To date, the Navajo Nation has not developed its own energy policy. For more than thirty years, academics, activists, and policymakers have been urging the Tribal Council to establish a coherent energy policy for mineral development on the reservation, but with little legislative success.100 Increasingly, the movement for such a policy is shaped by the politics and possibilities of developing wind and solar resources, as either complementary or alternative technologies to coal, oil and gas extraction on tribal lands. Some tribal leaders, like Navajo Nation Vice-President Ben Shelly, are turning renewed attention to developing a tribal energy policy, especially as controversies emerge over appropriate technologies and land use for new power plants, wind farms, and
transmission lines. Shelly raised the continued need and complicated challenges in setting such a policy for the Nation, relating the burgeoning movement for a tribal energy policy to the broader, older, national movement embodied by the intertribal Council of Energy Resources Tribes (CERT).
“There is also another energy policy, which is CERT’s. Now this is a Native American Indian policy – they have a group, CERT. It’s still around. But I went
100 At least as early as 1980, Lorraine T. Ruffing’s critique of the uneven development of mineral resources
among American Indian Native Nations, and the Navajo Nation in particular, stands out as a thoughtful, thorough analysis and agenda for action to increase tribal sovereignty vis-à-vis control over its energy resources. Her analysis focuses on the power of transnational corporations, American contract law, Indian mineral dependency, federal mismanagement, and effects of a misunderstood “energy crisis” in shaping how Native Nations manage – or fail to manage – their energy resources, through tribal policy change. See Ruffing 1980.
to their meeting in Las Vegas and I sat in and when they are talking about their energy policy, it’s back in the coal, coal, coal days – coal and gas. Nothing to do with alternative energy. So I seen some old faces, they all know each other. They all been in there too long. That’s the way I look at it. New young people, the ones that look to the future, I sense that is what needs to be done … I told them, we have to update a new Native American energy policy, a new one, to represent all of us Indian Native Nations that have energy resources. The way I look at things now, is we want to be the players in energy. How do you get there? You form a team. Right now, Indian energy people are just spectators in a ball game, a basketball game. That’s the analogy I put. I want to have a Native American team playing big energy. I’d rather go in there fighting to win, than lose, and do it by playing it. I want to play the game. I want to win, I want to play, set rules, and I am in that playing field with them right now … I said if you [CERT] don’t do it, Navajo is going to go forward by itself. That is what I am pushing right now. We are going to form our own team and then they can join us if they want. These are the ones [CERT] that really actually plays underneath with Congress. If this thing gets together it would cover every Native American energy resource, not just Navajo alone. But if they don’t do it we’ll do it, because we are big enough and we have a lot of resources.”101
Shelly is not alone in his critique of CERT as remaining too embedded in coal, following an increasingly outdated and politically unsustainable model of energy
development. Even as he critiques CERT’s leadership and urges the Navajo Nation to go forward on its own, the history of CERT is a movement intimately tied to the Navajo Nation. It was formed in 1975 under the leadership of Navajo Chairman Peter
MacDonald, just a few years following his proposal for coal gasification facilities in Burnham. Working in coalition with twenty-four other energy resource owning Native Nations, MacDonald successfully formed “an organization capable of collective action” (Ruffing 1980, 48). Control over tribal resources was its primary aim, constituting a radical departure from the dominant, colonial development model of federal and/or corporate control and management of tribal mineral resources. As President of CERT,
101 Interview with Ben Shelly, Former Vice President of the Navajo Nation (Vice President at the time of
MacDonald brought his experience on one of the most mineral-rich nations into this new national platform for intertribal advocacy, critiquing the Carter administration for not only failing to include leaders of Native Nations at the pivotal energy policy talks held at Camp David, but for ignoring altogether that 20% of the U.S.’s mineral resources lie beneath Indian territory (Ruffing 1980, 49).
MacDonald imagined the Navajo Nation’s mineral wealth to be of great historical significance, harboring the power to control power in the greater Southwest region, thus affecting the emerging “SunBelt” cities of Phoenix and Los Angeles as they boomed and bloomed. MacDonald and other CERT leaders further challenged U.S. leadership when CERT consulted with members of OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting
Countries), countries hailing primarily from the Arab world and Latin America, transferring the U.S.’s negative image of OPEC to the newly formed CERT. However, given the variety of mineral resources CERT members held (coal, oil, gas, and uranium), CERT’s power to have any real effect on prices was limited (Ruffing 1980, 50-51). Moreover, lacking independent legal status (in other words, the true sovereignty enjoyed by OPEC member countries), Native Nations that were members of CERT were limited in legal recourse for transforming the exploitative nature of existing leases of tribal land. MacDonald’s proposal of “joint ventures,” with particular stipulations, became the method that CERT hoped would transform the colonial relationship between Native Nations and energy corporations (Needham 2006, 336).
No matter what its relative lack of success, CERT’s significance as a model of energy activism cannot be underestimated. Thirty-five years later, CERT continues to operate as a voice for mineral-rich Native Nations in addressing Congress and mobilizing