Cet article propose une réflexion politico-écologique sur la souveraineté Navajo (Diné), soulignant les interprétations vécues et territoriaux de la souveraineté, l'élargissement des notions juridiques standards de la souveraineté qui dominent le discours public sur le développement économique et de l'énergie tribale. To intervene in these broad debates, I propose that there are multiple landscapes of power shaping Navajo territory, which must be brought into the ongoing, urgent debates over how the Navajo Nation might develop a more sustainable energy policy for the future. Broadly, these re-significations of sovereignty point toward a distinct modality of environmental action that suggests other kinds of relationships are at stake, challenging assumptions made by adversaries and allies alike that the politics of protesting (in this case) coal technologies is a practice with self-evident ethics. The article follows the controversy surrounding a proposed coal fired power plant known as Desert Rock, placing the phantom project in a longer, enduring history of struggle over energy extraction on Navajo land in order to illuminate this contested future. Operating from a critical analysis of settler colonialism, I suggest that alternative understandings of sovereignty – as expressed by Diné tribal members in a range of expressive practices – open new possibilities for thinking about how sovereign futures might be literally constructed through specific energy infrastructures. This article offers a political-ecological reflection on Navajo (Diné) sovereignty, emphasizing lived and territorial interpretations of sovereignty, expanding our standard, juridical-legal notions of sovereignty that dominate public discourse on tribal economic and energy development. Lastly, I focus on the role that women, matrilineal kinship and specific female deities play in the continuity of their struggle. I bring together theoretical frameworks and literature that reveal how Navajo history traverses and coheres within both settler colonialism and resource colonialism. Through ethnographic narratives, I highlight the central role of sheep and shepherding as a continued practice of the everyday resistance to the colonial conditions imposed upon them. ![]() My interlocutors shared stories that make stark the brutality of federal Indian policies on Navajo life, and at the same time show resilience and determination in the face of colonialism. In this report, I will show how the Navajo community now residing on the so-called Hopi Partitioned Lands has employed and called upon place-based relational politics, cultural values, and daily practices of refusal to endure under the harshest conditions of colonial invasions, internal and external changes and resource extraction. This report is a story of refusal by those who remain. Couched as an effort to resolve what was called the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, the act was actually the result of an ongoing effort to exploit mineral resources in the area. The Department of Justice undertook a plan to relocate more than 14,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi. Black Mesa was crisscrossed and split by barbed wire fencing designating boundaries. In 1974, the Navajo and Hopi Settlement Act made almost a million acres of shared Navajo-Hopi land in northern Arizona exclusive Hopi territory, called Hopi Partitioned Lands (HPL). ![]() ![]() In 1964, a conglomeration of companies known as Peabody Western Coal Company (now Peabody Energy), first signed a deal with the Navajo Nation and then the Hopi Tribe, granting the company mineral rights to strip mine the high desert plateau of Black Mesa seated within the 1882 boundaries of the Navajo and Hopi reservations. There are an estimated twenty to fifty billion tons of high grade, low sulfur coal underlying the Colorado Plateau in a stretch of Arizona desert known as Black Mesa.Since the 1970s, the Navajo (Diné) community of Black Mesa has faced a tremendous battle against particularly insidious types of colonialism that continue to endure into the present day.
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