It comes as no surprise, then, that uranium shipments in and through Navajo Nation territory have resumed. Energy Fuels, Inc. and the Navajo Nation (represented by President Buu Nygren) reached an agreement in January which allowed for the transport of uranium over Navajo land. The uranium has been and will be transported to a facility in Utah by the Energy Fuels company, a U.S. energy company.

The historical problem of uranium and the Navajo Nation is not lost on the Navajo people. During World War 2 and the Cold War, the United States government illegally violated treaties with the Navajo to mine and transport uranium on their land, resulting in outbreaks of radiation sickness and cancer, and later deaths. The generational impacts of this mining continue to this day.

The United States, in its ongoing dream of expanding its empire, seeks to procure uranium for energy, military, and economic purposes. Navajo protest is not congruent with this dream, and so businesses and the federal government have tirelessly worked to undermine Navajo sovereignty and steal the coveted uranium ore from the land which the Navajo call home, and transport said uranium over that land. 

What results is the following. 

1. A demonstration of U.S. colonialism in action. The 1868 Bosque-Redondo treaty established the Navajo reservation (the largest U.S. reservation), and Article IX of said treaty established the United States’ authority to build railroads and other infrastructure over the Navajo lands. What is at issue here is a corporation, on behalf of the United States, violating the land of the Navajo, which is in accordance with the wording of the 1868 treaty and the actions which surrounded it (including the termination of U.S. treaties with Indigenous nations in 1871).
2. A demonstration of the necessity for common action and solidarity efforts. In the summer of 2024, the same company had illegally transported uranium. Upon discovering this gross violation of what little sovereignty they were supposedly allowed, the tribal authorities attempted a roadblock, though were too late in doing so, as the uranium trucks had already passed through the Navajo lands. The subsequent resistance eventually resulted in the settlement that is now allowing uranium transport over Navajo Nation lands. This response was drafted and supported by the comprador Buu Nygren, who notably is married to Arizona State Representative and former Prosecutor Jasmine Blackwater-Nygren, and has expressly acted against the wishes of a large number of members within the Navajo Nation, who called for negotiations to be halted.

The perspective of one member of the Navajo Nation who wishes to remain anonymous is that the actions of current President Buu Nygren, and more importantly the colonial overlord government, only serve to hinder the well-being of the citizens of the Navajo Nation. 

The respondent made clear that “Nygren was looked at with hope because he was from a younger generation,” and that “many of the younger voters in the Navajo Nation felt betrayed and lied to.” Nygren has worked with the company Energy Fuels, Inc. and was instrumental in signing the January deal to allow the shipment of uranium through Navajo land. Per the anonymous source, “When Navajo people want freedom over their land, it becomes frustrating that the President of the Navajo Nation agrees to allow uranium transport and mining again.”

To this day, communities across the Navajo Nation are impacted by the mining of uranium. One such community is Church Rock, which has a long history of mining the uranium the U.S. government used for its nuclear weapons. In 1979, Church Rock, a small community of about 2,950 (of which only 20 are non-Indigenous), was the subject of outrage after a uranium spill on the Rio Puerco. The disaster, which is to date the largest nuclear disaster in U.S. history, and the third largest accidental release of radiation after Chernobyl and Fukushima, is all but forgotten. Just two months prior to Church Rock, the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown occurred, and the national response was immediate, with President Jimmy Carter visiting the site just days after. Church Rock was never visited by a U.S. President to address the disaster. The impact of the Church Rock disaster is not well researched, with a 2003-2007 study through Clark University, and an EPA profile being the only major sources of research on the matter. Nygren’s allowing the uranium operations to begin again is a disgusting insult to the survivors and victims of Church Rock, and is a clear indication of where his interests stand, that being with capital, and not his constituency.

The Bosque-Redondo treaty again demonstrates that the United States interest in the Navajo Nation is purely colonial. Wherever the U.S. stands to gain, the Navajo people will lose. According to the anonymous interviewee, “The land given to us by Bosque-Redondo is not suitable for agriculture or building a life on. The education and medical resources we receive are the absolute bare minimum. The U.S. Government took advantage of us in 1868, and now we are again seeing the effects.”

