Coal powered the Industrial Revolution and was the dominant fuel source in the U.S. up until the 1950s.
Since then, it’s been giving way to cleaner and cheaper energy alternatives. But President Trump is strategizing a comeback story for the American coal industry. His agenda includes Indian Country.
Coal is perhaps most closely associated with Appalachian states like West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Kentucky — or Wyoming, the nation’s leading producer of the fossil fuel. But the coal-mining business was once thriving in northern Arizona as well, atop the Colorado Plateau.
For decades, deafening noise enveloped the Navajo chapter of Black Mesa — less than 50 miles south of Kayenta. Around the clock, excavator cranes used to scrape heaps of topsoil with dragline scoops.
Some buckets were big enough to fit a few Greyhound buses.
They raked at the ground and ripped open the earth — reaching dark-band coal seams sitting hundreds of feet underneath the surface. Thunderous sounds bellowing from the top of Black Mesa have since been silenced.
“During the time I was a child, it was like that,” said lifelong resident Lily Johnson.
“We were so happy when Peabody left, and I realized that one day I got up with no noise, the beltlines up there no more,” she said, referring to Peabody Energy, the coal producer that operated in the area for over half a century. “It was so peaceful.”
Johnson is among the fewer than 500 Navajos who call Black Mesa home today.
Not too long ago, this snowy swath of rolling hill country also became home to a pair of once-booming coal strip mines spanning at least 64,000 acres. For context, that’s the size of about 45,000 football fields.
“We don’t have coal production at the moment,” said Steve Trusell, who is executive director of the Arizona Mining Association. “We used to, up at Black Mesa on the Navajo Nation.”
‘No idea of what they were getting themselves into’
From the late 1800s into the 1950s, coal was the most dominant energy source in the U.S., powering the nation through the Industrial Revolution and into the Cold War. And with such a big need for coal, Black Mesa has long been eyed by the feds.
The U.S. Geological Survey believed that 8 billion tons of coal could lay dormant beneath there in 1909. This untapped mineral wealth in northern Arizona attracted a lot of interest, particularly from utilities throughout the Southwest.
With the U.S. in search of natural resources in all sorts of places — even on sovereign tribal reservations — the feds established the then-Navajo Tribal Council in 1922. This governing body was expressly formed to negotiate and approve agreements for oil, gas and mineral extraction.
The Hopi council soon followed.
As a child, Johnson remembers tagging along with her mother to local chapter meetings in nearby Kayenta back in the 1960s when local Diné leaders discussed leasing Navajoland to the St. Louis-based Peabody Western Coal Company — now known as Peabody Energy.
“They had no idea of what they were getting themselves into,” said Johnson, sharing how locals assumed the mining would occur only underground. “When these big draglines appeared, by that time it was too late, and the dozers were just knocking down trees.”
In 1966, the Navajo and Hopi councils signedleases with Peabody. And as Peabody pursued coal at Black Mesa, a long-standing territorial dispute between Navajos and Hopis boiled over.
It stemmed from an 1882 executive order signed by President Chester Arthur.
This presidential proclamation created conflicting occupancy rights through the establishment of a 2.5 million-acre landbase for the Hopi Tribe, which was entirely surrounded by the Navajo Nation.
However, this reservation was unlike most, in that it didn’t entirely belong to Hopis — because the order also allowed “such other Indians as the Secretary of the Interior may see fit to settle thereon.”
So for close to a century, Navajos and Hopis cohabited this area.
The enduring occupancy problem wasn’t resolved until Peabody came along. To determine who was entitled to coal royalties and how much, the federal government stepped in to redraw the boundary between the two tribes, dividing the joint property into partitioned lands.
This solution came in 1974 when Congress passed the Navajo-Hopi Land Settlement Act. The federal law led to more than 3,600 families being forcibly relocated. More than 12,000 Navajos were among them.
In doing so, the settlement helped clear the way, in part, for the Kayenta Mine Complex, which for generations helped power some of the West’s most populous cities — from Phoenix and Tucson to Las Vegas and Los Angeles.
‘They’re just fulfilling the contract, nothing more’
Today, Black Mesa is basically barren.
It’s something that’s visible to ex-Peabody employee Sam Yazzie, who was born and raised in Black Mesa. He believes his former employer hasn’t done enough to restore the environment since the pair of coal mines shuttered.
“They’re just fulfilling the contract, nothing more.”
According to Peabody’s latest sustainability report, the mining company is in the final stages of cleanup and “restoring the land for productive future use, consistent with a comprehensive sustainability plan and ongoing collaboration with landowners, including the Navajo Nation and the Hopi Tribe.”
One mine was named after the community of Black Mesa.
Mining there began in 1973 and lasted for more than three decades until operations ceased in 2005. This mine transported the fuel through a 273-mile slurry pipeline to the Mohave Generating Station.
The 1,580-megawatt coal-fired power plant sat in Laughlin, Nevada. According to the EPA, this facility released 40,000 tons of sulfur dioxide annually and was considered one of the largest polluting sources in the West.
