curley moral economy of navajo coal workers.pdf

Annals of the American Association of Geographers ISSN: 2469-4452 (Print) 2469-4460 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raag21 T’áá hwó ají t’éego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers Andrew Curley To cite this article: Andrew Curley (2019) T’áá hwó ají t’éego and the...

Annals of the American Association of Geographers ISSN: 2469-4452 (Print) 2469-4460 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/raag21 T’áá hwó ají t’éego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers Andrew Curley To cite this article: Andrew Curley (2019) T’áá hwó ají t’éego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers, Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109:1, 71-86, DOI: 10.1080/24694452.2018.1488576 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2018.1488576 © 2019 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis. Published online: 26 Nov 2018. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1755 View related articles View Crossmark data Citing articles: 3 View citing articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=raag21 T’
a
a hw
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ı t’
eego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers Andrew Curley Department of Geography, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill The development of coal mining in the Navajo Nation, the largest Indian reservation in the United States, is understood as a consequence of economic dependency, resource curse, modernization, cultural contradiction, and so on. Missing from these frameworks are the perspectives of indigenous actors who participate in these industries. This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews conducted with Navajo coal workers and community members during a 2013 lease renewal to analyze how a moral economy of Navajo coal workers accounts for the mobilization of Navajo labor in support of the industry, despite years of exploitation and environmental damage. This article’s central argument is that the moral economy of Navajo coal workers is built on a subsistence logic, summarized in the Navajo idiom t’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego, which emphasizes notions of “hard work” on one’s “traditional” land and is produced in the collective conditions of a worker’s union. Even as the future of coal looks bleak, understanding how this folk ideology mobilizes Navajo workers in support of a declining industry gives us a better understanding of the integration of indigenous peoples into capitalist processes. Key Words: coal, indigenous geography, moral economy, Navajo, resource geography. 在纳瓦霍族国这个美国最大的印第安保留区中的煤矿开发, 被理解为经济依赖、资源诅咒、现代化、文 化冲突等结果。这些认识架构所缺少的, 是参与在这些产业中的原住民族行动者的视角。本文运用 2013年採矿权租约展延期间与纳瓦霍族矿工和族人所进行的民族志田野工作与访谈, 分析纳瓦霍矿工的 道德经济, 如何解释尽管常年的剥削与环境伤害, 纳瓦霍工人仍动员支持该产业。本文的核心主张是, 纳 瓦霍工人的道德经济, 建立在生计逻辑之上, 并以纳瓦霍的俗语“T’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego”概括之, 强调在自身 的“传统”土地上“勤奋工作”的概念, 并且在工人工会的集体条件下进行生产。尽管煤矿的未来相当严峻, 理解此般民间意识形态如何动员纳瓦霍工人以支持一个衰败的产业, 让我们对于原住民族整合进入资本 主义有更佳的理解。关键词: 煤炭, 原住民族地理学, 道德经济, 纳瓦霍人, 资源地理学 。 El desarrollo de la miner
ıa del carb
on en la Naci
on Navajo, la m
as grande de las reservaciones indias de los Estados Unidos, es vista como una consecuencia de la dependencia econ
omica, la maldici
on del recurso, la modernizaci
on, la contradicci
on cultural y as
ı sucesivamente. Lo que no aparece en estos esquemas son las perspectivas de los actores ind
ıgenas que participan en estas industrias. Este art
ıculo se basa en trabajo de campo etnogr
afico y entrevistas administradas en 2013 a obreros navajo que trabajan el carb
on y a miembros de la comunidad, al renovarse el arrendamiento, con el fin de analizar c
omo una econom
ıa moral de aquellos ~ os trabajadores puede explicar la movilizaci
on laboral navajo en apoyo de la industria carbon
ıfera, pese a an ~o ambiental. El argumento central del art
ıculo es que la econom
ıa moral de de explotaci
on y dan los trabajadores navajo del carb
on est
a construida alrededor de una l
ogica de subsistencia, resumida en la expresi
on navajo t’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego, la cual enfatiza nociones de “trabajo duro” en nuestra tierra “tradicional,” y es producida en las condiciones colectivas del sindicato del trabajador. Aun si el futuro del carb
on luce sombr
ıo, entender c
omo esta ideolog
ıa popular moviliza a los trabajadores navajo en apoyo de una industria en declive nos facilita una mejor comprensi
on de la integraci
on de los pueblos ind
ıgenas en los procesos capitalistas. Palabras clave: carb
on, geograf
ıa ind
ıgena, econom
ıa moral, Navajo, geograf
ıa de los recursos. n 2017, Arizona’s largest utility, the Salt River Project (SRP), announced that it would close the Navajo Generating Station (NGS) at the end of its fifty-year lease in 2019. NGS is a 2,250-megawatt I power plant on the western edge of the reservation and is the largest single contributor of greenhouse gases in Indian Country. For decades, the Navajo Nation has relied on coal mining for jobs and # 2019 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 109(1) 2019, pp. 71–86 Initial submission, September 2017; revised submission, March 2018; final acceptance, May 2018 72 Curley revenues. In recent years, however, the region’s coal economy has been in decline. Although environmental costs to the land and people are a factor, utility companies are divesting from coal because of its higher costs compared to natural gas. Since 2006, two of the four long-standing coal mines within the reservation have permanently closed, laying off hundreds of workers and resulting in millions of dollars in lost revenues. Employees at these mines mobilized in 2006, in 2013, and again in 2018 to try to prevent their closures but with declining success. In February, workers, relatives, community members, and tribal officials protested a potential shutdown of the NGS outside of the Arizona state capitol in Phoenix (Barbee 2018). In 2013, I observed an early iteration of this crisis within the Navajo Nation. The Navajo Nation Council was considering renewing a lease that would keep the plant in operation until 2044. At the time, the plant provided 90 percent of the power for the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a critical water infrastructure for the state. SRP, the plant’s operator and second largest owner, first approached a Navajo “negotiating team” in 2010 to extend the lease. By 2013, SRP was ready to move on the lease. Their lobbyists leaned on tribal lawmakers to pass the necessary council resolutions that would demonstrate support for the lease extension. Although Navajo environmental groups voiced opposition, their concerns were absent from the proceedings. Mobilization instead came from Navajo coal workers who chartered multiple buses from Kayenta, where they worked and lived. They traveled the 134 miles to Window Rock where the council would decide on the lease. They filled the usually empty gallery seats of the Navajo Nation Council Chambers. The Navajo Nation passed the necessary resolutions to extend the life of the plant until 2044. In 2017, however, SRP reneged on this agreement after it secured cheaper energy from other power sources. This development follows a long pattern of settlers buying time with tribal nations in unequal negotiations only to unilaterally abandon them in the end when circumstances shift more in the colonizer’s favor (Wilkins 2013a). Had this effort succeeded, the renewal would have certainly preserved the plant and its feeder mine, the Kayenta Mine, for the foreseeable future. In a place of nearly 50 percent unemployment, the mine and plant combined employ approximately 800 workers Figure 1. Navajo coal workers outside of Navajo Nation Council Chambers, April 2013. with high salaries and good benefits. Additionally, coal provides sizable and reliable revenue for the tribe in a neoliberal era of declining federal funding. In this article, I argue that Navajo coal work cannot be reduced to theories of employment and modernization, dependency and underdevelopment, environmental damage, risk, politics of recognition, resurgence, or even limited to the logics of settlercolonialism. Rather, the social life of coal produces heterogeneous, divergent, and conflict-ridden senses of indigeneity. Methodologically, anticipating internal contestation and centering research and analyses on actors and groups within their relative relation to coal breaks apart what might become homogenizing assumptions about Navajo cultural values that are often found in works on indigenous peoples and extractive industries. This article focuses on Navajo coal workers who are responding to a declining coal economy and suggests that their mobilizations in support of coal are an expression of a moral economy (Figure 1), a collectively held ideological claim about what is the proper order and distribution of resources often expressed in moments of political and economic crises. There are two central features to this moral economy of Navajo coal workers. First, it is rooted in the Navajo “subsistence ethic” of t’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego, which is fundamentally an expression of hard work and the maintenance of one’s livelihood on ancestral lands. Second, it is reproduced in the collective structure of a worker’s union. Although the subsistence ethic existed in Navajo communities long before the coal industry developed, the worker’s union helped put this ethic into political mobilization within the Navajo Nation. The moral economy of Navajo coal workers T’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers stresses two important benefits of coal work: (1) Coal provides a source of livelihood and (2) it enables Navajo people to stay in the reservation on their traditional lands. Understanding the perspectives of Navajo coal workers helps us to better understand coal’s uneven social impact in and around indigenous–settler interfaces and how capitalist structures and practices are incorporated into indigenous life as strategies of survival. Navajo Coal and Development Scholarship on Navajo extractive industries started as modernization narratives that characterized the Navajo Nation and its people as in need of “development” through the exploitation of natural resources (Reno 1981; Goodman 1982; Ali 2003). Starting in the 1970s, scholars critiqued this modernization approach and said that tribes were “dependent” on revenues from extraction (Robbins 1978; Dunbar-Ortiz 1979; White 1983; Weiss 1984). They became an internal colony of the United States through “resource colonialism” and “captive nations and internal-colonies” (Snipp 1988, 2) or as “radioactive colonialism” in the case of uranium mining (Churchill and LaDuke 1986).1 Navajo resources have powered the region’s economy through jobs, cheap energy, and accessible water (Deck 1997; Anthony Evans, Gamez, and Madly 2013). It has also caused known and unknown environmental damages and engendered contentious politics around it. Since the imposition of the reservation system in the 1850s, U.S. tribes were treated as backward and uncivilized. Consequently, reservations are always sites of intervention, first by armies and churches and then by government officials and development experts. The first and perhaps most notorious resource developers extracted from Indian lands was oil, especially among the Osage in Oklahoma (Dennison 2012; Fixico 2012). Congress eventually passed the Indian Mineral Leasing Act in 1938 to regulate mining within Indian lands (Rosser 2010; Voggesser 2010; Allison 2015). In the Navajo Nation, oil, uranium, and coal coevolved with institutions of tribal governance that led to the tribe becoming reliant on extractive industries for revenues (Reno 1981; Chamberlain 2000; Iverson and Roessel 2002; Wilkins 2003). In this respect, the dependency school of thought was largely correct in its characterization of the incorporation of indigenous territories into exploitative and unequal 73 relationships with surrounding non-Native polities. U.S. federal officials, who oversaw Indian affairs, assumed that the tribe’s abundance of valuable energy resources could support new forms of industries within the reservation and would improve life and livelihoods for the Navajo people (Kluckhohn et al. 1946; Aberle 1969; Reno 1981). The first large-scale Navajo coal lease was signed in 1957 outside of the Navajo community of Shiprock, where oil was “discovered” thirty years before (Powell 2018). It was called the Navajo Mine and has become the fuel for two large regional power plants operating just outside of the northern edge of the reservation, the Four Corners Generating Station and the San Juan Generating Station (Iverson and Roessel 2002). These power plants continue to sell energy to rural Arizona towns and New Mexico cities, although their production has declined significantly in recent years, which has also resulted in a loss of jobs and revenues. In 1962, the McKinley Coal Mine started operations just south of the Navajo Nation’s capital of Window Rock. Finally, in 1967 and 1973, two large coal mines opened on Black Mesa in the center of the reservation to satisfy rapid energy growth in the region (Needham 2014). In 1968, Congress passed legislation to build the CAP, a series of large canals that would move water from the Colorado River to the Salt River Valley where Phoenix was expanding. To provide power for CAP, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, from Arizona, proposed the construction of a large coalfired power plant, the NGS, in lieu of a hydroelectric dam in the Grand Canyon. Udall worked to build the power plant on tribal land to provide the Navajo Nation with revenues and jobs as part of a modernization narrative. The plant was built in concert with the passage of mining leases between the Navajo Nation and Peabody Western Coal Company to supply coal from Black Mesa to the plant. The mine that supplies NGS is called the Kayenta Mine. Today it is one of two mines operating in the Navajo Nation. Many of the mine’s workers live in the town of Kayenta about twenty miles northeast of the mine site (Ambler 1990; Nies 2014). In recent work, researchers and activists have become more critical of coal, development projects, and even the role of tribal governments in facilitating exploitation (Smith and Frehner 2010). They recognize the inherent health and environmental consequences of the coal industry (Jorgensen 1978; 74 Curley Geisler et al. 1982; Churchill and LaDuke 1986; Ambler 1990; Gedicks 1993). Today many environmental groups claim that tribal governments were designed to accommodate and intensify resource extraction as new forms of colonialism across indigenous lands (Powell and Curley 2008; Powell 2018). In Native environmental scholarship, there is an emphasis on decolonization, cultural renewal, or a return to “traditional” practices of Native life and leadership (Jaimes 1992; Churchill 1999; LaDuke 1999; Coffey and Tsosie 2001; Necefer et al. 2015). Settler-colonial studies (Veracini 2011) focuses on indigenous–settler dynamics and emphasize the role of “the settler” (Wolfe 1999), “arrivants” (Byrd 2011), or “non-Native” (Morgensen 2010) in structuring the legal, political, and territorial difference between colonizer and colonized (Snelgrove, Dhamoon, and Corntassel 2014). This scholarship is strong in describing and analyzing the social, racial, and political restrictions and inequalities of tribes within settler-colonial (as opposed to postcolonial) states that are bent on the “elimination of the Native,” including through resource colonization (Wolfe 2006). These narratives, however, have difficulty capturing how indigenous peoples work through colonial structures for survival. In response, critical indigenous scholars and activists are articulating normative politics centered on indigenous “refusal,” “liberation,” and “resurgence” that provide pathways beyond the “settler state” to dislodge it of its conceptual dominance (A. Simpson 2014; Coulthard and Simpson 2016; L. B. Simpson 2016). They provide much-needed language to recenter