ABSTRACT
The Rocky Mountain and Northern Great Plains states of the western US are facing some of the most important and far-reaching changes in the history of the region. Community-level interaction patterns, personal stresses, and a broad range of human behaviors that have very little direct connection to the number of dollars in a person’s pocket. One of the first problems of discussing the social or “socioeconomic impacts” of western developments is that the terminology can imply so much that it actually communicates very little. At one extreme, “socioeconomic impacts” include all of the changes caused by a development that are not explicitly physical or biological in nature. At the other extreme, “socioeconomic impacts” are a specific type of strictly economic impacts. The paradoxes of western energy developments are in evidence throughout this volume, but perhaps nowhere are they more visible than when the developments affect Native Americans, or Indians.
