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This chapter describes the grassroots movement that erupted on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation to resist non-Indian mining and change forever the trajectory of Indian energy development. As news of Consolidation Coal’s massive proposal spread, tribal members connected this project to regional plans being made for the Northern Plains and began to see coal mining as a final attack on the homeland. Opponents thus launched a passionate resistance movement, fueled partly by concerns over the physical destruction of sacred landscapes, but mostly driven by fears that mining would bring outsiders to disrupt existing customs and values. Becoming minorities in their own land, the Northern Cheyenne believed the tribe would cease to exist as a unique indigenous community.But to mobilize an effective fight for survival, tribal members needed help. This chapter thus describes the confluence of interests among Indians, ranchers, and environmentalists, who cooperated to foment resistance to coal mining in Southeast Montana. This odd partnership helped galvanize Northern Cheyenne against their leaders’ development plans, but importantly, most tribal members did not oppose all mining. The majority favored development as long as their tribal government could regulate its pace and scale so that customs and norms remained undisturbed.

This final chapter in the first section returns to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation to demonstrate the tribe’s continued pursuit of large and lucrative coal deals throughout the 1960s. It reveals that tribal leaders were not simply passive witnesses to the construction of energy deals but increasingly sophisticated and active participants. Yet, although Cheyenne leaders may have increased their expertise to secure better deals – culminating with Consolidation Coal’s massive proposal described in the Prologue – their focus remained on maximizing financial return. This blinded leaders to their constituents’ concerns that large-scale mining could harm the reservation’s environment and disrupt customs and norms sustaining their indigenous community.

If the Prologue presents the specific action that altered the state of reservation resource development, this first chapter explains how we got there. Opening with the federal government’s warm embrace of the first energy proposals to the Northern Cheyenne tribe in the 1960s, the chapter describes the legal regime that placed federal, not tribal, officials in charge of reservation development. Tracking the ideological underpinnings of these laws back to the 1930s, it shows that while John Collier’s Indian New Deal ended the worst of federal Indian policies – such as allotment and forced assimilation – paternalistic assumptions of Indian inferiority remained in federal law. Further, the chapter demonstrates how laws governing reservation development were patterned off a dysfunctional legal regime used for leasing public minerals, which allowed energy companies to acquire vast amounts of resources on the cheap. Little of this, of course, was known to Cheyenne leaders in the 1960s, who collaborated with federal officials to secure the largest and most lucrative energy contracts possible.

Sadly, just as energy tribes secured recognition of their sovereign rights to control resource development, the market for Indian energy collapsed. This Epilogue explains the changes in international energy markets that produced a glut of cheap foreign oil in mid-1980s, making investment in tribal-led energy projects uneconomical. It also updates readers on the fitful attempts by the Northern Cheyenne, Crow, and Navajo to establish mineral revenues amid fluctuating energy markets, and details the intense intra-tribal debates over resource development that continue to divide these communities. Despite these setbacks, however, the book concludes on a hopeful note, describing subsequent changes to federal law that continue to expand tribal control over reservation resources. The last anecdote offers CERT Chairman Peter MacDonald’s 1982 farewell address as an opportunity to summarize the energy tribes’ momentous efforts. These groups mobilized a defense of the homeland, developed the institutional capacity to regulate energy development, and secured legal authority over reservation resources. Only the successful execution of that authority to alleviate suffocating poverty remains.

Setting the stage for the momentous actions that would alter the trajectory of Indian energy development, in particular, and tribal sovereignty, more generally, the Prologue describes the massive energy proposal the Consolidation Coal Company delivered to the Northern Cheyenne tribe in the summer of 1972. Although not a surprise to Northern Cheyenne leaders who had been working to secure this lucrative deal for some time, the offer placed the community in a precarious position. To reject it meant only more poverty, but many believed that accepting a project of these dimensions could threaten the continued existence of the tribe. In the end, tribal leaders would not make the decision on whether to accept Consolidation’s proposal, ordinary tribal members would. Launching a grassroots movement to protect the homeland, the Northern Cheyenne rejected the proposal, determined to develop their own minerals, and promised to alter Indians’ historic role as observers to the expropriation of tribal resources. The revolution in Indian energy development began in Lame Deer, Montana.

The Introduction lays out the book’s central claim that, in the 1970s, energy tribes expanded their capacity to govern reservation resources and thus secured a belated recognition of their legal authority to develop these assets. After first describing the antiquated legal structure that prevented tribes from controlling reservation development, the introduction highlights the transformative role the Northern Cheyenne played in halting mining projects threatening its community. This tribe also spearheaded a national movement to prepare similarly situated tribes to control energy development and to demand changes in federal law that recognized tribal sovereignty over reservation resources. The Introduction situates this story of expanding tribal sovereignty within American Indian historiography on the Indian self-determination policy, but shows how it provides a surprisingly missing explanation for how tribes reclaimed control over their resources. In addition, this work contributes to the literature in energy and environmental history by demonstrating how local actions to shape development emanated out to affect global resource flows and the national legal structures governing those resources.