Permeable Jurisdictions: Sovereignty and Toxic Exposure in the Indigenous Southwest
Thirteen years after Diné leaders signed the Treaty of 1868 the Atlantic and Pacific railroad was completed, connecting New Mexico to California directly through Diné homelands. As a result, the legacy of these settler railroad allotments continues to pose ongoing jurisdictional problems for Diné communities living in these so-called “checkerboard” regions along the southern border of the Navajo Nation. To theorize this territorial arrangement, this talk articulates the analytic of permeability to understand how Diné communities navigate ongoing threats of environmental contamination posed by decades of downstream and downwind toxic discharges in and between their sovereign homelands. In doing so, this case study demonstrates the simultaneous erasures and possibilities of Diné political action in an era of climate change and public health crisis.