In the spring of 1977, members of the National Indian Youth Council (NIYC), along with the Coalition for Navajo Liberation, barraged the Secretary of the Interior and the chairman of the Navajo Nation with petitions calling for a halt to the proposed construction of several coal gasification plants on the Navajo Reservation in northwestern New Mexico. The petitions stated that the billion-dollar industrial venture would lead to "the inevitable genocide" of the local Navajo people whose culture and livelihood would "once again (be) trampled and ignored." The NIYC-led campaign to stop coal gasification began in 1974 and lasted through most of 1977. Their struggle was against not only the multinationals seeking to build and profit from the plants, but also the governments of both the United States and the Navajo Nation, which ignored the interests of the Burnham residents in their legislative wrangling over gasification. In this article, the author traces the history of the attempts of NIYC to stop the coal gasification in the Navajo Nation from 1974 to 1977. (Contains 42 notes.)