tribal sovereignty, Carroll writes that we need more ethnographies and less polemics (2015). I hoped that my study could articulate sovereignty in practice and not in idealization. We hear tribal leaders travel to colonial capital cities, e.g., Phoenix, Santa Fe, and Denver and proclaim we are sovereign, yet when it comes to everyday governing practices, we self-impose federal and state limitations on said sovereignty. This is part of the point of the text, to demonstrate instances or where and how it happens. Carroll asks about the role of the state in a self-determination future? In a forum at the Navajo Studies conference last year, Melanie Yazzie asked me something similar, about what I meant when I wrote we need to invest in a politics of decolonization. To me, it’s both vague and simple. The state as is created out of the IRA of 1934 inherits real limitations, but it also can be the basis of independent regime in a hypothetical decolonial future. In the international state system, a governing authority is requisite for recognition, and I imagine our tribal government fulfilling such a role if the U.S. would ever allow it. How that is practiced and implemented has yet to be worked out, and that’s the vague part of my answer. I’m still thinking through it.

Beth Rose Middleton Manning and Sara Smith highlight my use of temporal bending as ways to understand how we think about the past and the future. Smith points out that these are theoretical ideas and something I could foreground more in the text. I also liked Middleton-Manning’s work on land tenure and dams among tribes in California. Her book Upstream was on my shelf as I was writing this book and it helped me think through contemporary legal-political problems tribes face, especially in controlling their lands and resources.

What I was trying to do here was ground temporal considerations in actions related to energy transition. In this case, both opponents and proponents of coal deployed history and the future in political ways. What was interesting for me was the range of histories or futures used to shape our actions, is it “deep time” or geological scale, or in the language of crisis and demand immediate action. In other words, time shapes ideology, and the particulars of the political project contain their own language of time at different scales. As Smith writes in the language of desire, and Kikon in fantasy, ideas of the future are important for decolonial work, even in instances where oil in your kitchen is desired. Importantly for me, it is time that makes coal leases like modern day treaties. In Native Studies we often argue treaties infer a power relation between two sovereigns, and that’s where some of our justifications for sovereignty emerge. But in this case, treaties contain restrictions and parameters in time, often at such a distance as to make the permanent; so what does it mean for the tribe to agree to reservation boundaries forever in 1868 and a 75 year coal contract in 1968? How are these actions more similar than different. This was what I was trying to understand when thinking about time.

All this is to say I appreciate the careful comments and deep readings the reviewers provided.

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References

Baka, Jennifer, and Saumya Vaishnava. 2020. “The Evolving Borderland of Energy Geographies.” Geography Compass 14.7

Carroll, Clint. 2015. Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Campt, T. 2017. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Kikon, Dolly. 2019. Living with Oil and Coal: Resource Politics and Militarization in Northeast India. Seattle: University of Washington Press.

LaDuke, Winona, Deborah Cowen. 2020. “Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure” in South Atlantic Quarterly 1 April; 119 (2): 243–268.

Middleton, Beth Rose. 2018. Upstream: Trust Lands and Power on the Feather River. Tucson: The University of Arizona Press.

Andrew Curley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His research interests include Indigenous incorporation into colonial-capitalism, or forms of exploitation linked to resource extraction and underdevelopment.