Oil is both boon and bane of the reservation

ANETH, San Juan County — It is unclear how the area along the San Juan River came to be known as Aneth.

One historian surmised it came from the Spanish word anexo, meaning annex. But aneth is not a Spanish word. Nor is it a Navajo word.

Regardless, Navajos call it t'aabiich'iidii, a reference to the business practices of the first Anglo trader on the land. It means "just like the devil."

According to College of Eastern Utah professor Robert McPherson, a Methodist minister in 1895 named the area aneth, which is Hebrew for "the answer."

Answers are what some 2,300 people scattered across the vast desert in prefabricated houses have been seeking for years. More than a third lack plumbing and a quarter are without kitchen facilities. Almost half heat their homes with wood. Nearly eight in 10 don't have telephones, according to the U.S. Census.

Unemployment is 33 percent. Fifty-four percent didn't graduate from high school. The median family income is $15,604. More than half live below the federal poverty line.

People still live in houses without running water, electricity and telephones. Education hasn't improved. Roads remain unpaved. Existing jobs are few. Prospects for new ones are bleak.

"Economic development is really on the back burner," McPherson said.

Just like they have for the past 50 years, Utah Navajos rely on oil and gas money for basic needs like housing and water.

Oil rigs atop mesas in this corner of the Navajo Nation rise like a shrines above the sagebrush-covered valley floor.

The steady clank of their counterbalanced lever, like a giant hammer pounding an anvil, break the silence in the sparsely populated desert. The up-and-down motion drives a pump to create suction to pull crude up through the well.

Wells in this faraway slice of southeastern Utah have extracted nearly 500 million barrels of oil the past half century, making the renowned Aneth oil fields Utah's largest producer. Geologists, fittingly, call the area Paradox Basin.

Utah Navajos should seemingly be much better off. The tribe has collected millions of dollars in oil and gas royalties over the years. But its members remain impoverished. Most don't have much to show for what their land has earned.

Oil wells are the boon and bane of life on the reservation. Crude propels what little economy exists. But it also is the source of decades-long litigation and infighting. Environmental degradation, too, has left scars on the tribal land and psyche.

Remoteness, lack of infrastructure and no capital investment dollars works against starting new businesses on the reservation. Even so, the economic potential remains untapped, according to the Navajo Utah Commission, made up of leaders from the tribe's seven chapters in the state.