The Greater Chaco region is a living and ancient cultural landscape. A thousand years ago, Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico was the ceremonial and economic center of the Chaco Cultural Landscape, an area encompassing more than 75,000 square miles of the Southwest in NM, AZ, CO and UT and sacred to Indigenous Peoples. Today, Chaco Canyon is a National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site, considered one of the most important archaeological sites in the Americas, yet the vast majority of the Greater Chaco Landscape is leased to oil and gas activities. Indigenous People, primarily Pueblo and Navajo (Diné) peoples, sacred cultural sites, precious water resources, and the area’s biodiversity are all under a grave and growing threat from fracking.

For over a century, the federal government has quite literally treated the Greater Chaco Landscape like a national energy sacrifice zone. Victim to large-scale resource exploitation, including a history of Navajo displacement and land theft, the Greater Chaco region has been carved into a complex checkerboard of federal, state, private, and Navajo allotment land. A maze of federal and state agencies control the area, allowing for oil, gas, and mining companies to exploit communities, as well as layers of law, regulations, and oversight agencies. New Mexico is now the second biggest oil producer in the United States, hosting the world’s largest oilfield in southeast New Mexico and west Texas, with more than 91% of available lands in the Greater Chaco area leased for fracking.

Fracking disproportionately harms Indigenous communities due to their unique relationship to the land and water, and their exposure to the harmful effects of colonization and racism. Diné families experience fractures in their community including increased truck traffic, road degradation, infrastructure decline and failures, increased noise and light pollution, health impacts, decreased air and water quality, degrading water quality, unsafe conditions for livestock, destruction of sacred sites, and other associated impacts. Fracking spills, leaks, and explosions happen daily. Still without proper protections, the region is now host to a variety of boondoggle scams to propel the oil and gas industry, including false-promises of “clean” hydrogen and efforts to turn toxic radioactive fracking waste into drinking water.

For decades, the Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Land Management has skirted updates to its Farmington, Rio Puerco, and adjacent field offices’ resource management plans that would finally address the cumulative impacts of industrialized fracking on the Greater Chaco Landscape. Despite dozens of public meetings, two million protest comments, and countless resolutions calling for restraint, federal and state agencies continue to rubberstamp more fracking with no safeguards in place to protect the region’s cultural landscape and without adequate consultation with the public, Tribes, Navajo Chapters, and impacted communities. In response to continued calls for action, Secretary Deb Haaland announced the “Honoring Chaco Initiative'' in 2021 - a new collaborative process that promises to finally deliver meaningful cultural landscape protection in Greater Chaco. However, despite the ongoing “Honoring Chaco '' process, the Bureau of Land Management continues to approve hundreds of new oil and gas wells and related activities, including the re-issuance of 45,000 acres of oil and gas leases in August 2022.

One thing is certain: Greater Chaco cannot be honored while it continues to be sacrificed.