The Settler Politics of Oil and Gas Leasing in the Greater Chaco

• In Event: Settler Colonialism and Scalable Scholarship: Studying Up on The Technopolitics of Indigenous Displacement And Dispossession - II

Abstract

This paper examines the techniques and technologies through which the American government and its contractors lease federally-managed lands and minerals for oil and gas development. Federal or public lands in the United States are also stolen lands, lands taken from indigenous peoples through colonial settlement. In the San Juan Basin of northwestern New Mexico, the contested nature of federal land management is particularly evident, as a shale boom encroaches in a landscape held sacred by Diné (Navajo) communities living on the eastern edges of the Navajo reservation as well as by dozens of tribes throughout the southwest. This landscape, referred to as the Greater Chaco landscape for its proximity to Chaco Canyon, is now a patchwork of federal, state, tribal, and private territorial jurisdiction. An outcome of 19th century railroad, homesteading, and Indian allotment policies, this checkerboard pattern of jurisdiction is extremely consequential for hydrocarbon extraction, as most of the region’s minerals are managed by federal agencies regardless of current or ancestral surface occupancy. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in northwestern New Mexico, this paper ethnographically explores the processes through which parcels of surface land and subsurface minerals are identified by private interests as desirable for leasing, and the technologies of jurisdiction (Pasternak 2017) through which leases are adjudicated. Bringing STS methodologies to bear on the leasing process has the potential to compliment settler colonial critique and expand the purview of STS by highlighting the practices through which dispossession of indigenous lands continues under the guise of managing the commons.

Author

• Sonia Grant, University of Chicago