The Growing Impact of Climate Change

This story was produced for Our Living Lands, a collaboration between the Mountain West News Bureau, Koahnic Broadcast Corporation, and Native Public Media, focusing on the impact of climate change on Indigenous communities.

Across the U.S., nearly 17,000 homes on tribal lands are still without electricity. A large portion of these homes are located within the Navajo Nation, where rising temperatures due to climate change are making it increasingly difficult for families to stay cool. Recently, a mutual aid program has emerged to bring much-needed relief.

On a blistering morning in the Navajo Nation, the landscape is dominated by sunbaked deserts, red-rock mesas, and sprawling juniper trees beneath a vast blue sky. In the foothills of Navajo Mountain, Leeland Tomasiyo stands outside his home, searching for a breeze.

“We have a metal roof on top, you know?” Tomasiyo says, flashing a weary smile beneath his mustache. “All that heat just builds up inside and cooks the place.”

Unfortunately, the situation is getting worse. Tomasiyo explains that it feels much hotter every year.

“It’s really hard,” he adds, removing his cap to wipe his brow. “Sometimes we get in the car just to cool off.”

Tomasiyo’s family is one of the 13,000 in the Navajo Nation living without electricity. This represents nearly a third of the homes in the 27,000-square-mile reservation, which stretches across parts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico.

Despite being rich in energy resources like coal, oil, and uranium, the Navajo Nation has long struggled to benefit from the power generated by its own land. For over four decades, the reservation housed the largest coal-fired power plant in the West— the Navajo Generating Station. The plant, which was decommissioned in 2019, powered cities in Arizona, Nevada, and California, including Los Angeles.

“There’s this irony where large-scale transmission lines carry hundreds of megawatts of electricity across the reservation, while homes below remain without power,” says Andrew Curley, a Diné professor at the University of Arizona who studies energy extraction on tribal lands.

The federal government’s Rural Electrification Act in the 1930s helped bring electricity to remote rural and farming communities, but Native American tribes were largely left out of this initiative. Although a Navajo utility nonprofit began efforts in the late 1950s to address the issue, progress has been slow.

One key obstacle was the Bennett Freeze, a development ban imposed in the 1960s due to a land dispute between the Navajo Nation and Hopi Tribe. This ban prohibited the construction of homes, schools, roads, and utility infrastructure across more than 1.5 million acres of jointly owned land in northern Arizona. It also halted electricity development in the region for 43 years. The ban was finally lifted in 2009 by President Barack Obama.

Despite these challenges, efforts continue to bring electricity to homes in the Navajo Nation, with organizations and communities working together to provide relief. Climate change, however, continues to exacerbate the urgency of these efforts, making reliable electricity access more crucial than ever.

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