The slow, red hum of morning dances through the mountains, the valleys, across the wide open plains of northern Arizona, through the spacious blue skies and sparse white clouds watching over this mesa. Few noises stifle its waves. The desert is frontier land, inhospitable, “the loneliest land that ever came out of God’s hands,” as observed by Mary Austin, a western settler, in The Land of Little Rain. Lonely, rugged land, but also home to the “cleanest air to be breathed anywhere in God’s world,” a space of solitude and intrinsic beauty. An unbounded land of enchantment beneath that beaconing sun, a western promise where anyone can be anything, do anything, free from that republic to the east. And in this wilderness, the Navajo peoples arrived almost two thousands years ago, their culture birthed by that shimmering star above, powering life in the desert. In return, they gave their land veneration, elevated it to their own status. But this land also played host to “great wealth in ores and Earth”, where “men are bewitched by it and tempted to try the impossible,” (Austin). A land too powerful for settlers to stay away. And so they came, America with her great flag, pilfering the resources hidden under this Earth. One by one, oil, uranium, and coal were given freedom by settlers. And with these ores came energy, ecological collapse, and most importantly — power. For decades, Navajo sovereignty has been entangled with extractive economic development, the tribe hoping to assimilate into American culture by engaging in capitalism, only to be left behind and disconnected from their land by outside influences. Now, a transition to generative green energy presents an opportunity to reimagine and rejuvenate Navajo sovereignty, linked yet again with their land, hoping to save a culture and maybe, just maybe, provide that seemingly unreachable goal: freedom. The Diné (Navajo) people’s emergence story describes this land — the Dinétah — as
home to beetles and locusts and bats, groups of life bringing prosperity to the desert. To the Navajo, this land is culture, the space “where people have performed in activities that keep Navajo life going,” (Kelley & Francis 39). Land is the root of stories, connecting ancestors to the current generation. As an intrinsic part of their culture, that gravitational force builds a stable, sustaining society. And for hundreds of years, they lived off the Dinétah, 27,425 square miles of home, for it nourished them in red clay. The natural world was fellow tribespeople, metaphysical actors linking reality to heaven, the wind breathing life into the tribe’s souls. In 1863, as the United States fractured over slavery, General Kit Carson brought his army to the Dinétah, unbinding the Navajo from their land. This was the culmination of thirty years of American policy to sever these cultures from their home, corrupt their sovereignty under an implacable vision of red, white, and blue. In 1868, the Navajo became one of the few tribes allowed to return home, yet one in four had died while interned in New Mexico (“History: The Navajo”). The Trail of Tears now burned westward, clearing a path for American settlement. When dawn broke, these settlers crossed the wide Missouri, building imperial cities across this expanse. Still dwelling in that land of little rain, the Navajo could no longer see themselves, could no longer see their future, instead falling victim to enlightened settlers from the east.
As the sun crests the horizon, dancing rays of red and orange illuminate a slow, lentic existence, the few tumbleweeds drifting slowly in the wind. A solitary caw of a vulture perched above the rocks. This land — now the designated Navajo reservation — is independent, officially recognized in the United States Constitution as a sovereign nation. Yet, on the ground, it is wholly dependent: subservient underneath federal primacy, the supreme law of the land. Supreme even to God. Tribal lands are managed via “inclusive exclusion”, where tribal governments have just enough guidance to greenlight the wishes of Washington, just enough
distance to remain dark (Rifkin 90). They can run a government, make their own decisions, yet sovereignty feels owned far away from the desert. Every Navajo decision has a stripe of red and white, a dance of dependence with foreign revenue and investment. A lack of agency over their habitat, their environment — and their culture. When unbounded settlers arrived, they craved power, and found it as a corrupted gift of the land. Oil extraction began in the 1920s, followed by uranium in the 1940s, then coal (Powell 35-36). Federal reorganization of the Navajo began almost immediately, creating the Navajo Nation Council in 1923, a legislative body that quickly signed mining leases to companies like Standard Oil, unleashing the Dinétah to modern society (38). And soon, out of the ground, came power — wired to Washington, fueling sins in Las Vegas, stars in LA. No longer was the Dinétah a homeland, no longer was the tribe driven by the sun. They had a bureaucracy, a vision of the future looking away from that rising, western star. That flag — red and white stripes, white stars on a blue background — shimmered brightly in the desert. The homes of the Navajo, clay huts built on top of black gold, remained dark.
