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Fire on the Plateau: Conflict And Endurance In The American Southwest
"This book recounts my journey through the Colorado Plateau, a journey through place and time and self.... During my explorations of more than three decades, I found a land that sears into my heart and soul, a place that has taught me and changed me. I also discovered a land of conflict and endurance, a land that has given birth to one of the great chapters in American history." --from the Introduction The Colorado Plateau, stretching across four states and covering nearly 80 million acres, is one of the most unique and spectacular landscapes in the world. Remote, rugged, and dry -- at once forlorn and glorious -- it is a separate place, a place with its own distinctive landscape, history, and future.In Fire on the Plateau , legal scholar and writer Charles Wilkinson relates the powerful story of how, over the past thirty years, he has been drawn ever more deeply into the redrock country and Indian societies of the Colorado Plateau. His work in the early 1970s as staff attorney for the newly formed Native American Rights Fund brought him into close contact with Navajo and Hopi people. His growing friendships with American Indians and increasing understanding of their cultures, along with his longstanding scholarship and experiences on federal public lands, led him to delve into the complicated history of the region.Wilkinson examines that history -- the sometimes violent conflicts between indigenous populations and more recent settlers, the political machinations by industry and the legal establishment, the contentious disputes over resources and land use -- and provides a compelling look at the epic events that have shaped the region. From centuries of habitation by native peoples to Mormon settlement, from the "Big Build-Up" of the post-World War II era to the increased environmental awareness of recent years, he explores the conquests of tribes and lands that have taken place, and the ways in which both have endured.Throughout, Wilkinson uses his own personal experiences as a lawyer working with Indian people and his heartfelt insights about a land that he grew to love to tie together the threads of the story. Fire on the Plateau is a vital and dynamic work that is sure to strike a chord with anyone interested in the past or future of the American Southwest.
416 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1999
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
December 28, 2020
I was skeptical about this book written by an old white man about Indian law and the West. But Wilkinson won me over through his humor, love, and self-awareness. It's a book about how the legal system has been used as another weapon of genocide. It's also a book about tender, fraught relationships with fathers. It's a vulnerable undertaking.
July 26, 2015
I like this lawyer - and it's definitely not everyday that I find a lawyer to admire. Charles Wilkinson proves to be that rare exception. A bit reluctant at first to pick up a first hand account of recent resource and tribal issues on the Colorado Plateau as seen through the eyes of a lawyer, my attitude changed within a few pages. Charles Wilkinson writes with heart! It doesn't take long to see this writer has an obvious emotional investment in the clients and cases he goes to bat for.
The book opens with a telling case of Navajo high schoolers commuting long hours to attend classes. Wilkinson and his firm made the case that long bus rides were leaving students tried before and after class and hurting their grades. With evidence and conviction, they got high schools built on the reservations. With each case recounted, I could sense Wilkinson's attachment to the Colorado plateau and its people grow and grow.
Fire on the Plateau also provides a much broader telling of both the social and natural history of the Four Corners area. But what really set this book apart from others in my mind is Wilkinson's emergence from a lawyer who is just doing his job to someone who bonded to the land and the people he served.
The book opens with a telling case of Navajo high schoolers commuting long hours to attend classes. Wilkinson and his firm made the case that long bus rides were leaving students tried before and after class and hurting their grades. With evidence and conviction, they got high schools built on the reservations. With each case recounted, I could sense Wilkinson's attachment to the Colorado plateau and its people grow and grow.
Fire on the Plateau also provides a much broader telling of both the social and natural history of the Four Corners area. But what really set this book apart from others in my mind is Wilkinson's emergence from a lawyer who is just doing his job to someone who bonded to the land and the people he served.
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January 17, 2024I read this for my Advanced Field Seminar class about the Colorado Plateau. While a little outdated (written in 1996), this book provides a good overview of the Colorado Plateau through the eyes of Charles Wilkinson, a lawyer who worked for the Native American Rights Fund and later founded CU Boulder's Getches-Wilkinson Center for Environmental Law. Wilkinson shares stories of Indian law and history, legal battles, and his explorations of the Plateau, rafting, hiking, backpacking, all to offer the reader some understanding of the region and the forces that shaped it. He dives in deeply to the story of the Hopi Nation's lawyer in the 1950s and 60s, John Boyden, and how after his death evidence was revealed that he was secretly working for Peabody Coal while claiming to represent the interests of the Hopi. His conflict of interest and ambition for development led to leasing coal on the Black Mesa, within the Hopi Reservation, and terrible royalty rates for the Hopi for decades. It was interesting to see Wilkinson's forecasts for the future and how right or wrong some of them were. While the words of a white man should not be the primary source of information about indigenous history, this book has shaped my view and understanding of the Plateau.
