In Trail of Lightning by Rebecca Roanhorse, the Big Water, an apocalyptic event, facilitated the shift between the Fifth and Sixth worlds of Diné culture. Those who survived live in Dinétah, what was once the Navajo reservation that has since been walled off. Not only do the Diné survive, though, but also some of the residual structures from the Fifth world and settler colonialism that threatened the survival of the Navajo Nation. Through their reinstatement in the Sixth world, it appears that while Indigenous identity might change to suit the environment, the societal structures that they are within will not change. The Indigenous identity begins to work within what Sarah Jaquette Ray discusses in chapter two of her book The Ecological Other: Environmental Exclusion in American Culture, where the Indigenous body and environmental concerns are brought together to highlight a history of environmental exclusion despite the stereotype of the “ecological Indian.” Despite the land being saved, however, the Diné culture struggles, where the threat moves from an external force to internal conflict among Indigenous communities. I argue that Roanhorse depicts a kind of Indigenous futurism in the Sixth world that requires the capitalist structure of the Fifth world without environmental activism, suggesting that in the Sixth world the “ecological Indian” will be someone who works to improve the Earth without removing the capitalist structures in place that ruined it in the first place. 
	The Big Water was a result of the Fifth world’s problems with resource management, where the Earth was exploited for everything it could give, resulting in climate change conditions. This kind of environmental disaster is not unfamiliar to Indigenous people, however, where settler colonization brought on an initial apocalypse that saw the land being taken from the Indigenous nations.

The Diné identity, then, is provided a boundary within which those who identify as Diné would seek to protect, and they do when there is the threat of multinational corporations. 
	In discussing how the Dinétah came to be, Maggie provides a brief history of the final stages of the Fifth world that lead up to the Big Water; namely that of the Energy Wars, and the burden that placed on Indigenous communities that had to defend their land once again against settler colonialism. 

Once again colonization is happening in favor of those who seek the land and not those who are already living on it, but this time is revised to include militant force as the “multinationals with private armies a thousand times more powerful than the original bilagáana settlers”. Multinational corporations, as an outgrowth of capitalism, sought the land because of its resource rich nature, privileging financial benefits over the sacred nature of the land to the Diné. This isn’t surprising, however, due to the historical habits of corporations and settlers seeking the resources without a responsibility to the inhabitants.
However, the solution that the Tribal Council suggested in order to keep the multinationals out did not prioritize the land, but rather the preservation of the Diné identity, accomplished through building a wall and isolating the community. 
