ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how longstanding extractive legacies and discrepancies of energy access in the Dine (Navajo) Nation are being challenged through transition efforts in the early twenty-first century. Extraction has become just that in Navajo energy and economic development. The footprint of the burgeoning energy industry became increasingly visible on Navajo territory in the latter half of the twentieth century, with coal mine expansions, oil well proliferation, new above- and below-ground transport infrastructure, more substations and, most recently, the emergence of shale gas fracturing. Compared to the historical development and contemporary state of the movement against fossil fuels and other intensive extraction of Navajo natural resources, Navajo Transitional Energy Corporation (NTEC) is a barometer of the Navajo Nation's fledgling energy policy. When global energy extraction struggles are emplaced, as ethnography aims to do, we see how "transition"—much like "sustainability"—has traction in some, but not all, conversations. Transition, to many Dine grassroots activists, means something different than transition for NTEC.
