Overview
In recent years Native American tribes and communities have been on the forefront of energy justice battles. Many Native communities have been caught in the crosshairs of industrial extraction and environmental degradation, while others have looked to leverage energy extraction for their own economic and political ends. This learning unit explores how different Native American and indigenous groups have engaged with energy issues and shaped national energy development.
Energy justice is a term devised by scholars to describe community-led efforts to promote a more human-centered outlook on energy systems and development. Scholars studying energy justice have identified three major dimensions of energy justice. Distributional justice considers who bears the environmental and economic burden of energy systems, and who reaps the rewards. Recognition-based justice asks whether different community interests are adequately represented in decision-making around energy projects. Procedural justice considers who actually makes key decisions, and whether communities have procedural opportunities for input and decision-making power.
The primary sources in this learning unit demonstrate how these justice concerns have animated Indigenous energy activism in recent decades. The primary sources in this unit cover a range of topics: uranium mining in the Navajo Nation; coal mining and Native American sovereignty; the 2016 anti-oil protest at Standing Rock; and the place of Native communities in the ongoing green energy “transition.” Each helps to illuminate how Native American communities have acted around different dimensions of energy justice.
What this learning unit reveals is that Native communities are not monolithic–their histories intersect with energy history in different ways, and their approaches to issues of energy justice have differed across different contexts. Some have seen firsthand the environmental and health effects of the energy industry. In this unit, a map of uranium mining in the Navajo Nation attests to the perils created when mineral extraction overlaps with reservation landscapes. Other Indigenous groups have debated how best to navigate issues created by the downstream movement of energy supplies. This teaching unit showcases two case studies in energy justice issues raised by oil pipelines. The first, the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, saw Alaskan Natives fighting for forms of procedural justice as they settled land claims that facilitated pipeline construction. The second, the #NoDAPL Standing Rock protests, involves the stauncher forms of opposition to pipeline construction led by members of the Standing Rock Sioux.
And yet, for some tribal groups, energy justice has meant taking control of energy production in order to leverage them for tribal sovereignty and economic development. This unit illustrates this approach through a primary source from the Council of Energy Resource Tribes (CERT), a group formed in the 1970s to develop reservation mineral resources.
This unit reveals that the intersections between Indigenous history and energy history are complex, and that calls for energy justice can take many forms. The sources gathered in this unit will help students think through the different ways that Indigenous groups have navigated the energy industry, environmental and economic concerns, and justice principles.
Cite this overview:
LaRiccia, Dante. “Overview: Environmental Justice and Indigenous Communities.” Energy History Online. Yale University. 2025.
Library Items
Uranium Mining in the Navajo Nation
Between 1946 and 1986, the Navajo Nation was the location of intensive uranium mining operations that supported U.S. nuclear arms and energy programs. While nuclear programs championed a futuristic energy source, Navajo communities increasingly confronted the ecological and health risks associated with uranium mining. From radioactive materials to waste runoff, citizens of the Navajo Nation have confronted the toxic legacies of uranium mining for decades. They have suffered the environmental and health effects of an industry central to futuristic technologies from nuclear arms to civilian energy stations.
Resource Mining and Native Sovereignty
Energy justice often means sovereignty over energy systems, and for many of the Native American tribes whose reservation lands encompass energy resources, this means control over those resources. For decades, the federal government maintained final authority over tribes’ leasing agreements with mining companies. As a result, many tribal authorities fought to control their own decisions around industry, economic development, and energy development.
TAPS and Native Land Claims
In 1968, oil was discovered in Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, sparking hasty plans by multinational oil companies for the construction of a Trans-Alaska Pipeline System (TAPS). The problem for the oil companies was that Alaska Natives were then in negotiations with federal and state authorities over each parties’ land claims in the new state. Alaskan Natives, represented by the Alaska Federation of Natives, looked to maintain historic land claims against efforts by the state government to gain title to larger tracts of Alaskan property. The discovery of oil and the plans for TAPS only placed greater emphasis on the resolution of these negotiations.
Standing Rock Protests
Many energy justice battles have been waged over the environmental impacts of energy infrastructures. Community members and activists frequently work to ensure that marginalized and vulnerable populations are not made to bear the environmental burdens of energy systems. One of the most famous examples of this principle of energy justice developed around the Dakota Access Pipeline. A major oil pipeline running from oil fields in North Dakota through South Dakota, Iowa, and Illinois, the Dakota Access Pipeline posed a threat to regional water supplies, particularly those of the Standing Rock Reservation that straddles the North Dakota-South Dakota border. The pipeline also threatened to disturb what many Sioux considered sacred land, home to burial sites and ancestral remains. Beginning in 2016, indigenous resistance to the pipeline swelled into a nation-wide movement, with thousands joining anti-pipeline encampments at Standing Rock, including members of more that 300 federally recognized tribes.
Additional Reading
James Robert Allison, Sovereignty for Survival: American Energy Development and Indian Self-Determination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015).
Marjane Ambler, Breaking the Iron Bonds: Indian Control of Energy Development (Lawrence, Kan: Univ. Press of Kansas, 1990).
Nick Estes, Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance (London/New York: Verso, 2019).
Donald Mitchell, Take My Land, Take My Life: The Story of Congress’s Historic Settlement of Alaska Native Land Claims, 1960-1971 (University of Alaska Press, 2001).
Andrew Needham, Power Lines: Phoenix and the Making of the Modern Southwest (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Dana E. Powell, Landscapes of Power: Politics of Energy in the Navajo Nation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018).
Traci Brynne Voyles, Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015).
Author Bio
Dante LaRiccia is a PhD candidate in the History Department at Yale University. His research explores the entangled histories of U.S. colonial expansion and the globalization of the carbon economy during the twentieth century.