Gridlock: Infrastructure and Jurisdiction in Eastern Navajo Agency

Abstract

This article examines how settler legal orders in Eastern Navajo Agency produce conditions of impasse that defer investments in life sustaining infrastructures, like roads. Focusing on the conjuncture of infrastructural decay and jurisdictional friction amid an oil and gas boom, I elaborate a concept of “gridlock” as a deadly effect of settler governance. Unfolding stories about road maintenance, school access, and emergency medical transport, the article describes gridlock as a space of both impasse and improvisation that Diné residents inhabit in moving through a region engineered for their immobility.