indigenous lifeways in analysis and to transcend narratives of erasure and elimination. Although these frameworks free indigenous scholarship from colonial limitations, they also miss important areas of social, political, and cultural life within Native communities that work contrary to ideals of resurgence, such as the mobilization of Navajo coal workers in defense of a dying industry. In this case, a moral economy approach disaggregates “Navajo” to a particular size and scope of ideological production around questions of labor and livelihood to reflect the politics around this particular issue. Methods Historically, across academic fields, tribal actors are treated as unified objects of analysis. Peoples with complex and divergent perspectives, with unique positioning, and who occupy different geographical and social niches are reduced to their tribe, nation, or government (Coombes, Johnson, and Howitt 2012). To alleviate this tendency, for example, Radcliffe (2015, 2) emphasized social heterogeneity among indigenous peoples, moving away from “indigenous” as a homogenous or fixed category in colonial structures with essential meaning to one of positionality. Her research highlights elusory forms of intervention in the lives of indigenous women based on colonial assumptions of what it means to be an indigenous man or woman in rural areas of Ecuador. Neale and Vincent (2017) warned us of the limitations of focusing too much on perceived “ontological differences” within indigenous communities that is a premise in much of anthropology and critical cultural studies on tribes (Hunt 2014; Radcliffe 2015; Todd 2016). What I emphasize here is not difference, or intersectionality, but “friction” between the structuring of colonial relationships (i.e., settler colonialism and regional energy interests) and the particularity of a deployment of an indigenous identity that is trying to preserve a paternalistic model of development within the Navajo Nation (Tsing 2011; Valdivia 2015). Methodologically, this article puts at the center of analysis those who are most reliant on and supportive of the continuation and renewal of the coal industry within the Navajo Nation. I account for how Navajo coal workers reached larger understandings of work and livelihood in the production of a moral economy. The understanding of the coal industry for workers is not simply a reflection of dependency or opportunity; it is fundamentally a sense of livelihood. Their understanding is an example of how indigeneity is socially and materially produced against and through colonial structures. The geography of coal mining in the reservation requires us to narrow our object of analysis from the homogenizing category of “the Navajo,” because it can obscure diverse and contrasting motivations of social actors under its name. The understanding of the spatial and scalar nature of coal in the region demands a focus on the specific groups and actors within and without the reservation who shape competing energy politics. This article generally relies on observations of protest, formal political procedures, community meetings, and on-the-spot conversations with Navajo people regarding the future of coal for the T’
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o aj
ı t’
eego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers Table 1. 2013 coal workers and Kayenta residents interviewed Date CW 1 CW 2 CW 3 CW 4 CW 5 CW 6 CW 7 CW 8 KR 9 KR 10 KR 11 KR 12 KR 13 KR 14 5/22/13 5/14/13 5/13/13 7/18/13 7/19/13 N/A N/A 6/22/13 N/A N/A N/A 9/1/13 N/A N/A Note: CW ¼ coal River Project. Age Gender 61 N/A 66 64 N/A 60s N/A N/A 30 23 35 34 30s 32 M M M M M M M F F F F M M F worker; Education Occupation High school High school N/A High school College College High school College College College Graduate Graduate Graduate College Welder Electrician Administrator Truck driver Dragline operator Works for SRP Truck driver Truck driver Researcher Not-for-profit Government Government Researcher Arts KR ¼ Kayenta resident; SRP ¼ Salt Navajo Nation in 2013. It also relies on forty-two in-depth, semistructured interviews with tribal officials, coal workers, and environmental organizers conducted between 2012 and 2014. During this phase of research, I attended local meetings at the Kayenta “chapter house” and “township,” two separate and sometimes competing subpolitical bodies within the community. I talked with informants on the phone (unrecorded) and learned about unadvertised events. I socialized in the afternoons and evenings with community members, most of whom did not work at the mine but knew someone who did and who had deep understandings of the history and politics of coal in the region. In directly observing the renewal process, I traveled hundreds of miles between tribal meetings and events that would suddenly pop up regarding the lease, from mobilizations in Window Rock, to public hearings in Page and Phoenix, polities located on opposite ends of Arizona. In particular, I developed my analysis from fourteen in-depth interviews with Navajo coal workers and community members from January 2013 to January 2014 when I lived in the Navajo community of Kayenta (Table 1). The Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers Moral economy broadly refers to embedded beliefs about economic rights. Sayer (2000) claimed that ideas of moral economy are documented as far back 75 as Aristotle, and these might be part of a larger “universal moral grammar” that exists outside of capitalist rational (Honneth 1996; Mikhail 2007). Our modern usage of moral economy, however, is rooted in Thompson’s provocative essay about “bread riots” in late eighteenth-century England as that country transitioned into capitalism. Thompson attributed “the crowd’s” collective sense of moral indignation to ongoing changes in distribution practices between buyers and sellers of grain that marginalized common folks. He said that the bread riots were not spontaneous rebellions of hunger, as economic historians had described (Thompson 1971), but a defiance to a changing social order. His intention was to describe preexisting mores that informed rebellions and were disrupted by social changes linked to the emergence of capitalism and a new political economy of agriculture (R. R. Fassin 2009). In this approach, Thompson considered the agency of actors who comprised “the crowd” and whose standpoints were informed by local customs and culture on the politics of resource distribution (Thompson 2015). Scholarship in agrarian studies further developed moral economy to focus specifically on the social class of peasants. J. C. Scott’s (1977) reworking of Thompson’s language described a subsistence ethic of Southeast Asian farmers as the basis of moral economies. At the time of Scott’s writing, peasants were idealizations in national liberation movements in both Asia and Latin America. They were also the first victims of “modernization” and the commercialization of agriculture in socialist and capitalist economies, however (Booth 1994; Edelman 2005). In his use of moral economy, Scott reemphasized dearth and referred to a historical and conservative subsistence ethic of poor peasants who were riskaverse and living near the edge of survival (J. C. Scott 1977; Watts 1983). Like Thompson, Scott disputed rational choice theory of conventional economics. He also challenged Marxist grand theories of exploitation that were deductive and did not account for the lived experiences and perspectives of poor peasants (J. C. Scott 1977). Wolford moved away from precapitalist logics of moral economies in her focus on social mobilizations for land in Brazil (Wolford 2005, 2010). Rather, she described a contemporary production of moral economies that were based on a blend of history, “customs, culture, and context” (Wolford 2010, 7). Wolford described how political mobilizations in Brazil were rooted in 76 Curley peasants’ senses of a right to land that combined subsistence and colonial logics. Indigenous actors are on the opposite end of this dynamic. In colonial contexts, transition from subsistence to