Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation presents an unexpected story of the relationship between coal and the Navajo Nation. There are perhaps two dominant tropes regarding extractive industries and indigenous peoples. One dominant trope of Indigenous peoples and extractive industries might be something like this: Indigenous people are abjectly subjected to extractive violence by colonial powers, and Indigenous peoples are inherently oppositional to extractive industries. This trope has plenty of truth to it. On the other hand, another dominant, but perhaps more neoliberal, trope might be that Diné peoples supported the coal industry because of financial opportunities and prospects of deepening the Navajo Nation’s incorporation into “modernity” and capitalist status quo. In other words, coal would bring development.

However, Curley aims to bring nuance to our understandings of the relationship between coal and the Navajo Nation. Curley underscores that neither of these narratives presented above nor the actual political projects around coal expansion and energy transition away from coal centered Indigenous peoples’ aims and perspectives. This book lays out the many reasons that the Navajo Nation and many Diné peoples pushed for the continuation of coal mining while many also fought for its end.

Throughout the book, we learn of the tumultuous colonial and political context in which the coal industry arises, is maintained, and ultimately dismantled on Diné lands. Colonialism, in its many shapes, stripped Diné peoples of their lands and various modes of connection and relations to land, and importantly leaving reallocated land devalued in many ways. It is in this context that tribal sovereignty and self-determination asserted and negotiated through carbon takes its shape. As Curley poignantly states, for the Navajo Nation and many Diné coal workers, coal “was a livelihood upon which sovereignty, self-determination, and even the continuation of culture rested” (11).

Curley describes carbon sovereignty as a form of sovereignty that is “shaped by colonial limitations and entanglements” (25) and “built on the expansion of energy resources”(24). Out of a political-economic landscape consistently fraught by colonialism in its many forms and over various temporal scales, the Navajo Nation negotiated and etched out this mode of sovereignty. I am reminded of how Black studies scholar, Tina Campt (2017), describes “reassemble in dispossession”. Campt states that this “is a quotidian practice through which the dispossessed reconfigure their status as subjects within a field of limited and often compromised resources”(60). In her book, Campt discusses modes of refusal and fugitivity as these quiet moments of reassemble in dispossession within an anti-Black social order that may be futile but are enacted for the sake of dignity and futurity for subjugated peoples. In the examples that Campt provides, reassemblage in dispossession is often noted at the individual and community scale, and often in opposition to the state by subjects of the colonial state. However, an intervention of the notion of carbon sovereignty is that it not only makes way for us to understand agency within dominating systems but also it brings to light the ways the agency is asserted and “how survival is made possible” through various scales of Indigenous social and political life. There are negotiations on how to maintain Diné life and culture in the practice of the Navajo Nation politically supporting coal leases, in Diné coal workers being coal workers, and even in Diné youth and environmentalists arguing for energy transition. It seems to me that the opposition is always to losing Diné culture and lifeways. It is about navigating the maintenance of sovereignty, self-determination, and culture. At moments in tribal, community, and individual decision making that meant supporting the coal industry on Diné lands in ways that were mediated by the tribal council. In this way, carbon sovereignty stresses the, often louder, political actions in reassemblage in dispossession taking place on the ground, particularly in communities with resources and minerals sought for extraction.

Carbon Sovereignty makes several interventions in traditional environmental and climate justice scholarship. First, this book stresses the importance of historicizing the present-day landscape of environmental injustice. In chapter one, Curley explains that colonialism is a shapeshifter, morphing with various policies, structures, and agendas over time, all the while still working to erase native cultures and take indigenous sovereignty. This way of framing colonialism helps us to understand how the present landscape of environmental injustice was always in the making within the American colonial system. Moreover, it grounds the process to specific policies and actors delineated in the chapter, rather than dismissing it as a mythical “settler colonialism” juggernaut, as Curley explains. Understanding colonialism morphing its shape over time while maintaining its anti-Indigenous ends harkens to the many fronts of the afterlife of slavery. This underscores the ways the passage of time has not necessitated movement away from the anti-Black and anti-Indigenous underpinning of our political and economic systems. Carbon sovereignty, also, highlights the ways facing the impacts of colonialism’s many forms and making survival possible have sedimented into and involved both the human and more than human realms.

Another important intervention in environmental and climate justice centers on Curley’s nuanced discussion of agency. Activism and litigation are major themes in environmental and climate justice literature. This, along with citizen science, are the primary thrusts of agency in this discourse. However, what is important about Curley’s discussion of carbon sovereignty and energy transition is the ways he foregrounds what is important to Diné peoples, including both the coal workers as well as environmentalists. Curley explains that many coal workers he interviewed in this work saw coal as a means to maintain culture, such as providing Diné language lessons for their children and having a livelihood that permitted them to stay within Diné lands. Similarly, in chapter five, we learn about the youth and environmental activists who wanted to reinvigorate cultural practices in transitioning away from coal alongside broader climate change goals. These facets contrast with the oft-told story of abjection and annihilated cultures and provide examples of the many routes Indigenous communities have long laid out to maintain sovereignty and cultural practices eroded within settler colonial states and “struggle to make visions of the future a reality” (6).

This text also has lasting impacts on how we think of repair and energy transition. In the book, we learn that the transition from coal, as with the transition to coal, was not a decision made out of prioritizing the goals and good of indigenous peoples. Rather, it was a political economic convenience. However, Curley reminds us that even transition for environmental reasons, i.e. climate change still often does not prioritize indigenous wellbeing, begging the question of repair for whom? (Bruno et al. 2023). In this way, energy transition, in its many iterations, has been a continuation of colonial violence. Whose survivability is prioritized in colonial and capitalist ecological repair? It calls to mind the many versions of eco-gentrification displacing and erasing marginalized communities in the name of environmentalism. However, the case of energy transition and the Navajo Nation that Curley presents stresses the historical precedence and perpetuation of sidelining Indigenous communities. It further emphasizes the importance of positioning present-day environmental injustice historically.

Overall, in this book, Curley lays the groundwork of how we can conceive of the ways marginalized populations navigate and negotiate life in the meanwhile of new world-building. This book causes one to take seriously what living, hoping, and caring for community looks like as we make our way to a world with decolonization, abolition, and liberation. What does it look like to exist and ensure continued existence in this meanwhile?  Coal may not have been the end goal for many of the Diné peoples that Curley worked with in this project, certainly not coal to uphold a settler colonial state. However, the primary interest was staying on ancestral lands with a livelihood that allows one to support family and community, and bring the capability to maintain, create, and nourish cultural traditions. Understanding how survival is made possible and how marginalized communities make way for futures that were never meant to be within this colonial, racial capitalist world is nuanced work that requires historicizing, in-depth political economic analysis, and attunement to on-the-ground agency and livingness. This is what Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation accomplishes.

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References

Bruno, T., Curley, A., Gergan, M. D., & Smith, S. (2023). The work of repair: land, relation, and pedagogy. cultural geographies, 14744740231203713

Campt, T. (2017). Listening to images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Tianna Bruno is an assistant professor in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the intersection of Black geographies, critical environmental justice, political ecology, and critical physical geography. Through her work, she aims to foreground Black life, sense of place, and relationships to the environment within spaces of present-day environmental injustice. Her research also highlights the mutual experiences of degradation and survival between subaltern communities and their surrounding ecologies through the integration of Black geographies and critical physical geography, specifically analyzing trees. This research is currently focused on Texas, and will soon expand to various locations across the Black diaspora. Tianna’s previous work broadly related to environmental justice has been published in Local Environment, Professional Geographer, and the Annals of the American Association of Geography, and a book project currently underway.