Drawing from ethnographic research in Montana, this article aims to understand the precarious economic position of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and its response to the partial closure of a coal power plant that produces electricity for the urban Pacific Northwest. The Tribe estimates that one in five of its tribal members would lose employment if the plant should fully close. Thanks to a decades-long process of incorporation into the regional coal economy, tribal development approaches reflect a “carbon sovereignty” logic that seeks to win sovereignty through coal development. In light of closure, this logic has shifted towards alternative energy sources. To explain this, I turn to dependency theory to provide insights into the nature of tribal economies amid changing economic and political conditions created by the energy transition. Dependency theory can help explain how tribal nations are incorporated into capitalism via resource extraction, particularly of fossil fuels, and understand how tribal economies are made “underdeveloped.” Subsequently, dependency theory can help illuminate the basis for why tribes articulate notions of sovereignty tied to energy development. Upon the decline of fossil fuels, dependency theory helps make sense of shifting notions of sovereignty as a response to economic anxieties about the energy transition.
AllisonJR (2015) Sovereignty for Survival: American Energy Development and Indian Self determination. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
2.
AminS (1974) Accumulation and development: A theoretical model. Review of African Political Economy1(1): 9–26.
3.
AminSMcDonaghF (1973) Neo-Colonialism in West Africa. London, UK: Penguin Harmondsworth.
4.
BoggsJP (1984) The Challenge of Reservation Resource Development: A Northern Cheyenne Instance. In: Native Americans and Energy Development. Boston, MA: Anthropology Resource Center, 205–236.
5.
CardosoFHFalettoE (2024) Dependency and development in Latin America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
ChurchillWLaDukeW (1986) Native America: The political economy of radioactive colonialism. Insurgent Sociologist13(3): 51–78.
10.
CoulthardG (2014) Red Skin, White Masks : Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
11.
CurleyA (2019) T’áá hwó ají t’éego and the moral economy of navajo coal workers. Annals of the American Association of Geographers109(1): 71–86.
12.
CurleyA (2021) Infrastructures as colonial beachheads: The central Arizona project and the taking of navajo resources. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space39(3): 387–404.
13.
CurleyA (2022) Dependency theory and indigenous politics. In: The SAGE Handbook of Marxism. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 1150–1166.
14.
CurleyA (2023) Carbon Sovereignty: Coal, Development, and Energy Transition in the Navajo Nation. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press.
15.
DennisonJ (2012) Colonial Entanglement: Constituting a Twenty-First-Century Osage Nation. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.
16.
Dunbar-OrtizR, ed. (1979) Economic development in American Indian Reservations. Albuquerque, NM: Native American Studies, University of New Mexico.
17.
FrankAG (1967) Capitalism and underdevelopment in Latin America, 93. New York, NY: NYU Press.
18.
FraserN (2022) Cannibal Capitalism: How our System is Devouring Democracy, Care, and the Planet – and What We Can Do About It. London, UK: Verso.
LaDukeW (1999) All Our Relations: Native Struggles for Land and Life. Boston, MA: South End Press.
22.
LambertV (2009) Choctaw Nation: A Story of American Indian Resurgence. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
23.
PasternakS (2017) Grounded Authority: The Algonquins of Barriere Lake against the State. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
24.
PeñaR (2019) Northern Cheyenne Tribe comments to DEQ regarding the October 2019 Revised Remedy Evaluation Report (“RER”) Part I for the Units 1 and 2 ponds at Colstrip.
RistG (2002) The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith. London, UK: Zed Books.
29.
RobertsonD (1979) Power plant and industrial fuel use of 1978: Fuel replacement. The Harvard Environmental Law Review3: 214–235.
30.
RodneyW (1982) How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press.
31.
RoemerKFHaggertyJH (2022) The energy transition as fiscal rupture: Public services and resilience pathways in a coal company town. Energy Research Social Science91: 102752.
32.
RostowWW (1990) The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Southeastern Montana Development Corporation (2022). Comprehensive Economic Development Strategy: 2022–2027 revision. Technical report, Southeastern Montana Development Corporation.
35.
TaylorG (1980) The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act, 1934-45. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
36.
The Red Nation (2021) The Red Deal: Indigenous Action to Save our Earth. Brooklyn, NY: Common Notions.
WalksalongW (2023) The Biden administration must reinstate the coal leasing moratorium.
42.
WhiteR (1988) The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment, and Social Change Among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
WolfeP (2006) Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native. Journal of Genocide Research8(4): 387–409.
46.
Ziontz, Pirtle, Moresset, and Ernstoff (1974). “Petition of the Northern Cheyenne Indian Tribe to Rogers C. B. Morton, Volume II: Appendix,”. A-1, K. Ross Toole Papers, series V, box 28, folder 2, Mansfield Library, University of Montana.