"And so we find that this grand-scale reordering of nature has teemed with ramifications and contradictions for the Southwest: a beautiful man-made lake but drowned sacred places; easy access by water to backcountry but trashed-out, crowded backcountry; old animals replaced by new ones through our arrogance, resourcefulness, and luck; impressive efficiency (electricity streaks throughout the Southwest in an instant) but prodigal waste (the desert sun evaporates 600,000 acre-feet of water, enough to serve Phoenix and Tucson, off the top of Lake Powell every year). What can we expect in the years to come?"
"More and more people treat the old sites with reverence. But there are so many of us. Too many people, too few ethics: the same basic problem as with the Big Buildup.
"A main task of our humanity is to learn the lessons of conquest, whether the conquests involve people, such as Nicaagat and the Ute, places, such as Glen Canyon, or life-supporting natural phenomena, such as cryptobiotic soil. We have much more to learn, but there is still time for the Colorado Plateau because it is a broad and distant land. Will we learn what we must, and learn it fast enough, so that the land can hold both its physical health, which is its life, and its remoteness, which is the core of its bold, vivid personality?"
"And so we find that this grand-scale reordering of nature has teemed with ramifications and contradictions for the Southwest: a beautiful man-made lake but drowned sacred places; easy access by water to backcountry but trashed-out, crowded backcountry; old animals replaced by new ones through our arrogance, resourcefulness, and luck; impressive efficiency (electricity streaks throughout the Southwest in an instant) but prodigal waste (the desert sun evaporates 600,000 acre-feet of water, enough to serve Phoenix and Tucson, off the top of Lake Powell every year). What can we expect in the years to come?"
"More and more people treat the old sites with reverence. But there are so many of us. Too many people, too few ethics: the same basic problem as with the Big Buildup.
"A main task of our humanity is to learn the lessons of conquest, whether the conquests involve people, such as Nicaagat and the Ute, places, such as Glen Canyon, or life-supporting natural phenomena, such as cryptobiotic soil. We have much more to learn, but there is still time for the Colorado Plateau because it is a broad and distant land. Will we learn what we must, and learn it fast enough, so that the land can hold both its physical health, which is its life, and its remoteness, which is the core of its bold, vivid personality?"
November 24, 2016
Boring. This is a book about laws and preserving Native cultures. Important, but as a voyage of self-discovery that leaves a lot to be desired, especially when written by someone coming from having only legal writing experience. Not engaging at all.
July 26, 2020
An excellent history of the challenges faced by Native people and the magical land where they live. Written by a lawyer who has helped the Tribes fight against discrimination, pollution belching power plants and dams that drown ancestral homelands.
May 7, 2024
If you enjoyed Blood and Thunder, continue your education of the Colorado Plateau with this gem.
May 31, 2025
This book gave me a better appreciation of land, water and people and how we need to appreciate and respect it all. I am indebted to the author in taking the time to create such an educational read.
December 26, 2012
I grew up on the Colorado Plateau, just minutes from the "Big Rez," and Charles Wilkinson paints a detailed social, natural and geologic picture of this land, about as close as you can get to the Third World here in the United States, in some ways.
Having one of the largest American Indian populations in the country, and certainly so going by percentage of the population, Indian relations with whites, whether private citizens or the state and federal governments, form a large part of this area's history. Wilkinson, with extensive experience in Indian law, gives an expert's eye view to how this has played out on the Plateau, especially since the rise of the Indian rights movement in the 1970s.
No less a person that Southwestern Indian-oriented novelist Tony Hillerman praises this work for that very expertise. And Hillerman, who has included Navajos, Apaches, Hopis and Zunis as protagonists in various of his novels, would know biased opinion if he saw it. (Contrary to one reviewer here, John Boyden's apparent conflict of interest in representing the Hopi HAS drawn calls for investigation.)
Wilkinson's exposure of how politically connected Salt Lake City attorney John Boyden sold the soul -- and massive coal mining rights -- of the Hopis out to Peabody Coal while also on retainer to Peabody takes up a good-sized chunk of this book. As Wilkinson was the person who discovered the smoking gun, and that in turn was partial motivation for this book, you can feel his anger in defense of Indian rights come through.
For an outside thumbnail history of this, read this Phoenix New Times story at: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues...
The next two factors in this area are the hardness of its natural features and its aridity, as pointed out by explorers like John Wesley Powell. And, per Powell, communal-minded Mormons appear to continue to have the best success of Anglos in dealing with this land.
Then, this area has been America's energy frontier ever since the Manhattan Project at nearby Los Alamos. Much of the country's uranium in the early years of the Atomic Age came from this area. Radiation poisoning, Indian treaty negotiations and environmental hazards are part of that mix.
