Landscapes Of Power: Politics Of Energy In The Navajo Nation (new Ecologies For [Paperback]

InLandscapes of PowerDana E. Powell examines the rise and fall of the controversial Desert Rock Power Plant initiative in New Mexico to trace the political conflicts surrounding native sovereignty and contemporary energy development on Navajo (Diné) Nation land. Powell's historical and ethnographic account shows how the coal-fired power plant project's defeat provided the basis for redefining the legacies of colonialism, mineral extraction, and environmentalism. Examining the labor of activists, artists, politicians, elders, technicians, and others, Powell emphasizes the generative potential of Navajo resistance to articulate a vision of autonomy in the face of twenty-first-century colonial conditions. Ultimately, Powell situates local Navajo struggles over energy technology and infrastructure within broader sociocultural life, debates over global climate change, and tribal, federal, and global politics of extraction.

InLandscapes of PowerDana E. Powell takes an historical and ethnographic approach to understanding how a controversial coal power plant slated for development in the Navajo (Diné) Nation was defeated and, in the process of its destruction, generated the conditions for new understandings of indigenous environmentalism to emerge.

Dana Powell is Associate Professor in the Graduate Institute of Humanities in Medicine at Taipei Medical University, Affiliate Faculty in the College of Indigenous Studies at National Dong Hwa University, and Research Associate at the Institute for Environment, Energy, and Economics at Appalachian State University.

"In this masterful study Dana E. Powell weaves a rich narrative that intertwines Navajo leaders' efforts to reverse a depressed economy with the complexities of the political atmosphere, tribal sovereignty, the imperative to address environmental justice and climate change, and Navajo concerns about land use.Landscapes of Poweris l4