UC Santa Barbara

This dissertation investigates an Indigenous (Paiute-Shoshone) led social movement against lithium mining on a sacred landscape in the sagebrush steppe region, called Peehee Mu’huh. Scholars have not fully theorized how Indigenous spaces being mined for lithium to service electric vehicles (EVs) are pushed through using discourse and environmental conceptualizations. Nor has there been work with/for People of Red Mountain (Atsah Koodakuh wyh Nuwu) – the organization who lead the resistance – in order to collaboratively describe their worldviews, framings, and rationale for how they go about political action. Defense of this sacred landscape actually began in time immemorial, but minimal literature exists on the historical geography of anti-colonialism in the Great Basin region in the context of energy transition minerals like lithium. Community-based resistance to mining has not yet been contextualized within decolonizing movements of the 19th and 20th centuries. In keeping with scholars of resistance, I aim to explain how diverse groups of people mobilize and form a collective identity to challenge the narratives around extraction and EVs produced through destruction of their cultural sites. I utilize qualitative, geo-ethnographic methods including archival research, participant observation, engagement in public space, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews. My findings indicate that waves of environmental re-structuring have significantly shifted the socio-ecological baselines of the region. I also found that a legacy of environmental injustice from mercury mining motivates people to resist lithium mining, and that they carry forth new uses and meanings of sacred spaces into broader realms. Although the movement was unable to halt mining at Peehee Mu’huh, they have galvanized an emergent critique of green capitalism as one form of neocolonialism.