wage-labor life is sometimes “telescoped” into a single generation (J. C. Scott 1977, 9). Consequently, memory of previous social orders is fresher and, in the case of many of my Navajo informants, existent within workers who are actively participating in a capitalist economy. What Scott identified as a subsistence ethic influenced how peasants responded to the commercialization of agriculture and how they resisted risky marketing schemes. In the unique conjuncture of settler-colonialism, indigenous peoples were confined to reservations and forced to assimilate to European American values designed to transform their understanding and relationship with the land. Combined with regional energy development built on unequal relations of power between tribes and states (Rosser 2010; Needham 2014; Powell 2018), Navajo subsistence understandings about the importance of hard work for survival were altered and redeployed in the context of wage labor (O’Neill 2005). This article uses moral economy to refer to collectively held beliefs about the role of coal work in the development and maintenance of productive relations around coal mining in the Navajo reservation. I argue this is an intervention within indigenous geography to integrate a deeper appreciation of social class and diversity of motivations within indigenous communities. It is also done to demonstrate how extractive industries are forms of “colonial entanglements” (Dennison 2012, 2017), processes of messy and often legalistic engagements among tribal actors, their governments, and outside colonial interests that make it more difficult for tribes to exert control over their lands, resources, and development priorities. In the case of mining in the Navajo Nation, coal workers extend a subsistence ethic of hard work into a moral economy of coal as an objective of Navajo state development. In my research, I found that coal workers often express to community members, the tribal government, the state government, and federal agencies how the Navajo Nation (and other state actors) ought to support policies that secure the future of the Navajo coal economy. Their mobilizations are based not on abstract economic rationale but a perception that the Navajo Nation owes coal workers a right to livelihood. Moral economies are not simply “traditional” beliefs reacting to a changing social order; they are reconstructed normative “folk ideologies” (Bernstein 2007, 11) deployed against a capitalist reordering of society for political impact. Although the Navajo Nation is not a peasant economy, it is a place built on embedded subsistence values, which inform the nature of Navajo incorporation into regional capitalism. When advocating for coal, Navajo workers repurpose the Navajo subsistence logic of t’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego as a right to work and a right to meaningful livelihood. This right operates in the liberal milieu of modern governance and is a claim against the powers of the state. This right is deployed at times of crisis, perpetuated by changing energy and capitalist interests in the region, arrangements that are fundamentally built on the exploitation of indigenous lands, resources, and labor. I observed collective expressions of this perceived right in 2013 as an effort to extend a coal lease by twenty-five years. In Canada, Latin America, and Australia, indigenous attitudes toward “development” and extractive industries are complicated and are not always sites of resistance against extractive industries (Valdivia 2005; Perreault and Valdivia 2010; Stanley 2016). Boutet (2014) found that Innu in Northern Canada adapted to resource development in their territory in ways that facilitated “traditional” land use practices into participation in wage-labor work. In Chile, Camacho (2016) differentiated indigenous attitudes toward mining, development, territory, and—ultimately—water change along generational lines to demonstrate difference in indigenous attitudes toward natural resource use. Although there are many parallels between indigenous peoples’ experiences in North America and the rest of the world as they pertain to extractive industries, here I rely on the scholarship on U.S. tribes as a particular iteration of settler-colonial history and structures that recognize, to a limited degree, territorial autonomy and processes of self-governance while denying critical facets of self-determination to these communities. This conjuncture produces an “indigeneity” highly reliant on and supportive of extractive industries as a strategy for survival on the land. T’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego and the Navajo Subsistence Ethic Navajo people have always maintained ideas of territory tied to particular individuals, families, or even clans. Work is generally valued in its T’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers immediate and contextual usefulness to a family, group, and, increasingly, idea of “nation.” The perceived usefulness of Navajo labor was historically evaluated in its necessity for survival in the conditions of the semiarid Colorado Plateau defined by cold, snowy winters, periodic droughts, hot summers, and sparse vegetation. Navajo notions of work and responsibility, the core of t’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego, “you are responsible for your own well-being,” were directly tied to survival and the necessity of providing subsistence for your family largely through physical labor. In their famous 1946 ethnography on “the Navaho,” Kluckhohn and Leighton identified this sense of so-called industriousness as “health and strength are perhaps the best of the good things of life for The People [Navajo]. If you aren’t healthy, you can’t work; if you don’t work, you’ll starve” (Kluckhohn and Leighton 1974, 299). In 2013, a sixty-year-old coal worker I interviewed (CW2) emphasized how coal work reflects values his parents and grandparents taught him as a child. He said in his second language, English, “We are doing as we were told. We get up early in the morning and come back and we bought just a little bit of progress.” The meaning of t’
a
a hwo ‘
at’
eego is rooted in ‘
at’
eego, translated to “for being” as in t’
a
a b
ıh
ı ‘
at’
eego k’ad ‘aw
aalya sid
a or “He has himself to blame for being in jail.” The phrase t’
a
a hwo ‘
at’
eego is popular in Navajo and used regularly in conversations about self-reliance. For example, the popular footrace series, “Just Move It,” held during the summer months across the reservation to combat obesity and diabetes, uses a variation of t’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego as the slogan for the run. Race organizers translate it to mean, “It’s up to you.” In the 2012 State of the Nation address, former Navajo Nation Vice President Rex Lee Jim referred to t’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego to reiterate the importance of Navajo people taking personal responsibility for their livelihoods. He said, “I wanted to encourage Navajos to take responsibility for their own actions and their own future.” (Navajo Nation Supreme Court Opinion SC-CV-4007, 18). In another example, “returning to the core values of t’a
a
’ hwo
a
ji
t’ e
ego,” the Navajo Nation Program for Self Reliance, “The NNDSR applies the Navajo teachings of the concept of t’a
a
’ hwo
a
ji
t’ e
ego to empower Customers to take personal responsibility for themselves and their families” (Navajo Nation Department for Self Reliance 2018). In 2009, Chief Justice of the Navajo Nation Supreme 77 Court, Herb Yazzie, used t’
a
a hw
o aj
ı t’
