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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.

After spending the 1970s developing the institutional capacity to effectively govern their resources, energy tribes now demanded that federal law recognize their authority to make development decisions. This final chapter documents, once again, the pivotal role the Northern Cheyenne tribe played in this process. With Ronald Reagan’s massive budget cuts forcing tribes to look increasingly to private-tribal partnerships to extract their minerals and secure revenue, the Northern Cheyenne executed a 1982 agreement with the Atlantic Richfield Company. Federal officials, however, were reluctant to approve the deal because it did not conform to the 1938 Indian Mineral Leasing Act, exposing how embedded notions of Indian inferiority continued to hinder tribal development. In response, the Northern Cheyenne, the Council of Energy Resource Tribes, and their allies within the federal government and the energy industry, pushed to change the law. The result was the 1982 Indian Mineral Development Act that authorized tribes to enter into whatever type of resource development agreement they desired, subject only to final federal approval. This new law reversed the historic roles of federal and tribal governments, giving energy tribes primary authority to determine the fate of their resources.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This chapter explores the historical relationship between Indigenous Americans and wolves illustrated through the stories of Indigenous peoples of North America, especially on the Great Plains and the Intermountain West. Tribal accounts have not been previously employed in scholarly examinations of the origins of “dogs” or studies of domestication. All the Plains tribes examined closely (Cheyenne, Lakota, Blackfoot, Pawnee, Shoshone) have stories characterizing wolves as guides, protectors, or entities that directly taught or showed humans how to hunt, creating reciprocal relationships in which each species provided food for the other or shared food. Indeed, evidence from tribes suggests a coevolutionary reciprocal relationship between Homo sapiens and American Canis lupus that existed until at least the nineteenth century.

While Raoul Walsh was still shooting The Man I Love in the fall of 1945, he rekindled his interest in Cheyenne. Cheyenne is far more interesting as a sexual farce than it is as a western action story. Moreover, Pursued turned out to be one of the most complex and controversial in his body of work, not only because of its haunting visual imagery, but also because it embraces so many psychological conceits thought by many to be uncharacteristic of Walsh. Silver River, on the other hand, has hardly been viewed as one of Walsh's or Errol Flynn's greatest efforts. He also became involved in a story he convinced Jack Warner to make, Colorado Territory, a remake of Walsh's High Sierra. In Walsh's hands, White Heat moves to the rhythm of bullets, each one shooting out from the frame as if the entire scenario, with its psychotic, mother-loving killer and its trigger-happy anger, wants to rouse postwar American society in even newer ways than Warner Bros. had already managed to with nearly two decades of the gangster genre.

Cheyenne conceptual artist Hachivi Edgar Heap of Birds makes word paintings, abstract paintings, and public art installations. This chapter considers Heap of Birds’s focus on memory, history, and community as central to his self and community-formulation. Through his artwork using image and text, he contributes to the ongoing project of decolonization: making visible a history of Native erasure and appropriating settler-colonial discourses of place and time, first steps in articulating a contemporary, collective, and sovereign Native identity.

One of the signature historical phenomena of the past 500 years has been the global expansion of European societies and their trans-Atlantic offshoots. The mercantile networks, commercial systems, and empires of conquest and colonization that formed the political and economic framework of that expansion involved the discovery and extraction of new mineral and agricultural resources, the establishment of new infrastructures of transport and communication, and the forcible relocation of millions of people. Another key component was the Columbian Exchange, the multiple transfers of people, animals, plants, and microbes that began even before Columbus, gathered pace after 1492, and were further fuelled as European settlement advanced into Africa, Australasia, and the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Donkeys evolved in the Old World and were confined there until the Columbian Exchange was underway. This chapter explores the introduction of the donkey and the mule to the Americas and, more briefly, to southern Africa and Australia. In keeping with my emphasis on seeking archaeological evidence with which to illuminate the donkey’s story, I omit other aspects of its expansion, such as the trade in animals to French plantations on the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius or, on a much greater scale, India to meet the demands of the British Raj. These examples nevertheless reinforce the argument that mules and donkeys were instrumental in creating and maintaining the structures of economic and political power that Europeans and Euro- Americans wielded in many parts of the globe. From Brazil to the United States, Mexico to Bolivia, Australia to South Africa, they helped directly in processing precious metals and were pivotal in moving gold and silver from mines to centres of consumption. At the same time, they aided the colonization of vast new interiors devoid of navigable rivers, maintained communications over terrain too rugged for wheeled vehicles to pose serious competition, and powered new forms of farming. Their contributions to agriculture and transport were well received by many of the societies that Europeans conquered and their mestizo descendants. However, they also provided opportunities for other Native communities to maintain a degree of independence and identity at and beyond the margins of the European-dominated world.