When asked about how to combat the transport of uranium and other colonial actions, the respondent said, “The younger Navajo 7th generation needs to think about the implications of what our ancestors taught us and participate in the sovereignty we have now. We need to make our government accountable for us. Protests that are happening must continue in the form of blocking highways and disrupting infrastructure. We need to take charge for what is ours, because if we don’t, we can say goodbye to our land and sovereignty. If the U.S. comes to take what little sovereignty we have, will we just let that happen?”

The respondent encourages everyone, both Navajo and not, to complain to chapter houses [Local Navajo Nation representative organizations], which are across the U.S., and make your voices loud. “This shouldn’t be pushed under the rug like everything else has with our nation.” 

The continued struggle against U.S. colonialism by the Navajo people is a demonstration of the need for an internationalist struggle against U.S. colonialism and imperialism in all corners of the empire. The Navajo cannot be left to stand alone in their struggle, because their struggle is the struggle of all colonized and working peoples under the violent oppression of the imperialists. The Navajo Nation has for centuries been fighting a war that can only be won through the upending of the whole capitalist imperialist system. This war will be won by the self-conscious uniting of the Indigenous nations, New Afrika, and the conscious workers of the oppressor nation on a truly internationalist foundation built on a struggle for self-determination of all oppressed peoples.

The Supreme Court of the United States issued its decision in Arizona v. Navajo Nation last Thursday, condemning the Navajo people to surrender their treaty rights to water from the Colorado River and the other tributaries, streams, and sources that feed the Navajo reservation. This follows directly on the heels of the court’s Haaland decision which, as the Clarion predicted, marked not a high-water mark in the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty, but rather the beginning of a long-planned onslaught against the Indigenous peoples within the prison-house of the U.S. Empire.

Water is a precious commodity in the American West. Future desertification of the whole growing region is almost inevitable. The Navajo nation has been battling state governments for decades over the allocation of water in the region and the federal government for at least as long, looking for recognition of the rights that were promised by treaty.

In its duplicitous and cowardly Navajo Nation decision, the U.S. Supreme Court recast the issue; the treaty, they whine, only guarantees the Navajo Nation the right to water that flows into the reservation. If anyone were to redirect the water away from the reservation, then that’s just too bad. That water, they say, between the lines, has more use elsewhere — watering cash crops. As long as the $5 billion worth of agricultural industry is kept intact, so what if the Navajo people starve as a result?

The bulk of the opinion is actually an attack on the principle of the so-called “trust” that we discussed on Monday, the idea that the U.S. imperial state owes anything to the Indigenous peoples it has displaced, murdered, and betrayed. While Haaland made hay from the idea of the “trust relationship” in order to uphold Congress’s power to pass laws that govern Indigenous persons, Navajo Nation explicitly states that the trust relationship is non-existent. Justice Thomas dismisses the idea entirely in his concurrence. “[T]he idea of a generic trust relationship with all tribes — to say nothing of legally enforceable fiduciary duties — seems to lack a historical or constitutional basis.” Gorsuch and the three left-liberal justices alone — Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson — return to the treaty rights, to the sovereignty of the Indigenous peoples. But let us not forget that Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson also signed on to the main opinion of the court in Haaland, where the reactionary justices made it clear that the “period of treaty making” had ended and that the Indigenous peoples would be governed not from a sovereign to a sovereign but rather by the fiat of Congress, whose powers over them are “plenary,” an unassailable, hegemonic domination. Gorsuch clearly and plainly states the perfidy of the federal government:

The Navajo have tried it all. They have written federal officials. They have moved this Court to clarify the United States’ responsibilities when representing them. They have sought to intervene directly in water-related litigation. And when all of those efforts were rebuffed, they brought a claim seeking to compel the United States to make good on its treaty obligations by providing an accounting of what water rights it holds on their behalf. At each turn they have received the same answer: “Try again.” When this routine first began in earnest, Elvis was still making his rounds on The Ed Sullivan Show.

The Navajo reservation is the largest Indigenous reservation in the U.S. Empire. It encompasses over 17 million acres, and the tribe has enrolled over 300,000 members. The average non-Indigenous American citizen uses 82 gallons of water a day. The average Navajo person uses 7 gallons. In parts of the reservation, as much as 91% of the households lack access to water.

The court remains today what it has always been — the sword and shield of U.S. settler-capital. The decisions in Haaland and Navajo Nation could not appear more different on their surface, but if one looks beneath, it will become clear that they serve the same purpose: to grind the millstone of disenfranchisement and genocide.