Brian Frehner

editor of Indians and Energy: Exploitation and Opportunity in the American Southwest

November 4, 2015

Brian Frehner is starting his sixth year in the history department at OSU. He teaches classes on U.S. history that emphasize the environment, technology, and the American Southwest. His research explores relationships between cultures and their need to produce and consume energy. He most recently explored these issues in the collection of essays he co-edited, Indians and Energy: Exploitation and Opprotunity in the American Southwest. In a book forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press, entitled Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920, he explains the historical context that shaped how prospectors found oil. He traces their various pursuits of power as a struggle for cultural, intellectual, and professional authority, over both nature and their peers. Some prospectors saw power as the work they did exploring and drilling into landscapes, while others saw it in the intellectual work of explaining how and where oil accumulated. Charting the intersection of human and natural history, their story traces the ever-evolving relationship between science and industry and reveals the unsuspected role geology played in shaping our understanding of the history of oil.

Indians & Energy explores the ways people have transformed natural resources in the American Southwest into fuel supplies for human consumption. Not only do Native Americans possess a large percentage of the Southwest's total acreage, but much of the nation's coal, oil, and uranium resources reside on tribal lands. Regional weather and climate patterns have also enabled Native people to take advantage of solar and wind power as sources of energy; however, complex issues related to energy and Indians transcend the region–and the nation. The contributors believe that the lessons of the Southwest can illuminate broader trends in other places. Their intent is not to end but to join the conversation and encourage others to do the same. They consider the intricate relationship between development and Indian communities in the Southwest with the hope that an understanding of patterns in the past might be useful in guiding policies and decisions in the future.

URL: https://library.okstate.edu/news/celebratingbooks/2011-honorees/brian-frehner

Last Updated: 14 January 2022