T

he Navajo Nation and its surroundings are Diné Bikéyah – a place existing in relation to four sacred mountains and a temporality encompassing both time immemorial and the future. The Navajo Nation is also a complexly negotiated sovereign space made in relation to settler governance, resource deals, and historically-contingent events. We might understand coal in the Navajo Nation as one case study through which to grapple with coal, climate change, labor, and energy transition – but – we might also reverse this colonial mindset and instead understand that the history and future of the settler state and its environmentally catastrophic cities are unimaginable and unintelligible without the concepts of carbon sovereignty, colonialism as shape-shifter, and temporal bending that emerge from this book.

Andrew Curley’s Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation accomplishes the often-impossible feat of being both deeply grounded in the Navajo Nation through careful ethnography, archival work, and lived experience, but also transcendent in its analysis and theoretical contributions to the discipline of geography. Curley makes a compelling argument for what he terms “carbon sovereignty” – the material ways that coal became a terrain of contestation in the Navajo Nation’s practices of tribal sovereignty. Carbon sovereignty is a set of contingent negotiations that maintain sovereignty in relation to settler colonialism even as the conditions make certain things impossible.

Curley beautifully historicizes coal in the history of Diné land and life, and writes that “we must think about Indigenous futures in the 21^st century as a commitment to a politics of decolonization…the Diné people were brought into the fold of colonial capitalism through complicated and overlaying structures and events over time.” He describes colonialism as a shapeshifter and traces it across history, always with care and attention to what he hears from folks on the ground. In this, one of the strengths of his scholarship is a refusal to succumb to simplistic narratives. It would be easier to write a condemnation of coal and the coal economy – but this is not true to what coal has meant to coal workers or to the Navajo Nation. Coal workers sometimes fight for coal even as they bear the embodied cost of its labor, because they understand coal through t’aa hwo aji t’eego – an ethic of responsibility to do what is needed. T’aa hwo aji t’eego has enabled them to stay on the land, pay for their children’s education, and simply remain. Curley is careful to balance the social and political life of coal with how environmental activists see coal and how politicians see coal as a means to negotiate sovereignty.

As a methodology, Curley’s approach intervenes into how scholars research Native issues. As he observes, settler colonial studies, (largely dominated by white settlers) emphasizes the primacy of elimination, and essentially requires that the settler/Native dynamic “remain in an unchanged, dichotomous relationship over five hundred years,” thus, the Indigenous peoples of today are imagined in the same position as in 1492 – this is not true to lived experience or history, and belies both Native futurity and the shapeshifting nature of colonial capitalism. In striking prose, Curley writes, “Movement was fundamental to Diné history. It defines the people” and proceeds to weave together the production of Diné space in oral tradition and the “Foundational Laws of the Diné,” a section in the Navajo Nation Code that works to decolonize the tribe’s government in part through narrating this place. Though he is not showy about it, in this writing, Curley is claiming Native space by giving us both a needed history of the Southwest and a roadmap to how to understand Native history and future while accounting for oral tradition but not romanticizing it. Against the supposed elimination of the Native, this book begins with a map of Diné Bikéyah and demonstrates how this place remains even if not everyone is attuned to see it. Curley restores into now and the future the Diné landscape that settler colonialism has failed to erase.

Beyond Diné Bikéyah, coal relations, and energy transition, this book provides us with several productive concepts. Temporal bending (the use of shifting timelines for strategic purposes) and colonialism as shapeshifter are two that will stay with me. The book’s organizing principle – carbon sovereignty – is also one that can be picked up to understand the work that Native nations do to forge sovereignty through the means at hand. I would argue that we can also pick up this concept to understand the formation of settler states as well, because their forms of governance and use of mineral resources are primarily and foundationally made in relation to the violence of colonization that shaped their laws, understanding of landscapes, and the relation to the natural world that has caused so much destruction. Early in the book, Curley recalls a grant reviewer commenting that his project should compare coal in West Virginia and the Navajo Nation – this book makes it clear not only that such comparison trivializes people’s lived experiences and political struggles and makes them into just another case study, but furthermore demonstrates that to we can’t understand any part of US energy politics without first understanding how carbon and extraction shaped the history of this place.  

Curley critiques the urge to generalize, to make easy arguments that allow for comparison and abstract the complexity and nuance that are only possible with deep knowledge and connection to a place, history, and people, and his book is invaluable as a story of coal in the Navajo Nation, and stands alone as that. At the same time, it expansively provides us with a slew of theoretical concepts and methodologies for all of us who study colonial capitalism, resource and energy geographies, or temporal geographies.

This Society + Space book review forum began as a standing-room-only Saturday 8 am session at the 2023 Denver, Colorado American Association of Geographers conference, and all the participants from the session were eager to share their remarks here. Dolly Kikon, Naga anthropologist at the University of Melbourne connects Curley’s political understanding of coal’s extractive regimes to her own work in Assam and Nagaland. Clint Carroll, citizen of the Cherokee Nation and Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies in the Department of Ethnic Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, emphasizes Curley’s care with Indigenous agency and sovereignty, particularly the ways that the book reframes development history with North American Native Nations at the center. Tianna Bruno, assistant professor of geography at the University of California Berkeley, reads Curley’s work across disciplinary boundaries in conversation with Black Geographies and highlighting his contributions to how we can think of Environmental Justice more carefully. Jenn Baka, associate professor of geography at Pennsylvania State, focuses on what Curley’s empirical work and analysis means for energy geographies and transition. Beth Rose Middleton Manning, Professor of Native American Studies at University of California Davis explains the usefulness of Curley’s contributions, particularly colonialism as shape-shifter, carbon sovereignty, temporal bending, and the moral economy of coal. Together, this forum demonstrates the possibilities and potentials of Curley’s work and provides productive ways that geographers, scholars of Native Studies, and those interested in colonialism and extraction can take up his ideas.

Sara Smith is a Professor of Geography and Environment at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She researches the relationship between territory, embodied life, and the political use of time. She has written on these topics in the Ladakh region of the Indian Himalaya and in the US South. She is the author of Intimate Geopolitics: Love, Marriage, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold, Political Geography: A critical introduction, and co-editor of Feminist Geography Unbound: Discomfort, Bodies, and Prefigured Futures.