An impassioned documentation, Our Story tells the story of a handful of Southwest Native American activists working to protect the land, water, air, relics, and living culture of the Greater Chaco landscape. Threatened from all angles by extractive industries like oil drilling, uranium mining, fracking, and for-profit water pumping as well as a long history of government betrayals and broken treaties, the Greater Chaco landscape is being torn apart at a rate never seen before.
Demands for energy surged first in the 60s and again under the Trump administration and continue into the Biden administration. Residents of the Chaco region already face water, power, and food scarcity, but now face poisoned water sources, depleted aquifers, and total destruction of unlisted and unstudied heritage sites at the hands of big oil interests. This atop air, noise, light, and soil pollution would render the homeland of dozens of indigenous peoples completely unlivable in the near future.
What this short documentary does best is make thoughtful political points about just transition and proper land management. Fracking and oil infrastructure is not only dangerous and capable of spreading toxic and potentially radioactive waste thousands of miles through injections into and around existing aquifers but has proven to be expensive to maintain and unsustainable.
Southwest Native activists from various tribes and states have come together to mandate an end to ‘checkerboarding’ (the practice of selling federally held allotments for extraction without consulting people living nearby making the landscape a checkerboard of public land and hazardous extractive industry land). This creates legal ‘energy sacrifice zones,' backed up by federal law which literally lay out that for-profit extractive industry is more important than the land, the natural wonders, or the health of the people living in these areas throughout Navajo and Pueblo lands.
While the narration is occasionally unorganized and the interviews could have been steered a bit better, this outstanding short documentary makes an excellent argument for a just transition to sustainable energy production and spells out clearly the demands of native activists for this transition. Our Story comes highly recommended.
What type of college professor would find this title valuable?
Any professors which study Native American history, art, and literature will find value in this short documentary. It would also be of great use to Forestry and Land Management students.