T’áá hwó ají t’éegoand the Moral Economy of Navajo Coal Workers

Abstract

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.

The evolving borderland of energy geographies

“…As evidence of the cross-cutting scope of energy geographies, Behrsin's (2019) work integrates both STS and Marxist political economy in order to critique the scientific knowledge enabling renewable energy transitions.While this scholarship helps to establish a foundation for intersections between energy geographies and STS, additional avenues can be explored. For example, engaging Lave's (2015) research on the emergence of new environmental knowledge regimes and Goldstein's (2015) work on "divergent expertise" could help to better elucidate the actors/knowledge claims contributing to (or absent from) energy policy debates and decision making processes.Based on our review, a notable underrepresentation within energy geographies is indigenous knowledge.WhileCurley's (2018aCurley's ( , 2018b work is helping to give voice to members of the Navajo Nation that are currently grappling with whether and how to transition away from a coal-based energy economy, additional research is needed in other indigenous landscapes enmeshed in energy development/transitions. The MHA Nation on the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota is a notable research gap, particularly as the reservation lies within the Bakken shale basin.…”

“Why would they care?”: Youth, resource extraction, and climate change in northern British Columbia, Canada

“…This can practically result in extractive industries being responsible for state obligations, including environmental oversight (Cameron and Levitan 2014). The reorganization of decision making and transfer of responsibilities to resource extractive industries increasingly guides economic options in rural, remote, northern, and Indigenous communities (Cameron and Levitan 2014;Curley 2018). Youth are directly impacted by these shifts as they influence employment and education options (Cairns 2013).…”

“…(Davis and Todd 2017, 764) Investment in an ideology based on dispossession and a perceived singular future is a key characteristic of settler futurity and, indeed, in resource extraction in rural and remote locales in Canada. Settler colonialism seeks to not only reproduce its likeness-what Lorenzo Veracini (2011, 3) has described as "a persistent drive to ultimately supersede the conditions of its operation"-but also to naturalize settler colonial structures, thereby attempting to limit how we perceive, resist, and engage environmental challenges, such as impacts of extractive economies on rural and remote northern and Indigenous communities (Coulthard 2014;Curley 2018).…”

“…Uncertainty, and the responsibility of the individual for their economic wellbeing, are internalized by youth; in the words of Cairns (2013, 340), a “binary of success and failure” structures imagined futures. Internalizing neoliberal uncertainty, while at the same time emphasizing individual failure, masks structural inequities—inequities that include the impact of boom‐and‐bust economies locally and globally (Shandro et al 2011), the uneven impact of neoliberal policies (Pimlott‐Wilson and Hall 2017), and the seeming lack of alternate options created by resource capitalism (Curley 2019).…”

“…I do not, however, discuss the relationship between Indigenous sovereignty and resource extraction at length in this paperalthough, as will be shown below, in our youth-led research we start our conversations from these relationships and return to them throughout our activities. For more on why climate change, decision making, and resource extraction cannot be disparate from Indigenous sovereignty, see Simpson (2017), Whyte (2017Whyte ( , 2018, Curley (2018), Daigle (2018), Spice (2018), Million (2018), and Yazzie (2018). Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte comprised a detailed resource on Indigenous climate justice, which can be viewed at: https://kylewhyte.cal.msu.edu/climatejustice/.…”