Its closure came amid a lawsuit stemming from the enforcement of emissions limits under the Clean Air Act, alongside Hopi and Navajo council resolutions restricting the Black Mesa mine’s use of the Navajo Aquifer. Roughly 45 billion gallons of groundwater were drawn from that local Arizona aquifer and pumped to Nevada.
The other mine — named after the Navajo township of Kayenta — powered the 2,250-megawatt Navajo Generating Station near Page. Eight million tons of coal was delivered annually along a 78-mile electric railroad.
It was considered the West’s biggest coal-fired plant, emitting about 44,000 tons of carbon dioxide by burning 22,000 tons of coal each day. The Navajo Generating Station opened in 1974 and closed in 2019.
Its majority owner, Salt River Project, shifted focus to natural gas by divesting from the power plant. Other investors — including the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, Arizona Public Service, Nevada Energy, Los Angeles Department of Water and Power and Tucson Electric Power — also drifted away from coal.
Despite Yazzie’s disappointment in Peabody’s ongoing reclamation efforts, he doesn’t deny the economic benefits that generations of coal mining provided — not only to his tribe, but also himself and his dad.
“Our lives pretty much changed,” said Yazzie. “They hired him since [dad] had a couple of mules and a wagon. He loaded up water and took it to these exploratory drill areas. Eventually he sent me to a private school in South Carolina through funding from his occupation. He supported us.”
A 2012 federal report published by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in partnership with the Interior and Energy departments found that Peabody contributed $1.3 billion to the Navajo and Hopi economies through coal royalty payments, bonuses and water fees from the Kayenta Mine alone.
The Navajo Nation earned the lion’s share — $772 million — while the Hopi Tribe received $291 million between 1987 and 2010. In 2011, the Navajo Nation settled its $1.8 billion RICO lawsuit against Peabody Energy.
Leaders claimed that the Navajo Nation lost more than $600 million in revenue in connection to coal mining on Black Mesa. The 1999 suit alleged that Peabody lobbied the Interior Department to prevent raising the tribe’s coal royalty rates to 20%. They settled on 12.5% instead.
With the coal mines being shut down, many Peabody employees left to find work elsewhere, including Yazzie. But he eventuallyreturned home from Houston to help take care of his mom.
“It’s a brain drain, a lot of people leaving. There’s nothing to draw them back,” said Yazzie. “We still have sheep, we still have cattle and horses. That’s their legacy — what they worked so hard for. Here, we grew up around blasting and herding sheep and taking care of livestock.”
But that tradition of raising animals is slowly dying off. Johnson owns a few dozen Navajo Churro sheep and warns how she, like other livestock owners, must adhere to Peabody’s strict grazing rules.
“If you’re violating their plans, the following year they won’t allow you to use the land,” said Johnson. “If they see livestock, they said they can haul it away. It feels like they have all the rights even over the Navajo Nation.”
Yazzie accuses Peabody of reseeding reclaimed mine areas with the wrong type of vegetation — Midwest flora — relying on lots of rainfall to flourish in the drought-stricken Southwest.
“And you could just see where there was no mining.”
“It’ll be green in the summer, and then you look at the pastures and it’s just brown — barren,” added Yazzie. “The runoff — whenever it rains and whenever there’s snow — it just makes ditches, and you know, and they’re not actively going back to fixing all of them, so it’s just a shoddy job.”
Peabody stands by its work, pointing KJZZ to a recent national excellence award from the Interior Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement, which is responsible for overseeing the company’s progress. But Peabody would not address the allegations raised by Black Mesa residents.
“Probably did one of the most scary type jobs, I was a core driller,” said Alex Osif, who is Diné, Hopi and Pima and sitting president of United Mine Workers of America Local Union 1924.
He was also a Peabody miner for nearly four decades. Now, Osif is the benefits counselor for Arizona’s sole black lung clinic, which is helping more than 300 coal miners in the Four Corners.
This medical facility sits in Chilchinbito on the Navajo Nation and is run by Canyonlands Healthcare, which operates a dozen rural health clinics across Arizona and Nevada. His day job involves diagnosing miners with black lung disease and pneumoconiosis.
“We do work within a radius of Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado. We’re starting to show cases in New Mexico again,” said Osif, blaming a coal mine now owned by the Navajo Transitional Energy Company. “I’m starting to see miners show up on our doorstep.”
As for Kayenta Town Manager Jarvis Williams, he’s proud of what Peabody did.
“It was a gradual decline. Because at the height of coal mining here around the 2000s, you had almost 1,600 employees up there — and then you maybe had 300 at the time of the Kayenta mine closure,” said Williams. “I’m a coal miner’s kid. My kids are coal miners’ kids. It’ll be felt for at least a couple more generations — and really up to us to not allow that pride to fall to the wayside.”
This story was produced by KJZZ, the public radio station in Phoenix, and published by KNAU as part of the Arizona Public Media Exchange.