This chapter focuses on intensive fieldwork at a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery, revealing doctrines in which humans recognize their deep interconnections with the natural world, broadly conceived, as part of the path to the goal of nirvana. Living among stones considered to be Buddhas, the monks and nuns adopt nonviolent and environmentally friendly lifestyles and forms of practice. They learn spiritual lessons from trees, tigers, snakes, storms, and a variety of other natural entities. Unlike the previous religions that mainly focused on animals, this chapter states that stones and water can be enlightened too. But with the help of practices from the Cheyenne First Nations group, it also illustrates some of the limitations of such a broad spiritual regard for the natural world.

Chapter Two argues that the frontier club western served as the hinge between open-range ranching and “quality” publishing—industries which were locked in parallel marketplace battles, shared investment and personnel overlaps, and wielded similar tropes of cultural hierarchy. It traces Wister’s journey from Philadelphia to Wyoming to Manhattan via elite clubs which shaped the emerging western. Philadelphia Clubman, novelist and physician Silas Weir Mitchell provided Wister’s entrée to ranching and publishing, and the drawing-room manners and heterosexual romance which the Boone and Crockett Club template lacked. Wyoming cattle kings (especially Cheyenne Club members) cultivated anglophile rituals to mask the brute force of their financial cartel. And Manhattan’s “quality” publishers (including Harper Brothers and Macmillan) developed marketplace manoeuvres—again cloaked as cultural superiority—to defeat competition from dime publishers and reprint libraries. A concluding comparison between frontier club and dime novel westerns suggests how frontier club writings promoted these parallel interests.

The Introduction discusses how upper-class clubmen in the East, cattle kings in the West, and popular print culture in its formative years came together in the late nineteenth century to create the modern western. It charts the frontier club group through a network of exclusive college and gentlemen’s clubs, including, centrally, the Boone and Crockett Club and one western outpost, the Cheyenne Club. The quintessential example of the frontier club western is Owen Wister’s bestselling novel The Virginian (1902). Its fictional action was fuelled by the exclusive club mentality and it converted clubmen’s extra-legal violence in Wyoming into an image of heroic individualism.

The Combat Zone was an adult entertainment district established in 1974 by the City of Boston and destroyed in the early 1990s; rather than risk the invasion of residential neighborhoods by evicted exotic dancers and prostitutes, the city chose to contain the sex industry within two downtown blocks. The Zone embodied contradictions between feminist awareness and female exploitation, containment and contagion, reality and fantasy. Dance generated and sustained the fantasies that in turn sustained the Zone; while the bookstores, porno theaters, and prostitutes contributed to the gritty reality often maligned by the mainstream press, the strip clubs and burlesque halls produced the theatrical unreality that came to define the Zone in the city’s imagination. Sharing choreographic and performance strategies, dancers in the Combat Zone constructed a kinesthetic and emotional topography that shaped perceptions of the city itself.

Hidden by rocks near a waterhole in Australia’s desert interior an Aboriginal woman and her children catch their first sight of the shockingly large animal of which they have previously only heard: the newcomer’s kangaroo. Thousands of kilometres to the west and high in southern Africa’s mountains a shaman completes the painting of an animal that does not exist, horned at the front, bushy tail at the rear, a composite of two species, one long familiar, the other new. Across the Atlantic Ocean on the grasslands of Patagonia the burial of an Aónik’enk leader is in its final stages, four of his favourite possessions killed above the grave to ensure his swift passage to the afterlife. To the north in what Americans of European descent call New Mexico, Diné warriors chant the sacred songs that ensure their pursuers will not catch them and that they will return safely home. And on the wintry plains of what is not yet Alberta, Siksikáwa hunters charge into one of the last bison herds they will harvest before the snows bring this year’s hunting to an end. Two things unite these very different scenes. First, though we cannot be sure, the historical, ethnographic, and archaeological sources on which they are based allow for them all happening on precisely the same day, sometime in the 1860s. Second, all concern people’s relationship with one and the same animal—pindi nanto, karkan, kawoi, ∤íí’, ponokáómita·wa—the animal that English speakers know as ‘horse’. And that simple fact provides the basis for this book. For, before 1492, horses were confined to the Old World—Europe, Asia, and Africa north of the tropical rainforests and a line reaching east through South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Somalia to the sea. They were wholly unknown in Australasia, the Americas, or southern Africa. As a result, the relationships implied by the vignettes I have just sketched, as well as those involving Indigenous populations in Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Chile, Mexico, South Africa, and New Zealand, evolved quickly. And they were still evolving when these societies were finally overwhelmed by European colonization.