Oil and natural gas, touched on by Wilkinson, are part of that picture, too, as are logging rights.
Getting back to the American Indian theme, Wilkinson shows how development of these resources has caused fractures in governments of most Southwestern Indian tribes, fractures exacerbated by the fact that their current government structures were imposed by Washington without regard for traditional native systems.
Meanwhile, the start brilliance of red rocks, painted desert, deep canyons and twisting slot canyons serves as the unchanging existential background for this thin-veneered modern story.
Having one of the largest American Indian populations in the country, and certainly so going by percentage of the population, Indian relations with whites, whether private citizens or the state and federal governments, form a large part of this area's history. Wilkinson, with extensive experience in Indian law, gives an expert's eye view to how this has played out on the Plateau, especially since the rise of the Indian rights movement in the 1970s.
No less a person that Southwestern Indian-oriented novelist Tony Hillerman praises this work for that very expertise. And Hillerman, who has included Navajos, Apaches, Hopis and Zunis as protagonists in various of his novels, would know biased opinion if he saw it. (Contrary to one reviewer here, John Boyden's apparent conflict of interest in representing the Hopi HAS drawn calls for investigation.)
Wilkinson's exposure of how politically connected Salt Lake City attorney John Boyden sold the soul -- and massive coal mining rights -- of the Hopis out to Peabody Coal while also on retainer to Peabody takes up a good-sized chunk of this book. As Wilkinson was the person who discovered the smoking gun, and that in turn was partial motivation for this book, you can feel his anger in defense of Indian rights come through.
For an outside thumbnail history of this, read this Phoenix New Times story at: http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues...
The next two factors in this area are the hardness of its natural features and its aridity, as pointed out by explorers like John Wesley Powell. And, per Powell, communal-minded Mormons appear to continue to have the best success of Anglos in dealing with this land.
Then, this area has been America's energy frontier ever since the Manhattan Project at nearby Los Alamos. Much of the country's uranium in the early years of the Atomic Age came from this area. Radiation poisoning, Indian treaty negotiations and environmental hazards are part of that mix.
Oil and natural gas, touched on by Wilkinson, are part of that picture, too, as are logging rights.
Getting back to the American Indian theme, Wilkinson shows how development of these resources has caused fractures in governments of most Southwestern Indian tribes, fractures exacerbated by the fact that their current government structures were imposed by Washington without regard for traditional native systems.
Meanwhile, the start brilliance of red rocks, painted desert, deep canyons and twisting slot canyons serves as the unchanging existential background for this thin-veneered modern story.
April 30, 2013
A comprehensive and well written guide to the American Southwest, made particularly poignant by reading it while I was in the midst of researching the energy water nexus faced by the Navajo of Arizona.
The book provides a relatively vast overview of tribes and experiences on the Colorado Plateau. While it was slow moving at times, it was also markedly engaging and diverse for a legal and historical account. The diversity of stories and rich personal experience of Wilkinson make this an important read for anyone seeking to understand the US Southwest.
The book provides a relatively vast overview of tribes and experiences on the Colorado Plateau. While it was slow moving at times, it was also markedly engaging and diverse for a legal and historical account. The diversity of stories and rich personal experience of Wilkinson make this an important read for anyone seeking to understand the US Southwest.
May 8, 2010
Charles Wilkinson has spent almost his entire professional life working as a lawyer and working with Native American rights, water rights, and mineral rights on the Colorado Plateau in the Four Corners region. His book talks about the history, the ecology, the economy, and the people within that area.
As nearly as I can tell, Wilkinson is highly sympathetic to and respectful of the various Native American cultures without trying to "become" a member of it.
As nearly as I can tell, Wilkinson is highly sympathetic to and respectful of the various Native American cultures without trying to "become" a member of it.
February 20, 2009
An amazing story of the colorado plateau and the people and natural resources found there. Please read this book if you are interested at all in water, coal, oil, and other resource policy as it relates to the native peoples and natural beauty of the American Southwest found in the incomparable Colorado Plateau and Great Basin areas. One of the best books I've read in years!
February 23, 2012
This book is so inspiring. It's part memoir, part cultural history, part love song to the Colorado Plateau. Charles Wilkinson is a rare person--an academic who writes well, a lawyer who's first and foremost a good human being. I hope that one day I will have lived and worked in a place long and well enough to write a book like this one.
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July 28, 2008What I have read of this book has made me realize even more what an amazing person Charles Wilkinson is. I have been lucky to get to know him.
August 10, 2016
This book covered the settlement and development of the Colorado Plateau (by rich white bastards). It is informative and it is heartbreaking. Wish the writing style had been more compelling...
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April 4, 2019979.13004 W6863 2004
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews