Editor's note: This story was produced for Our Living Lands, a collaboration of the Mountain West News Bureau, Koahnic Broadcast Corporation, and Native Public Media focusing on the impact of climate change on Indigenous communities across the country.
Nationwide, nearly 17,000 homes on tribal lands still need electricity hook-ups. A majority of them are spread across the Navajo Nation, where climate change is making it harder for families to keep cool. In recent years, however, a mutual aid program has been helping change lives.
It’s a scorching hot morning in the Navajo Nation, a sun-baked desert painted with red-rock mesas, green junipers, and a vast blue sky.
In the wind-swept foothills of Navajo Mountain, Leeland Tomasiyo – wearing jeans, a light blue button-up, and a gray ball cap – is standing outside his home, trying to catch a breeze.
“We have a metal roof on top, you know?” Tomasiyo said with a pained smile beneath his mustache. “So, all that heat just kind of builds up inside and it just cooks the place up inside.”
That wasn’t always the case. But Tomasiyo said the reservation feels hotter each year.
“It’s really hard,” he added, removing his cap to wipe his brow. “Sometimes we'd get in the vehicle, we’ll sit in there just to cool ourselves off.”
The Tomasiyos are one of 13,000 families living without electricity in the Navajo Nation. That’s nearly a third of the homes dotting the 27,000-square-mile reservation, which stretches across parts of Arizona, Utah and New Mexico.
These high desert lands are a hotspot for energy sources such as coal, oil, and uranium. For years, however, private companies have used them to help power communities outside of the Navajo Nation. In fact, for more than 40 years, the reservation was home to the largest coal-fired power plant in the West. The Navajo Generating Station, which was decommissioned in 2019, provided electricity to major cities in Arizona, Nevada and California, including Los Angeles.
“That creates this situation where you have these large-scale transmission lines moving hundreds of megawatts of electricity across a reservation above homes that are lacking power,” said Andrew Curley, who’s Diné and a University of Arizona professor focused on energy extraction and production on tribal lands.
In the 1930s, the federal government gave loans to utility companies to connect remote areas and farming communities to the electric grid under President Franklin Roosevelt’s Rural Electrification Act. But when it came to tribal communities, “electrification was not something that the federal government was prioritizing,” Curley said.
A Navajo utility nonprofit started in the late 1950s to help change that. But progress has been slow since then. One of the barriers was a land dispute between the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe that led to a decades-long development ban across jointly owned Navajo-Hopi land in northern Arizona. The ban was known as the Bennett Freeze, named after Robert Bennett, then the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who in 1966 halted development across more than 1.5 million acres. Along with outlawing the development of electricity, it also prohibited people from building houses and schools, repairing roofs and roads, and digging gas and water lines.
The ban was in place for 43 years before it was lifted in 2009 by President Barack Obama.
That hasn’t been the only challenge for Navajo families seeking electricity. Getting a homesite lease approved and accepted for electricity development can take years, said Curley, adding that the slow process has significantly hurt the Navajo economy.
“A lot of our most productive laborers, workers – in blue-collar, white-collar work – are moving out of the reservation into the cities where there is that kind of economy where they can participate,” said Curley, noting that people can’t run their own business or work remotely without reliable electricity.
Paulette Tomasiyo, Leeland’s wife, said having power in their home would allow her to take college courses and work toward a degree in elementary education.
More than anything, though, electricity would give her peace of mind. Right now, she’s standing in their kitchen, where a coffee maker and microwave sit on the counter. Both of these appliances have never been used, she said with a laugh.
“We’re like, oh, someday this will be on!” she continued. “You just put popcorn in and get it ready, turn on your coffee and all that stuff. These are gonna be on soon.”
She then pointed at the stainless steel fridge tucked against the far wall, adding, “even this frigerator – this is a fake frigerator.”
Tomasiyo said they try to preserve meat and dairy in coolers filled with ice, but extreme heat makes that difficult.
“Recently, we bought food, right? We usually bring them back in the ice chests like this,” she said, opening up an ice chest filled halfway with water and floating packs of lunch meat and jars of salsa. “This is what we get … [the ice is] already melted. You cannot keep food here, meat, or anything, or else it ends up waste.”
And the nearest grocery store is more than 100 miles away. That means when the Tomasiyos buy meat – a big expense for a family of nine – they don’t take any risks.
“You have to cook it right here when you get back home,” she said.
But days without a refrigerator and air conditioning are now over for the Tomasiyos, who have lived without electricity for nearly 15 years. Their home was one of 170 on the Navajo Nation reservation that got connected to the electric grid this year. That’s thanks to a mutual aid program called Light Up Navajo, which relies on private and federal funding, and volunteer electrical workers from across the country.
“It just brings tears to my eyes,” Paulette Tomasiyo said, reflecting on when she found out her family would get power through the program. “Every morning, we get up and I just always think to myself, I’m just waiting, waiting – one day this will come.”
Now, with electricity running through their home, powering all of their appliances and devices for the first time, Tomasiyo said she's no longer consumed by heat-related stress and anxiety.
Editor's note: In Part 2, Mountain West News Bureau reporter Kaleb Roedel profiles more Navajo families that received electricity this summer, and interviews leaders and volunteers of the program that made it possible.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Colorado and KANW in New Mexico, with support from affiliate stations across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
