Youth & Futures

This article examines how Diné and Lepcha youth articulate decolonial futures that diverge from large-scale infrastructure development models. Rather than advocating for dams or power plants, Indigenous youth imagine energy and environmental futures rooted in their own territories and values. Their activism is framed as “youthful decolonial futurity,” a politics that centers community control, ancestral stewardship, and intergenerational decision-making.

This article argues that colonialism is advanced through the development of national infrastructures, which arrive in some places while being withheld in others. By examining the Central Arizona Project, it highlights how infrastructure planning across space and time established conditions for dispossession and marginalization of Navajo resources. The study shows how physical, legal, and political systems converge to reinforce colonial control through infrastructure development.