eego to reduce child support owed to a woman who had divorced her husband twenty years prior. Yazzie wrote: Our elders have always taught the concept of t’aa hwo aji t’eego (self-reliance). The emphasis of this value is that one must prepare himself/herself for the difficulties in life—one needs to rise early to meet the dawn and be blessed with the desire, commitment and capabilities necessary for a strong positive mental attitude, physical strength and endurance and capabilities in dealing with life’s challenges. In an e-mail exchange, Bradley Begaye2 translated the phrase like this: “t’aa hwo—you only/just you aji’teego—have to be/it has to be/your actions/take initiative/make it happen/personalized to self.” In other words, “Only you are responsible for your state of being. The phrase is idiomatic,” he told me. “Ajit’eego” relies on the context of the conversation. At’eego is close to “the way something is. If you want to lecture someone about it … ’aa hwo anit’eego ei biigha—if you want to succeed, it has to be you.” Another informant wrote to me, “Just to let you know I disagree with the translation of many things—such as t’aahwo’ajit’eego. In my interpretation it would be ‘only you determine your state of being’ instead of ‘it’s up to you’ and all the other translations.” T’
a
a hwo ‘
at’
eego is often described as something that comes from the past when Navajo people relied mainly on sheep for subsistence. In rooting the source of t’
a
a hwo ‘
at’
eego in “elders,” the Navajo Nation’s Supreme Court dates its origin into the past. Fundamentally the history of t’
a
a hwo ‘
at’
eego is linked to survival on the land prior to the introduction of capitalist relations in the U.S. Southwest. Although the notion was born in the context of a subsistence economy, it is now applied within regimes of wage labor. For most people in the Kayenta area, the first wage labor work came in the form of uranium mining in the 1940s and 1950s. Uranium mining left a terrible and tragic legacy across the Navajo Nation (Brugge, Benally, and Yazzie-Lewis 2006; Voyles 2015). The mines were crude and irresponsibly administered (Eichstaedt 1994). Mining companies abandoned many of these sites. One of the coal workers I interviewed learned the value of mining from his father, who labored in these uranium mines in the 1940s and 1950s. By the time he started work at the Kayenta Mine in the 1970s, the negative health effects on his father had developed 78 Curley into cancer. Workers who had never smoked suddenly developed lung cancers years after they had ended their participation in mining. It was later learned that the mines were poorly insulated and the workers were not provided protective masks while mining (Eichstaedt 1994). Despite these negative health effects on a previous generation, young Navajo men still eagerly applied for employment at the new coal mines in the 1960s and 1970s, often right out of high school. With little formal education and even less opportunity, coal mine employment was seen as a way to provide for their families and fulfill their home obligations. The mines opened shortly after the Vietnam War when many Navajo veterans returned from the war looking for work. With the expansion of capitalism into the region, Navajo subsistence attitudes toward work did not suddenly disappear and were not simply replaced by capitalist ideologies of individualism, “the Protestant work ethic” (cf. Littlefield and Knack 1996; Weber 2002). Rather, alternative and preexisting ideas of work were repurposed and redeployed in this changing environment. In the case of Navajo men, physical labor for survival, perceived as “hard” work, was reemphasized: chopping firewood, building corrals, diverting water runoffs to flood fields. These kinds of physical labor became tied to ideas of Navajo masculinity and maintaining connections with ancestral land (Lee 2013; Innes and Anderson 2015). Eventually, seasonal employment in non-Native industrial agriculture, rail, road, and housing construction drew Navajo men away from the household economy for months at a time (O’Neill 1999, 2005; Hosmer, O’Neill, and Fixico 2004). This economy further intensified gendered divisions of labor. Women took responsibility for subsistence agriculture, herding sheep, weaving rugs, and other local forms of industriousness as men traveled in labor camps or worked far away from home (Adams and Ruffing 1977; M’Closkey 2008; McCallum 2014). One can interpret this evidence of Navajo as a primitive form of accumulation (Bush 2005, 2014, cf. Pasternak 2017, 73), but Navajo people have retained a strong sense of place that is rooted in their traditional homelands and have resisted moving into towns and cities. They have worked on development strategies that will bring industry into the reservation. Although not part of the formal definition of t’
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eego, for some, it implies doing meaningful work near one’s home. As one coal worker said to me: I have lived the mining environment all of my life. It was the mineral that helped me from childhood to high school. I’m accustomed to it. I do know the value to the family, my mom and dad when they were alive, and I was raised as a miner. And me again, I raised my family from coal mining. Uranium to coal mining, it has benefited our people. And it is very benefiting to be near or live on our own soil. Take as the minerals are being discovered, near our hometown. We don’t have to live somewhere else. (CW1) For the men I interviewed, their masculinity was defined in providing for one’s family, both nuclear and extended. This was how the coal industry, although clearly an environmental and health risk to miners and members of the community, quickly embedded itself in the Navajo working-class economy. Although the work displaced families who lived on or near the mine site and contributed to environmental problems in the area, many (not all) who sought and gained employment in the industry came to believe that the benefits of providing a good living for themselves and resources for their families outweighed environmental and health consequences. R. R. Scott (2010; R. R. Scott and Bennett 2015) identified a similar tendency among coal workers in West Virginia. In one interview, Scott talked to a community member whose town was destroyed through the controversial mining technique of mountaintop removal. The interviewee acknowledged that coal displaced her family and obliterated generations of family history tied to the land, but it also provided the men with jobs and sources of livelihood. Faced with the destruction of her family’s land, the interviewee instead focused on the livelihood that coal brought to families (R. R. Scott 2010, 99). A young woman who grew up in Kayenta, but not in a coal mining family, told me that the children of coal workers were the ones who had new shoes and nice backpacks (KR14). Two other interviewees, whose fathers were coal workers, told me that the revenues from coal work were an important part of their household income when they were growing up (KR10 and KR11). Although they had questions about the industry, they understood and emphasized the importance of it for their parents and their parents’ generation. For some Navajo people, dressing nicely in new clothes was a sign of a good work ethic (KR14). New clothes and T’
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eego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers trucks were interpreted as the result of hard work. Most of the children of mine workers explained that even when they disagree with the coal economy, they respect their parents’ work and the material security it brought them. To have a job, regardless of the circumstances, meant that you were providing for yourself and your family. On the other hand, wealth can be interpreted as the outcome of corruption and bad character. Not all work is viewed favorably in traditional Navajo ideas of labor, and the opposite of t’
