American Indian Culture and Research Journal

It is perhaps ridiculous for Indian people to challenge a multi-billion dollar industrial operation, but if our right to an existence as a people is threatened by corporate greed, we have nothing to lose. —National Indian Youth Council News Release, 1975 In the spring of 1977, members of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), along with the Coalition for Navajo Liberation, barraged the Secretary of the Interior and the chairman of the Navajo Nation with petitions calling for a halt to the proposed construction of several coal gasification plants on the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico. The petitions stated that the billion-dollar industrial venture would lead to “the inevitable genocide” of the local Navajo people whose culture and livelihood would “once again [be] trampled and ignored.” In the words of NIYC Executive Director Gerald Wilkinson, the issue was “quite literally a question of life and death.” The NIYC-led campaign to stop coal gasification began in 1974 and lasted through most of 1977. The story was an archetypal David and Goliath bout—a local, relatively powerless people pitted against massive corporate and governmental might. More specifically, NIYC activists represented the interests of “the grassroots people” who resided in the Burnham chapter of the Navajo Reservation, the region where the proposed plants would be constructed. Their struggle was against not only the multinationals seeking to build and profit from the plants, but also the governments of both the United States and the Navajo Nation, which ignored the interests of the Burnham residents in their legislative wrangling over gasification.