about

I am an Assistant Professor in the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, located on the territories of the Tohono O’odham, Yaqui, and Apache peoples. I am Diné and a member of the Navajo Nation.

Building on ethnographic research, my publications speak to how Indigenous communities understand “resources,” infrastructure, and development in an era of energy transition and climate change.

In 2018, I presented aspects of my research to the House Committee on Natural Resources as it considered the fate of the Navajo Generating Station .

After a postdoc and two years as faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I  joined the University of Arizona in 2020.

My 2018 article, “T’áá hwó ají t’éego,” (open access) documents voices of coal workers in a collapsing Navajo coal economy.

Currently, I am finishing a book that focuses on the 2013 renewal of a lease between the Navajo Nation and the Salt River Project over a coal-fired power plant. The book highlights the colonial and environmental implications of this event.

With funding through the Sloan Foundation, I am also working with a research team trying to understand the social implications of energy transition and resource development for energy rich tribal communities.

My forthcoming work thinks through questions of the Anthropocene and climate change and how Indigenous practices, histories, and experience challenge some of the ways our narratives of environmental crises are framed.