A Tribe in Transition: Examining the Northern Cheyenne Experience with the Decline of the Coal Economy and the Energy Transition

Abstract

This research centers on the experience of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe—a federally- recognized tribe whose reservation is located in southeastern Montana—as it navigates the changes brought by an energy transition from coal. Situated within the Powder River Basin, a major coal producing region, the Tribe’s reservation lies 20 miles from the Colstrip Generating Station, a major coal-fired power plant that supplies electricity to the Pacific Northwest. In 2020, the Station partially closed, leaving only two of its four generating units operational. The Tribe has estimates that one in five of its members would lose employment should the station fully close. Using ethnographic methods including semi-structured interviews with tribal members, this case study explores shifting perceptions of economic development via energy. Taking an approach grounded in critical development studies, Indigenous geographies, and economic geographies, this thesis focuses on how coal development structures the political and economic possibilities for tribal economic development and how these perceptions are adapting to the energy transition as alternative forms of energy become increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. This thesis further examines how the market-making work of the prevailing US energy transition framework, which uses public funding to incentivize private development of low to zero emission technologies, is shaping the landscape of energy development in southeastern Montana and the distributional consequences of this work for the Northern Cheyenne Tribe. This study finds that the coal economy has underdeveloped the Northern Cheyenne Tribe by occupying tribal debates over economic development and making a significant share of tribal members dependent on jobs in coal extraction across the reservation line. Tribal efforts to pursue alternative energy development aim to wean such dependence. Finally, market-oriented approaches to energy transition are reinforcing existing inequalities in southeast Montana: private actors are reaping public funding for development while the Northern Cheyenne Tribe receives a smaller amounts and continues to struggle to overcome colonial bureaucracy.