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eego are accusations of cheating, dishonesty, or sometimes even witchcraft (Kluckhohn 1944; Kluckhohn and Leighton 1946). Today, charges of corruption and laziness are rampant in Navajo political discourse (Lee 2017). The Navajo tribal government has been restructured several times in the last forty years mainly as a response to these perceptions (Wilkins 2002, 2013b). A Navajo coal worker characterized how he felt about council delegates like this: “What the Council doesn’t realize is that they are the problem.” Sarcastically imitating council delegates, he continued: “Let’s go take a break, let’s go to the Shalimar Inn, let’s go have a beer.” By the time they come back they are too drunk to do anything. And then they were too busy playing around with their girlfriends. That’s what it is. That’s what this council is. They are always fighting because somebody went and touched somebody’s girlfriend. I later asked a council delegate about this perception that council delegates party and do not take the needs of coal workers seriously. The delegate said that it was the coal workers who were well off and demanding too much. He said that he sees them driving around in brand new trucks. Anticipating this, the coal worker said: They would not listen to the workers because I heard one of the council members say, “All they do is drive dualeys and four-door trucks.” Already they are prejudiced because we are practicing what our greatgrandmas and great-grandpas said, t’
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eego, it is going to be up to you to be something. We are not practicing what those councilmen over there are doing, just sitting around and going to bars. Can I have some discretionary funds? No. We are doing what we are told. T’
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eego. Get up in the morning and make some money. Good things will come to you. We get up early in the morning come back, we brought just a little bit of progress. (CW2) 79 The coal worker justified his work through t’
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eego and recognized that the rest of the community does not always support coal work. He went on to criticize what he described as a lackluster response from the Navajo Nation Council and the work of Navajo environmentalists in challenging the coal industry. His statement is further proof of the need to disaggregate Navajo claims and not assume or imply a uniform, ontological difference as the main substance of indigenous frameworks. For my informant, coal was primarily a political question. Other informants who lived in the community disagreed with the workers’ understanding that t’
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eego supports coal. They emphasized traditional lifestyles, such as sheep herding and farming. What distinguishes their perspectives from those of coal workers is both positionality and organizational infrastructures. For coal workers, not only are they materially invested in coal production but they are socially connected in ways historically new for Navajo people, through the collectivizing edifice of a worker’s union. Conversely, Navajo environmental organizations and tribal officials have their own structures that amplify different narratives on coal. In the next section, I argue that the coal worker’s union transforms t’
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eego into a moral economy of coal. Unions and the Production of Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers The role of Navajo labor in collectivizing the voice of coal workers was critical in translating ideas of t'aa hwo aji t'eego, from a maxim of subsistence to one that supports coal development in the reservation. The United Mine Workers Local 1924 maintains its own building and union hall in Kayenta, a separate political space from the rest of the community where it conducts meetings. The union maintains a hierarchy of paid staff who officially represent the workers. Most importantly, with its monetary resources, it can afford to charter buses for mine workers to travel from Kayenta to the tribal headquarters in Window Rock or to Phoenix to advocate for coal. The union sponsored these mobilizations in 2013 and again in 2018. As mentioned earlier, I witnessed one such mobilization in April 2013, where I conversed with dozens of Navajo coal workers as they petitioned the Navajo Nation Council to renew the lease for the NGS between the tribe and the SRP. From what I 80 Curley observed, this was the crucial process in elevating t’
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eego into an ideological claim about how and what should be done with tribal resources based on expectations of the state (Navajo tribal government). The union was instrumental in this process. It collectivized resources among workers and became an official voice for them. In a letter dated 28 February 2013, the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA) wrote to the Navajo Nation Council Speaker Johnny Naize, “We, the members of the United Mine Workers Local 1924 for the Kayenta Mine Complex, believe that the proposed lease amendment legislation for the Navajo Generating Station is in the best interest of the Navajo people.” The lease would: “train … our newer generation so they can become miners to support their families, provide … a college education of their children,” and restore lands “for livestock and wildlife habitat in addition cultural plant collection, which enables us to practice our cultural ways.” Unions are not a common organization in reservation communities, and tribal governments continue to have ambivalent relationships with them. Today, Local 1924 is one of two coal unions that operate in the reservation. The Union of Operating Engineers Local 953 represents the workers at the recently bought Navajo Mine on the eastern end of the reservation. Originally, there were two chapters of the UMWA on Black Mesa, but Local 1620 closed when the Black Mesa Mine shut down in 2006. Historically, tribal leaders have understood unions as threats to tribal sovereignty (Robbins 1978; O’Neill 2005; Kamper 2010). In 1958, the Navajo Nation Council passed a resolution banning unions in the reservation (Robbins 1978). In 1960, the Navajo Nation challenged the AFL-CIO’s right to organize under the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, claiming that treaty rights give tribes plenary power in their own lands. The following year, however, a U.S. District Court nullified the tribe’s right to ban unions and said that only Congress has authority over labor relations in reservations (O’Neill 2005). Afterward, tribal officials adopted a more pragmatic view toward unions, what Kamper (2010) called “pragmatic unionism” (101). Today tribal officials and community members see them as ways to gain more rights for Navajo workers. As Robbins (1978) wrote, “although the economic impacts of energy developments are depressingly slight, and even harmful, the introduction of huge energy projects has strongly affected Navajo labor relations with unions and federal agencies” (39). Navajo workers understand the exploitive nature of coal work. Although they support the industry, they are wary of the companies. One interviewee said that the union helped preserve job security and created safer working environments. Another interviewee told me: I grew up with the idea that union is bad. White collar workers and family. My dad was against unions. (But) I am a true blue union guy. Different companies that I’ve worked for, there are a lot of grievances and the company will stand behind you. Just look at the teachers, if there was no union then teachers would be fired left and right. Something like that be your mouthpiece. And I believe it. (CW2) The work at the mine is grueling and wages are paid hourly. Peabody Coal likes to highlight the number of Navajo employees it employs at the mine, but very few of them are salaried. Most of the employees with salaries are “company men,” who are nonNavajo and who live outside of the reservation. The contrast between the salaried staff and workers at the mine could not be starker. The union helps to alleviate this difference between salaried and hourly employees and acts as an important mediator between the Navajo people and the company (CW1). This organization is not formally part of the tribal government, corporation, or community. It translates ethos of working-class culture into the Navajo context and informs Navajo coal workers that they have working rights against the mining corporation, Peabody Coal. For more than forty years, the union has helped translate working-class culture into the cultural context of the Navajo Nation. An interviewee told me that he felt that the union was a good thing and that it improved the conditions of workers since he started there in the mid-1970s. He said, “When we first joined the union that was the only way to get a good wage scale and the union helped us a lot.” He continued, “They helped secure jobs through the bidding process,” a process that ensures that workers with senior rank get the jobs and shifts they want. This bidding procedure was won through union contracts and not something Peabody Coal used prior to the union. “We had that Indian preference and monetary wise and also health wise. We are the only union that offers 100 percent health benefits.” Union members meet twice a month to discuss their grievances and ongoing developments at the mine. During these T’
