wahgraphy

On December 11, I joined my friends and comrades Janene Yazzie, Nate Etsitty and Felix Earle and Brandon Benallie to talk about food sovereignty in the Navajo Nation. Thank you Eugénie Clement for organizing this event. It was really great to hear from everyone here and connect digitally when we can’t meet in person.

Link is found here: https://fb.watch/2Gn-UfZOXf/

Link to full article here: https://www.hcn.org/articles/indigenous-affairs-water-contested-water-settlements-inflamed-the-navajo-nations-health-crisis

“The Navajo Nation is at the center of the worst global pandemic in recent memory. Although the total number of COVID-19 cases is small compared to national hotspots, the rate of infection is among the nation’s highest.

Today, national media is focused on Navajo water insecurity — a clear threat to Diné people during the pandemic. About 30% to 40% of reservation residents do not have regular running water. But behind this statistic lies a history of racism and underdevelopment. Even as white communities benefited from decades of expensive water infrastructure, Diné communities were denied the rights and resources necessary to access the same water.

Water settlements between tribes and states are a source of much of this continued underdevelopment. For Indigenous people, these settlements also represent colonial dispossession, because they often suspend allocation of water rights and funding for water infrastructure until tribal leaders give in to the state’s demands. In 2005, for example, then-Arizona Republican Sen. Jon denied the Navajo Nation 6,411 acre-feet of water until it resolved its claims to the Colorado River with the state of Arizona.” ….

Julian Brave Noisecat interviewed Wahleah Johns and I about the history of coal extraction and energy transition in the Navajo Nation. The episode is called, “Episode 7: One Navajo’s Fight for a Just Energy Transition.” In this interview I supplement Wahleah’s interview with regional historical context. The podcast generally focuses on the the politics of climate change and practices of energy transition. Check out the other episodes on Apple Podcast or Spotify. I really enjoy this podcast and listen to it walking the dog, washing the dishes, or whenever I’m doing chores and I want to think about things.

In this response to a provocation from Natalie Oswin, “An Other Geography,” Sara Smith and I write in “Against colonial grounds”, that we need to critically rethink institutions of higher learning. We need to examine how disciplines and universities are complicit in the reproduction of colonial histories and myths of white supremacy.  We argue that if we take indigenous geographies seriously, we’d conceptually have the tools to think though many of today’s pressing moral, ethical, and political problems, from border walls to environmental sustainability. We also reflect on our location as participants in this system within a university in the U.S. South and how this adds to racism and anti-Black violence. The abstract below does a better job a summarizing the commentary.

“In this response to Natalie Oswin’s provocation, ‘An other geography’, we consider how we might work against settler narratives and structures from our situated positions in the discipline and in a specific academic institution in the US South. Following Diné student Majerle Lister, we ask what it would mean to consider giving the land back: what does that entail? The academic institutions we inhabit were built to insure white futurity, on fictive histories. Can they be retrofitted in the present to enable the futurity of Indigenous people and theorizations? Can we turn our discipline’s history of erasure inside out, to center the land, people, and practices that were both crucial to and absent from it except as shadowy and metaphorical presences? We draw on our own teaching, and from scholarship in Indigenous and Black Studies, to consider what it might look like to return land and reconfigure relations among those who have been cast aside by white patriarchal settler structures, but in incommensurate ways.”

Listen to Nick Estes’ interview of me regarding my work on coal, development, water rights and environmentalism in the Navajo Nation. Link for Apple Tunes or Soundcloud

My article on the meaning of work and livelihood for Diné coal workers. The article is Open Access through the Annals of American Association of Geographers website. Here is the link: T’áá hwó ají t’éego and 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’áá hwó ají t’éego, 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.