Now succumbing to that flag, to a vision miraged in the desert, the resources of the Dinétah were opened to all. Coal boomed in the 1960s, constructing multiple power stations that now dot the mesa landscape. Each emits fifteen million tons of nitrous oxide (NOx) into the skies annually, spurring respiratory infections and asthma for locals (Powell 60). Powering these plants are some four billion tons of coal unearthed from Dinétah. Former Navajo President Peter MacDonald saw resource extraction — the “power to control power” — as an “attempt to survive” in an industrialized, capitalist world (82). This was sovereignty, but a twisted, contaminated kind, the kind radioactive fallout molds like clay. Ash and soot, poisonous dust, blinded the tribe to their past and that history of outside influence breaking their land, now seeing it for profit, not prosperity. They had forgotten the stories of beetles and bats feeding life
into their souls, now enthralled by that emerald green light, of money, of power. Their eyes basked in it. Back in Washington, Congress signed the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) in 1969 to protect the natural world, yet failed to notice its tentacles reaching across the country, into this land. All development projects, even on the reservation, became subjected to federal review, keeping the Navajo fully entrenched in federal institutions, despite a “general fund… based solely on [their] natural resource industry,” (121). With the Navajo on their side, failing to champion their culture, Washington was free to domineer, to bury the stories of windswept canyons and birds chirping under the ground, in space vacated by oil and coal. Now tamed, the Navajo had no voice, no revenue to build their own society. All they had was a fantastic farm of ash. A veiled trap. Today, 35% of households within the nation lack running water, while 15,000 residents — 10% of the reservation — do not have electricity (Robbennolt). For centuries the Navajo lived in harmony, then saw their connection to land unplugged, rewired to the east. In doing so, settlers plugged into the ground, energized by its rich resource reserves, entangling themselves in a culture. Looking east, away from the sun, away from that prospective future, the Navajo spiraled, fell, darkened, staying powerless in a desert filled with power.
In 2005, then Navajo President Joe Shirley Jr. signed the Diné Natural Resources Protection Act (DNRPA), passed by the Tribal Council, to ban uranium mining within the reservation, ending decades of radioactive exposure for native miners (“Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley”). The Council became an ally of environmental activists hoping to rejuvenate this sacred, hallowed land. These nationwide activists, hungry for progress, turned their attention to the physical symbols of injustice — the coal plants — littering the landscape, ashening the tribe. The Mohave Power Station closed that same year, felled by 2011. The 2500-megawatt Navajo Generating Station tumbled down in 2020, leaving just two — the San Juan and Four Corners
Generating Stations — in operation. For environmental activists, these plant closures are a new morning sun, a new beginning for the tribe free from carbon shackles. No longer would NOx burn the lungs of the Diné. No longer would uranium poison the water. Yet these activists — still outsiders — fail to see their tentacles, their parched quest for power. They see the Dinétah as another land to mold in their image, the Navajo another culture to entangle. Gone are the plant jobs that paid over $50 an hour, over $117,000 annually in a world where economic opportunity is as sparse as the desert trees (Hurlbut et. al). It is why in 2009, the Hopi Tribal Council declared all anti-coal environmental groups — including the venerated Sierra Club — persona non grata, no longer welcome on their lands (Voyles 251). For the Hopi, these energy activists are “among the greatest threat” to tribal independence, modern corrupters, the same pioneers bewildered by an untamed expanse needing to be converted. Many who viewed the closure of plants and end of uranium mining as a rebuilding of tribal sovereignty failed to see their actions were inhibiting, entangling, and failed to consider the intense connection between tribe and land. The Hopi wanted their own say, not simply what the world thought was progressive. And so, the question of sovereignty, of freedom, is a hazy desert mirage: unclear, uncertain. Freedom is tangled in cords, wrapped in a stars-and-stripes patterned banner. It is complicated, challenging. An asymptote, forever out there, just beyond our outstretched arms.
To the Navajo, land is “life itself”, the place where culture thrives, where ceremonies take place, and where people meet and gather (Powell 144). And in their origin story, they describe the wind as the bringer of life. When it ceases to blow, the tribe “become[s] speechless” (Zolbrod 51). They die. The wind, like the sun, is now harvested, mined, much like the energy sources of the past, for its internal beauty, the power and force it provides. Yet the wind and the sun are natural, sustaining forces the Navajo peoples have long harnessed for food, for direction, for life.
Unlike coal, unlike oil, the Navajo peoples are wind and souls of the sun. And so, as the plants fell, the mines closed, the world around the tribe greening, the Navajo moved too. Glassy panels rose from the desert as physical symbols of a new, green era. In Kayenta, long the home of the reservation’s largest coal mine, 220,000 solar panels now reflect the sun’s blood, producing fifty-five megawatts of power for the reservation and beyond (Mohacsi). Just the first of many, the reservation plans for multiple solar farms to open in the coming years, producing upwards of 200 megawatts each: a rapid transition into the future. And unlike old power projects, utility authorities must hire 97% Navajo workers, providing a door out of that veiled resource trap — a beacon cracking through the ash. Others are looking elsewhere, at a decentralization of the grid, with photovoltaics to the masses through micro-infrastructure. NativeSUN is a Hopi-run environmental company that supplies individual solar panels to residential dwellings, many in rural places long disconnected from the capitalist-designed grid (97). For the 15,000 Navajo who lack electricity, these panels provide more than light: power, hope, freedom. They provide choice, the ability to live a decentralized life, to again plug into their land. And with choice comes sovereignty, ever so small. Gone are the winds blowing soot and ash, toxins from the mines and power plants, corrupting God’s cleanest air. Gone are the days of darkness, of silence, without birds or beetles or bats. This spiraling culture, lost for decades in a haze of morning smog, has broken that domination, that “epidemic of blindness”, its future now illuminated by reflecting solar panels, blown by the breeze of the sky (Worster 56).
That western sun, that bright, perennial light, is a symbol of hope, of a journey whose conclusion is uncertain, but of a vision of gold, shimmering. Pioneers traversed the Mississippi, braved the Great Plains, and settled in this desert. And with them, they brought their culture, laws, and economy, onto the mesa, unplugging a culture and rewiring it towards Washington.
Now, as the world turns green, the Navajo have an opportunity to reconnect with their past, entangled again with the Earth. An opportunity to capture that fickle light of freedom. Some activists see freedom as this steroid, enabling the tribe to “flex [it’s] muscle”, equal with the United States (Powell 126). Peter MacDonald sees it merely as self-sufficiency, the ability for people to do as they please, to live the life they once did, and could again. Joe Shirley sees it as a means of “saving self”, to rebuild the Nation holistically, rekindle its fire, cure its illness (124). The diversity of opinions of views on freedom highlight its uniqueness, its complication, its uncertainty. Maybe freedom courses through these wires, buzzing down the poles and into homes, through the town squares and hotels. Two-hundred years of domination and foreigners coming to this native land has corrupted the future, buried tribal sovereignty under a web of legislation and meters of ash. God’s cleanest air is now toxic, filled with radioactive dust and decades of industrial toxins. The sound of bats and beetles has long been silenced, choked by power’s pollution. God’s people — not those prospective settlers — are now broken, darkened by a sun they have struggled to see, by wind that failed to blow life into their souls. A hundred years of power has brought diseases and sickness to these people, blinding each from their future, disconnecting them from the land that has nourished them and the life it has given. Now, in the present, the Navajo are still impotent, still servants of power, entangled yet ostracized from the modern world. But with power comes hope, light for the future, plugged back into the Earth. And for once, maybe, just maybe, the illumination of something much bigger: freedom.
Works Cited
Austin, Mary Hunter. Land of Little Rain. Houghton Mifflin, 1903.
History: The Navajo, Utah American Indian Archive,
Hurlbut, David J., et al. “Navajo Generating Station and Air Visibility Regulations: Alternatives and Impacts.” Translated by Eric Lantz, NREL, National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Mar. 2012, https://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy12osti/53024.pdf.
Kelley, Klara B., and Harris Francis. Navajo Sacred Places, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Mohacsi, Isabella. “The Navajo Nation’s Transition to Renewable Energy: What and Where to Expect It.” Navajo-Hopi Observer News, 10 May 2022,
https://www.nhonews.com/news/2022/may/10/navajo-nations-transition-renewable-energ y-what-an/.
“Navajo Nation President Joe Shirley, Jr. Signs Diné Natural Resources Protection Act of 2005.” SRIC, SRIC, http://www.sric.org/voices/2005/v6n2/navajo_pr_dnrpa.php. Powell, Dana E. Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation, Duke University Press, Durham, 2018.
Rifkin, Mark. 2009. “Indigenizing Agamben: Rethinking Sovereignty in Light of the ‘Peculiar’ Status of Native Peoples.” Cultural Critique 73: 88-124.
Simone Robbenolt. “Historical Marginalization Has Left the Navajo Nation Uniquely Vulnerable to Covid-19.” Prosperity Now, Prosperity Now, 22 May 2020,
https://prosperitynow.org/blog/historical-marginalization-has-left-navajo-nation-uniquely -vulnerable-covid-19.
Voyles, Traci Brynne. “Decolonizing Cartographies: Sovereignty, Territoriality, and Maps of Meaning in the Uranium Landscape.” University of California, San Diego, University of California, San Diego, 2010, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6h30w26p. Accessed 30 Nov. 2022.
Zolbrod, Paul G. 1984. Diné Bahane’: The Navajo Creation Story. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.
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