ON JULY 6, 1972, in the small reservation town of Lame Deer, located forty-two miles east of the Custer battlefield in southeastern Montana, a handful of Northern Cheyenne leaders received a proposal that would forever alter their community. Representatives of the behemoth Consolidation Coal Company, a subsidiary of the Continental Oil Company (CONOCO) and the second largest coal producer in America, presented these leaders and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials with a lucrative offer to build a $1.2-billion coal gasification complex on the Cheyenne’s small, 440,000-acre reservation. The proposal included plans for a 70,000-acre coal mine that would feed four on-reservation gasification plants, which would convert Cheyenne coal into natural gas to be transported via pipeline to population centers throughout the country. Annually, the complex would consume thirty million tons of coal over thirty-five years of operation and required a dedicated reserve of one billion tons. The project was so large that, by Consolidation’s own admission, a new reservation town of thirty thousand people would be needed just to fill the required jobs. To place these figures in perspective, in the previous year the surrounding states of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota collectively produced only twenty-one million tons of coal, and the Northern Cheyenne population hovered around three thousand. The Consolidation Coal Company planned for a project of enormous dimensions.1
For their trouble, the coal company promised the impoverished Northern Cheyenne prosperity for generations to come. The day after the July 6 meeting, Consolidation’s vice president for western operations, Dell Adams, wrote to the tribe that his company would pay royalties of 25 cents per ton of coal mined plus “bonus payments” of $35 an acre for each of the 70,000 acres the mine would cover. The Northern Cheyenne thus would receive an immediate $2.5 million and could expect another $250 million in royalties over the life of the project. To sweeten the pot further and to appeal to one of the tribe’s most pressing needs, Adams committed an additional $1.5 million for the construction of a local health care center, hoping to erect a tangible reminder of the important relationship between his coal company and the community. These benefits, Adams understated, would “solve the unemployment problem” and ensure that the “standard of living should rise dramatically.” On a reservation where the 1969 average per capita income was just $988, these figures resonated loudly.2
Yet despite the seemingly sudden promise of fortune, Consolidation’s proposal did not shock tribal leaders or federal officials. If anything, the offer represented a culmination of the hard work these groups had put forth over the previous years to land a lucrative mining deal. Ever since mining companies began expressing interest in Cheyenne coal in the mid-1960s, tribal representatives and regional BIA staff had consistently touted energy development as the answer to reservation poverty. In taking this position, the Northern Cheyenne and their local trustees were far from alone. Across the American West in the years following World War II, multinational energy firms targeted cheap Indian energy to fuel the nation’s booming economy, and tribal leaders and federal officials warmly welcomed mining as the ticket to prosperity. More than being passive witnesses to the appropriation of their resources, Northern Cheyenne and other tribal leaders, in fact, worked actively to promote reservation development. And why would they not? Suffocating poverty threatened their people, and these leaders’ primary mission was to save the community.3
With Consolidation Coal Company’s proposal, Northern Cheyenne leaders believed they would guarantee their tribe’s survival. This was the deal they had been working for, one that could lift their community out of generations of poverty. But the massive proposal also poised the tiny tribe at the intersection of several perilous paths. Down one road was Consolidation’s promise of wealth, though the experiences of other tribes were starting to reveal the adverse consequences this choice might have on the Cheyenne community and landscape. A large mining project would mean an influx of outsiders and massive land disturbances that could change the way tribal members interacted with one another and their land. In a community with strong memories of their ancestors’ nineteenth-century sacrifices to secure a tribal homeland, the thought of opening up the reservation to non-Indian coal miners conjured up painful emotions. The counter-option was to simply close the reservation to all mining. Rampant poverty, however, hardly made this a choice at all. Desperate conditions are what spurred tribal leaders to pursue deals like Consolidation’s in the first place.
Yet another approach meant rejecting mines operated by outside firms and developing tribal resources themselves. Theoretically, this strategy could secure modest revenues while positioning the tribal government to ensure that the pace and scale of mining did not upset existing norms, customs, and natural environments. But this last path had not yet been traveled by any tribe. To successfully navigate it would require a monumental effort to develop the institutional capacity to market tribal resources while also controlling unwanted mining impacts. It would also necessitate wholesale revisions of federal Indian law to recognize tribal authority to pursue such development.
As it turns out, Northern Cheyenne leaders did not make the choice; ordinary tribal members did. Catching wind of Consolidation’s massive mining project, a grassroots opposition movement emerged that connected this proposal to even larger, regional development schemes that clearly threatened the tribal community. Faced with resistance from below, the tribal government not only rejected Consolidation’s proposal but moved to develop their own resources. These actions spurred a national, pan-tribal movement to prepare other tribes to do the same and spearheaded a campaign to change federal law to recognize Indian rights to develop tribal resources.
The summer of 1972 was thus a turning point. For decades, Indian energy resources had been developed with little input from Indian people. An outdated and paternalistic legal regime—a holdover from the 1930s—insured that Indian sovereignty was in practice meaningless. Energy firms developed tribal resources for an insatiable western market, yet tribal members remained mired in poverty. This situation began to change, however, when the Northern Cheyenne, suspicious of Consolidation’s plans and militant in defense of their homeland, decided to go it alone.