The deals were made possible thanks to the work of attorney John Boyden, a Utah Mormon who sees opportunity. Boyden represents the Hopi, but that tribe in reality consists of many nations that are like rival city states, so Boyden works to create a leadership that will be recognized by the federal government.

What the Hopi don’t know is that the attorney is simultaneously helping the companies that are buying the tribe’s mineral wealth. “Time sheets and billing correspondence later confirmed that John Boyden was working for Peabody Coal and Kennecott Copper at the same time he was working for the Hopi,” Nies writes.

“It might have been theft, but it was all done legally,” she writes later in the book. “By passing new laws, Black Mesa became a crucial resource colony for the expansion of the New West.”

What’s more, the legal resource taking is made possible thanks to the long history by which the Hopi and Navajo have been dispossessed and rounded up. The dispute between the Navajo and the Hopi, we learn, is not an ancestral war between tribes but rather a more recent conflict caused by the federal government’s cruel treatment of both groups.