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n critical Indigenous studies, we treat the word “sovereignty” with equal amounts of reverence and apprehension. For Indigenous ethnographers, specifically those of us who study governance within Native North America, “sovereignty” is a familiar utterance that represents tribal political status, clout, and a modicum of control over our nations’ present circumstances and desired futures. We also know that Indigenous sovereignty in settler colonial contexts often comes with tradeoffs and that it’s never complete. Andrew Curley’s Carbon Sovereignty, resides in this familiar intellectual space, yet makes some important, far-reaching contributions.

On its own, the title may not signal his position, but readers quickly understand that the book is about the expression of the Navajo Nation’s sovereignty through coal development—a specific political articulation that was built upon and sustained by an extractive and exploitative economy. The path to carbon sovereignty was deliberate and calculated and involved numerous players, settler and Indigenous alike, but this path was far from inevitable. Carbon sovereignty is a colonial construction with very real manifestations for Diné people’s lives and futures. And yet, Curley never loses sight of the agency of Diné people in this approach. Throughout the book, he presents the nuances of Diné experiences with coal development, highlighting the atrocities and absurdities of colonial capitalist policies and practices, as well as the adeptness of Diné people as they navigate this political-economic terrain that has worked to “make subsistence life impossible,” to use Curley’s phrasing (46).

That some Diné politicians celebrated and enabled this economic form of sovereignty to improve the conditions of reservation communities is skillfully chronicled by Curley; however, his critique of the larger structural/colonial development politics is striking. Perhaps the book’s most satisfying contribution is its historicization of the United States’ post-WWII thrust into the so-called underdeveloped nations of the world as originating in its very own “domestic” Indian policy—specifically, the mid-nineteenth century treaties that paved the way for the exploitation of Indigenous resources, like coal. As such, Curley positions the reservation as “a global place” (56) and asserts that the US development ideology and practices that facilitated resource extraction on other sovereign territories began in 1868, not 1948. In this way, Curley rejects the placement of North American Native Nations like the Navajo within normative development studies timelines and argues that Diné people have been subjected to these rationalized forms of violence—including and especially the corporatization of the tribal government in the 1930s that facilitated mineral leases on the reservation—long before “big-D” development began.

Carbon Sovereignty pushes us to rethink American Indian economic development narratives as much as it cares about the complex decisions and livelihoods that are entwined with extractive economies in reservation spaces. While Curley is adamantly against the inevitability of extraction on the Navajo Reservation, he’s also relationally guided in his analysis of coal workers and Navajo Nation government officials. This makes for quite an engaging work. As the son of a former Navajo Nation council member, Curley’s recounting of the ins and outs of tribal governance as it unfolds in the everyday is as amusing as it is enlightening. Further, Curley’s treatment of pro-coal sentiments on the reservation is honest and thoughtful. For many Diné people, coal has served as a material way to maintain a connection to homelands, community, and culture. Even while coal’s tradeoffs for the Navajo Nation have been significant, Curley seeks to counter narratives that pin the reservation community as merely a target of colonial/capitalist imposition, extraction, and exploitation. Framing Navajo energy development as solely one of dependency, Curley argues, overwrites Diné histories that tell a different story of agency and survivance. His alternate telling—informed by in-depth interviews with coal workers themselves—seeks to better “recognize” the Diné people who are otherwise difficult to locate in dependency theories.

Indigenous ethnographies like this one play an important role in our field. Our methodological and community commitments lead us to face often messy and contradictory social phenomena that belie a simple analysis. This doesn’t mean we can’t ultimately write against the very forces, policies, and structures that have led to and that serve to sustain present conditions. But our observations of what people say, the context in which they say it, and what they do—all from a position of being in relation to and in community with the actors themselves—force us to reckon with the relational intimacies of our worlds that are contested and constantly under construction for what futures our nations may collectively build.

Curley’s ethnography extends beyond the internal community and government spaces to better understand how the Navajo Nation interfaces with external polities, like the State of Arizona. In his analysis of the 2013 Navajo Generating Station lease renewal, Curley pinpoints the continuity of colonial-capitalist practices up to the present day in the form of what he terms “carbon treatymaking.” Although congress ended formal treatymaking between the US and Indigenous nations in 1871, Curley identifies the contemporary US legal practice of negotiating land leases and water settlements with tribes as analogous to the treatymaking era—both entail the negotiation of concessions under conditions of unequal power relations. Thus, carbon sovereignty and carbon treatymaking are both based on arrested notions of self-determination, even if they represent the flipside of each other—carbon treatymaking is about setting limits, and carbon sovereignty’s foundation is the facilitation of extractive and exploitative actions toward the land and the people.

The question that arises for me here has to do with the function and role of the Navajo state, with which Curley is intimately familiar, but about which he spends little time discussing its utility and form in a decolonial future. If the US Indian Reorganization Era of the 1930s has structured the Navajo government to operate as a corporate lease-facilitating entity, and if coal development has come to define Diné expressions of sovereignty, then where does the tribal state fit in more fully self-determined Diné visions? Curley’s discussion of such visions comes later in the book with his interviews of Diné climate activists, and yet the thread of everyday governance he has maintained up to that point somehow gets lost. I intend this more as a point of inquiry in the spirit of dialogue and shared scholarly interests than a critique.

Overall, Curley is deeply invested in the flourishing of Diné people, Diné sovereignty, and the politics of decolonization. And while these multifaceted and subjective arenas are not always in perfect alignment, Curley’s study leaves us with a clearer picture of what the future holds. Just as the political power represented by carbon sovereignty was never entirely controlled by colonial actors, Curley shows how new forms of political agency are pressuring the Navajo Nation elected leadership and the particular version of tribal sovereignty that was based in coal extraction and energy development. Curley’s interviews with Diné activists and artists illuminates their approach to energy transition rooted in the resurgence of Diné notions of life, balance, and relationality with the land. With recent mine and plant closures signaling the beginning of the end of the Navajo coal economy, Diné youth are envisioning and enacting alternatives, revealing, as Curley writes, “the clear limitations of a sovereignty imagined and understood through carbon” (153).

Clint Carroll is an Associate Professor in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder. He received his doctorate from the University of California Berkeley in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, and his bachelor’s degree from the University of Arizona in Anthropology and American Indian Studies. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, he works at the intersections of Indigenous studies, anthropology, and political ecology. His first book, Roots of Our Renewal: Ethnobotany and Cherokee Environmental Governance (2015, University of Minnesota Press), explores how tribal natural resource managers navigate the material and structural conditions of settler colonialism, and how recent efforts in cultural revitalization inform such practices through traditional Cherokee governance and local environmental knowledge. He currently co-edits the Cambridge University Press series, Elements in Indigenous Environmental Research. He also serves on the editorial boards for Cultural Anthropology and Environment and Society.