“Powell's book is impressive and creative. Essential reading for scholars of the Navajo nation and Indian country more broadly. Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals.” — R. E. O'Connor, Choice
“Dana Powell’s Landscapes of Power offers a fresh, astute, and important look at contemporary life within the context of energy politics on an American Indian Reservation in what is arguably the first modern and consciously post-colonial ethnography of the Diné. This book should draw interest from a broad range of readers.” — Gilbert A. Quintero, Medical Anthropology Quarterly
"Dana Powell is a gifted writer and exquisite storyteller, and the book is engaging, readable, and carries the reader through from beginning to end." — Kristina Jacobsen, Canadian Journal of Native Studies
"Landscapes of Power seeks to explain what energy justice and climate justice look like for marginalized communities embedded in ecologies rich in energy minerals. The book complicates common understandings of sovereignty as absolute independence; instead, it considers the variant forms of struggles and redefinitions of sovereignty among the Diné in their ongoing contestations over land, minerals, and energy...." — Jorge Ramirez, Radical History Review
"No other work has gone so far to provide a ground-level understanding of how individual tribal members experienced development and how those experiences shaped the debates about and ultimate policy toward further projects." — James Robert Allison III, American Historical Review
"A welcome addition to ethnographies of governance and power in Native communities. . . . A timely contribution to literature on energy projects that threaten Indigenous lands. It gives voice to Navajo people who were ignored or marginalized during institutional deliberations of the power plant." — Andrew Curley, Environment and Society
"In this masterful study Dana E. Powell weaves a rich narrative that intertwines Navajo leaders' efforts to reverse a depressed economy with the complexities of the political atmosphere, tribal sovereignty, the imperative to address environmental justice and climate change, and Navajo concerns about land use. Landscapes of Power is indispensable to the study of Native nations, their relationships to energy and development projects, and to understanding the Navajo nation's twenty-first-century history." — Jennifer Nez Denetdale (Diné), University of New Mexico
"Expertly tracing the legacy of the thwarted Desert Rock project, Dana E. Powell identifies an ethical project among Navajo activists that signals politics beyond straightforward environmentalism—a politics that matters for Navajo sovereignty, territory, and ethical ways of life, as well as for energy activism and policy everywhere. As with #NoDAPL and Standing Rock, the Desert Rock struggle goes to the core of what politics look like within, across, and in solidarity with Indian Country. This is essential reading." — Jessica R. Cattelino, author of High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty