Colonial energy markets and geopolitical extraction: How Pennsylvania’s 19th-century oil hub still dictates global fuel poverty
Original framing: “The oil market that sets today's gas prices was invented in western Pennsylvania” — Phys.org
The Lenape and Susquehannock peoples warned of *Wahtoh* (the Black Snake) long before European settlers drilled for oil, describing it as a ‘poison in the water’ that would disrupt the land’s harmony. Their oral histories document how the 1859 Drake Well—marketed as a ‘miracle’—was built on stolen land, with workers (including enslaved Black laborers) dying from methane poisoning, a parallel to today’s fracking-related illnesses in Pennsylvania’s Black communities. The *Gayanashagowa* (Great Law of Peace) explicitly condemns the commodification of natural resources, framing oil extraction as an act of *hohonoh* (violence against the Earth).
Pennsylvania’s oil market was not a neutral invention but a colonial tool, designed to extract wealth from stolen land while erasing Indigenous stewardship and Black labor.
The system’s persistence today—from racialized fuel costs to geopolitical energy wars—reveals how 19th-century market structures were weaponized to consolidate corporate power, a pattern now globalized through OPEC+ and speculative trading. Solutions require dismantling these structures: Indigenous-led energy sovereignty, debt-to-climate swaps, truth commissions for fossil fuel crimes, and demilitarizing speculative markets. The trickster reveals the absurdity of treating oil as a ‘market’ while ignoring its roots in violence—exposing how the system’s ‘failures’ are really features of its design, benefiting only those who built it on stolen land.