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eego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers meetings, Navajo coal workers communicate, coordinate, and elect “officers” to represent them in official contract negotiations with the company. They discuss wages, health benefits, shifts, and seniority. Through the union, workers are able to communicate their expectations of the Navajo tribal government effectively. They expect that the tribe will support policies that will continue coal mining and preserve their livelihood. Navajo coal workers translate values of hard work that is part of t’
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eego into a moral economy of coal that demands a right to livelihood. Some of my interviewees had strong criticisms of the union. As Gaventa (1982) showed in his classic study, coal unions become a power unto themselves and this was my interviewee’s point. He said, “I’ve seen documents of overstaffing at the Union Hall. People are sleeping and drinking on the job.” Others felt that the seniority system reduces opportunities for younger employees. Despite grounded criticism, the union still fosters a sense of solidarity among workers who share the same occupation risks. It produces an identity among Navajo laborers that is separate from the coal company and the tribal government. For many Navajo coal workers, this sense of collectivity only exists during contentious political times, such as the renewal of a coal lease or contract between the union and the company. At other times, though, this solidarity is simply nonexistent, and each worker slips back into his or her mundane and labor-intensive work routine. As Brubaker noted, identity in groups is not a permanent category but something that happens in a particular context to address a limited set of questions or issues. For the Navajo coal worker, solidarity and ideological understanding of the role of “coal workers” in Navajo development, U.S. modernization, and, in some instances, expressions of U.S. nationalism emerge during consequential political decisions such as the lease renewal but will disappear into the background once this question is over or resolved (Brubaker and Cooper 2000; Brubaker 2004). For Navajo coal workers, union-sponsored mobilizations reinforced this temporary sense of class identity and group belonging. In 2013, workers came together and demanded rights from the state. Their mobilization built on the subsistence ethic of t’
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eego and created an ideological moral economy of Navajo coal workers, evident in the preceding statements. These workers provided overlapping and largely consistent descriptions about coal work as a source of livelihood and critical income for their 81 families. In my interviews, their points were remarkably consistent and often emphasized that the money they earned through coal work paid for school fees and kept them rooted on the land. In these acts, Navajo coal workers forge a collective folk ideology to demand the continuation of the Navajo coal industry. This ideology is produced and promoted in political mobilizations. Therefore, the phrase t’
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ı t’
eego elevates a unique ethic among Navajo coal workers into a larger idiom of energy politics within the Navajo Nation. Not all Navajo people would agree with this interpretation of t’
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ı t’
eego. It is contextual and contingent. This is why many Navajo people find themselves in disagreement with the perspective of Navajo coal workers and their interpretations of historic Navajo values of hard work. Navajo environmental organizers and activists, in particular, hold radically different views on these same values (cf. Powell and Curley 2008; Powell 2015). The deployment of an identity, as coal workers, is a momentary political claim based on valuing hard labor, fulfilling a sense of livelihood, and staying close to home for work. The union organization provides Navajo coal workers with the space and leverage to develop this thinking and articulate an ideological claim about the meaning of coal and work in their lives. Without union support and resources, the moral economy of Navajo coal workers might not exist. Similar to earlier works on moral economy, it was a loose expression from a crowd about how society’s resources should be distributed. There are implications of fairness, justice, and rights. It is not always based on notions of subsistence, but in this case, ideas of work, livelihood, and survival from an early time in Navajo history became crucial in the deployment of demands to the (Navajo) state. Because it is a particular iteration of Navajo values and identity, this moral economy demands a renewal of the Navajo coal economy as a paternalistic model of development in the region. Coal workers believe that their labor built the Navajo Nation and improved overall conditions of life, providing power for electricity, jobs for families, money for school, and revenues for the tribal government. For this reason, there is a sense of indignation at the tribe’s wavering over lease contracts, even if the terms are unfavorable to the tribe. Navajo coal workers recognize that if the lease fails and the mine closes, their way of life is forever gone. 82 Curley Discussion and Conclusion Navajo coal work is more complicated than categories of employment and modernization; dependency and underdevelopment; or even environmental damage, risk, and politics of “recognition,” liberation, or resurgence. Coal work has a social life that produces complicated relationships to the industry in a capitalist economy. The mobilization in 2013 of Navajo coal workers for a power plant lease extension was an expression of their moral economy, a collectively held ideological claim about the proper order and distribution of resources within the Navajo Nation. In this article, I traced the production of moral economies for Navajo coal in relation to the organizational structure, resources, and sense of belonging that the union provides. I argued that the contemporary moral economy shared by many Navajo coal workers is rooted in the subsistence ethic of t’
