G
eographer Andrew Curley’s masterful text, “Carbon Sovereignty” examines the development and decline of the coal economy in Navajo Nation, challenging previous theories that do not address the complexity of coal within Navajo Nation, nor the international, national, regional, and local temporal and spatial contexts in which the coal economy, Navajo Nation governance, and 20th century enactments of Navajo sovereignty emerged. Curley offers key interventions and definitions, including of the terms carbon sovereignty, carbon treaties, temporal bending, and moral economy of coal. This book both resonated with and impacted my thinking about Indigenous environmental policy and sovereignty in the contexts of colonial occupation and climatic change.
Curley asserts that colonial relations and carbon relations must be thought together. Colonialism is the shape-shifter—it may be a soldier, a legal document, a memo between a coal company and the BIA, or a water litigation proceeding. The violence of colonial relations, including removals, forced boundaries to advance extraction agreements, and threats of termination, created the conditions for carbon relations, in which external entities like the state and federal government and private companies sought coal on Navajo Nation, and the Nation asserted its territoriality, self-determination, and agency through a material (coal) that was coveted by these entities.
Carbon sovereignty, then, is an assertion of agency, an expression of resource nationalism in response to colonial violence and impositions on lifeways and place. Curley’s conceptualizations of carbon sovereignty and a moral economy of coal defy simplistic understandings of Navajo participation in the carbon economy--- he writes, “…the tribal council wasn’t deluded or tricked into signing coal leases. Dine leaders made pragmatic concessions to support one form of energy development over another in the interest of self-determination.” “Carbon sovereignty” is an interpretation and exercise of tribal sovereignty that is based on the extraction and marketing of tribal resources, in order to increase the Tribe’s ability to self-govern and to support citizens in a racialized, neocolonial political-economic system pressing on the Tribe’s boundaries and citizens.
Carbon sovereignty is in tension with “carbon treatymaking,” in which negotiations over coal take place on an uneven ground of unequal power relations. The key example of “carbon treatymaking” regards the 2013 renewal of the Navajo Generating Station lease. This mirrored the process of treatymaking 150 years prior, in that tribes were faced with an “illusion of choice,” by federal, state, and private actors, which resulted in tribal dispossession. Like coal leases, treaties are supposed to be equally negotiated agreements, but they were actually strategies of political and economic dispossession by state and private actors. The state quasi-public utility Salt River Project was the power broker, extending its arm into Navajo Nation.
Curley also speaks of “temporal bending” in reference to the ways in which time and politics change but flawed agreements remain the same due to the long duration of leases, and the reproduction of uneven power relations that establish the conditions of possibility for negotiation. As he describes--- “the world dramatically changed between 1969 and 2019, but the coal contract doesn’t care about this” (136)—reminds me of FERC licenses allowing dams to operate without fish passage, and old mining claims allowing extraction and no clean-up when lands around them are set aside for conservation. Another type of ‘temporal bending’ is the assertion of new understandings of development as decolonial and based in self-determination, from Dine activists. These activists called for “restoring an original sense of sovereignty” (171) based in subsistence and disengagement from capitalism, aiming to build Dine futurities without coal.
The moral economy of coal is perhaps the most moving aspect of the text for me. Following a series of interviews with Dine coal workers who support the coal economy on Navajo Nation, Curley shows the ways in which the job security and living wages provided by the coal economy enabled workers to fulfill Dine traditional values of hard work and caring for one’s family. Coal workers were making a living from the land in a way that partially mirrored traditional ways of living from the land. Curley’s ethnography of the coal economy at Navajo Nation shows the diversity, complexity, and density (to draw on Dena’ina scholar Prof Jessica Bissett Perea) of Dine peoples engaging with coal. A different moral economy of coal from Dine environmentalists offers a vision of returning to traditional values and disengaging from colonial capitalism in its coal and other manifestations.
Curley’s broad and insider perspective is attentive to the breadth and depth of Dine concerns—to preserve language, culture, and lifeways, protect water and land, and live in Dine homelands (185). He eschews simplicity—whether by activists or councilmembers. He advocates for nuanced understandings of the praxis of sovereignty—as working to navigate colonial capitalism through resource extraction, or developing a culture of alternatives committed to decolonization and delinking from colonial capitalism. He advances understanding of moral economies by drawing on Diné concepts and their deployment by different actors in different contexts. He recognizes the ways in which the solidity, stability, and futurity promised by carbon sovereignty can de-materialize as political economic conditions change globally— leaving the Nation bereft, and pitting environmentalists and ratepayers against tribal members.
Curley offers a method for approaching understanding of tribal governance in spatial, temporal, and cultural context, placing agency and the forces that shape and limit it at the center of the analysis. The conclusions on coal and development are evolving as the process of moving away from a coal economy continues slowly (and painfully for coal-dependent families and governments). The discussion of what ‘alternatives’ look like is also ongoing. What I learn from Curley is a host of ways to approach understanding Indigenous resource governance—as a dynamic intersection of deeply-held cultural values, political-economic context at multiple spatial and temporal scales, and listening to different citizens and their positionalities (how they understand themselves and their assertions). The power of this text is both in nuanced understanding of Navajo coal economies, as well as in a method to build integrative understanding of Indigenous resource governance in the contexts of colonial capitalism and climate change.
Dr. Beth Rose Middleton (Afro-Caribbean, Eastern European) is a Professor of Native American Studies at UC Davis. Beth Rose’s research centers on environmental policy, cultural site protection, and climate adaptation with Native nations and communities. Beth Rose received her BA in Nature and Culture from UC Davis, and her Ph.D. in Environmental Science, Policy, and Management from UC Berkeley. She has published multiple articles and book chapters and two books with University of Arizona Press, Trust in the Land: New Directions in Tribal Conservation (2011), and Upstream: Trust Lands and Power on the Feather River (2018).
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