Modern marketing combined with traditional reverence for the environment can make the Navajo Nation a global leader in energy resource management, tribal President Peterson Zah says.
Zah outlined on Tuesday a comprehensive energy policy he said provides short-term benefits while ensuring future generations will share the tribe's vast natural resources."The Navajos have been taken advantage of financially, environmentally and culturally too often in the past," Zah said. "The Navajo Nation will show that it can not only protect its culture and environment but play a leading role in America's quest for energy resources."
The document sets out broad goals and doesn't deal in specifics of the tribe's dealing with coal and oil companies that do business on the reservation.
Scattered throughout the policy statement are warnings that the tribe intends to rectify what its sees as historic wrongs and unfavorable contracts.
The statement was described as a first for any U.S. Indian tribe as well as the first such omnibus policy statement for the Navajos.
The Navajo reservation - 25,000 square miles in northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico and southeastern Utah - has vast reserves of coal, oil, natural gas and uranium.
In recent years, oil has given way to coal as the leading revenue producer and uranium dropped to almost none. Natural gas also has declined.
But with thousands of hours of sunlight and a sweeping high-mesa terrain, the reservation also has extensive opportunities to develop wind and solar energy recourses, Zah noted.
Solar energy already is used in many Navajo homes that are scattered miles from sources of electricity, even though the reservation is the home of a major generating plant owned by a consortium of private off-reservation utilities.
An offshoot of the policy is diversification of economic opportunity for Navajos, both through new development and through enforcing preference laws that require the use of Navajo businesses and hiring of Navajo workers wherever possible.