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eego, which is an expression of hard work and maintaining one’s livelihood on ancestral lands. I showed how this ethic predates the coal economy and is not uniformly interpreted across the reservation but instead highlighted and heightened in coal-producing communities like Kayenta. Such a simple insight is sometimes lost in scholarship on indigenous peoples when a focus on ontological difference is featured. Methodologically, anticipating internal contestation and centering research and analysis on groups of actors and their relative relation to coal breaks apart what might become homogenizing assumptions of Navajo cultural values. This case study demonstrates that at times it becomes necessary to understand and account for competing internal sentiments on questions of a development project. Studies on extractive industries within the Navajo Nation focus too broadly on the collective understandings of indigenous peoples as objects of analysis, such as claiming to display “Navajo” attitudes toward the environment, leaning toward ideas of how they change over time within the community (temporal) and not how they are internally contested, frictional, and spatial. This scholarship misses the contestation of coal between Navajo actors and relative to their governing institutions. Not only is coal contested and complicated within the Navajo Nation but the terms of this complication and contestation are unique to the social and political actors involved. For Navajo coal workers and many members of their community, coal work is an expression of a kind of labor and relationship to the land that is rooted ironically in subsistence livelihoods. This benefits our understanding of Navajo people’s view of the environment and “development” and their participation in capital-intensive industries and economies. In this instance, the moral economy of Navajo coal workers is produced in the particular conditions of union activism. The geography of colonial relations between the United States, the State of Arizona, and the Navajo Nation dictate where coal activism occurs: backroom negotiations in Phoenix, public mobilization of workers inside and outside of the Navajo Nation, or lobbying in Washington, DC. This activism at tribal, state, and federal levels signals the tightening of “entanglement” of the Navajo people and their governing institutions into colonial capitalism. Such activism reveals how the Navajo Nation is spatially integrated into regional energy economies and political structures. With the decline of coal in recent years, this integration is in flux and subject to change in radical and unpredictable ways, a shifting political economy that triggers public displays of moral economies. The lesson of a particular class of Navajo workers and their multiple decades of labor in the Navajo coal economy yields critical insight into how we understand extractive industries and indigenous geographies today. The moral economy of Navajo coal workers not only helps us to understand the pressures of extractive industries on tribal lands, but it gives us a way to anticipate its social consequences of both booms and busts. In his seminal paper “The Making of the English Working Class,” Thompson (1966) wrote about the legacies of gone but not forgotten social classes: Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned, in their own lives as casualties. Our only criterion of judgment should not be whether or not a man’s actions are justified in the light of subsequent evolution. … In some lost causes we may find the cure to social evils which we have yet to cure. (13) Or as one coal worker put it: I would say that it gave me a good life, but there are times when you just felt like walking away from it. That was the source of income. That’s the only thing that I knew was to mine. … I did my job well and I was praised for it. So it was good and bad. (CW1) For the moral economy of Navajo coal workers, if their cause is lost and their industry forever in decline, T’
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eego and the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers their experience and collective understandings as a particular deployment of indigenous identity will remain in our memories and tell us something about the history and structuring of federal–tribal, indigenous–settler relations. Their moral frameworks persist. It is unfortunate that their voices are largely absent from scholarship on extraction in Indian country. They are the ones who chose to work in these mines and must bear much of its personal costs, from black lung, to work injuries, to lost time with family. It is a grueling and dangerous form of work. Navajo coal workers are talked about but never afforded an opportunity to speak. In light of recent developments in the Navajo coal industry, we learn that tribes are exploited in multiple ways through settler-colonial structures and regional energy development. Not only are their lands turned into the economic and energy fuel for the region, accruing reward upwards as in every capitalist relationship but tribal nations are demoralized and constantly reminded of their powerlessness. Colonial institutions like SRP perpetuate a sense of inevitability and defeat while pretending to champion the interest of tribes. It is a confusing and contradictory relationship. The legal and political links between tribes and states, utilities and coal mines, workers and employers demonstrate spatial limitations built on legacies of colonialism. Moral economies are responses to social change that tribal actors intuitively recognize as unjust. In their production and posture, these folk ideologies take on a life of their own and can diverge significantly from other grounded perspectives. In the end, they gesture toward resolutions of social wrongs perpetuated again and again. Acknowledgements The author thanks the article’s undisclosed reviewers and editor James McCarthy for their feedback, critiques, and support. ORCID Andrew Curley 7392-3565 http://orcid.org/0000-0002- Notes 1. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Ward Churchill was a well-known and cited scholar in Native 2. 83 American studies. Today, indigenous scholars avoid citing him because of his false identification as Native American and some disagreement with conclusions in his scholarship. I am citing his work here not to confirm his analysis but to include it as influential work during this time. This is a pseudonym. References Aberle, D. F. 1969. A plan for Navajo economic development. In Toward economic development for Native American communities: A compendium of papers submitted to the subcommittee on Economy in Government of the Joint Economic Committee, Congress of the United States, 91st Congress, 1st Session, Joint Committee, 223–76. Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office. Adams, W. Y., and L. T. Ruffing. 1977. Shonto revisited: Measures of social and economic change in a Navajo community, 1955–1971. American Anthropologist 79 (1):58–83. Ali, S. H. 2003. Mining, the environment, and indigenous development conflicts. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. Allison, J. R. 2015. Sovereignty for survival: American energy development and Indian self-Determination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Ambler, M. 1990. Breaking the iron bonds: Indian control of energy development. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas. Anthony Evans, T. J., M. Gamez, and E. Madly. 2013. Navajo Generating Station & Kkayenta Mine: An economic analysis for the Navajo Nation. Tempe: W. P. Carey School of Business, Arizona State University. Barbee, M. 2018. 200 protestors march at Arizona Capitol to oppose shutdown of Navajo Generating Station. Cronkite News, February 6. Accessed May 24, 2018. https://cronkitenews.azpbs.org/2018/02/06/hundredsprotesters-march-arizona-capitol-oppose-navajo-generating-station-shut/ Bernstein, H. 2007. Capitalism and moral economy: Land questions in sub-Saharan Africa. In Conference on poverty and capital, ed. Global Poverty Research Group and Brooks World Poverty Institute, 2–4. Manchester, UK: University of Manchester. Booth, W. J. 1994. On the idea of the moral economy. American Political Science Review 88 (3):653–67. Boutet, J.-S. 2014. Opening Ungava to industry: A decentering approach to indigenous history in subarctic Qu
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Journal of Genocide Research 8 (4):387–409. Wolford, W. 2005. Agrarian moral economies and neoliberalism in Brazil: Competing worldviews and the state in the struggle for land. Environment and Planning A 37 (2):241–61. ———. 2010. This land is ours now: Social mobilization and the meanings of land in Brazil. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. ANDREW CURLEY is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, NC 27599. E-mail: [email protected]. His research interests include indigenous geography, resource conflict, energy, water rights, land, tribal sovereignty, and Navajo studies.