The Archaeology of Race and Racialization in Historic America Charles E. Orser Jr (original) (raw)
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Identidad y cultura: una interpretación cultural de los Navajo-Hopi tierra de controversias
Vivat Academia, 2010
This interpretive essay provides a socio-cultural explanation of the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute based on the rich narrative account of the conflict by Benedek (1999). A macrolevel of analysis is taken so as to identify the general trends of the conflict. SPITCEROW, the acronym for a simple analytical instrument, is used to identify the main components of the overall conflict. Finally an analytical section explains the conflict through the use of the Social Identity Theory and supports it by using a broad cultural approach. The paper concludes that identity needs were at the core of the conflict and that once those issues were addressed and satisfactorily resolved, secondary issues were amicably negotiated and a settlement was reached.
There are an estimated twenty to fifty billion tons of high grade, low sulfur coal underlying the Colorado Plateau in a stretch of Arizona desert known as Black Mesa.Since the 1970s, the Navajo (Diné) community of Black Mesa has faced a tremendous battle against particularly insidious types of colonialism that continue to endure into the present day. In 1964, a conglomeration of companies known as Peabody Western Coal Company (now Peabody Energy), first signed a deal with the Navajo Nation and then the Hopi Tribe, granting the company mineral rights to strip mine the high desert plateau of Black Mesa seated within the 1882 boundaries of the Navajo and Hopi reservations. In 1974, the Navajo and Hopi Settlement Act made almost a million acres of shared Navajo-Hopi land in northern Arizona exclusive Hopi territory, called Hopi Partitioned Lands (HPL). Black Mesa was crisscrossed and split by barbed wire fencing designating boundaries. The Department of Justice undertook a plan to relocate more than 14,000 Navajo and 100 Hopi. Couched as an effort to resolve what was called the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, the act was actually the result of an ongoing effort to exploit mineral resources in the area. This report is a story of refusal by those who remain. In this report, I will show how the Navajo community now residing on the so-called Hopi Partitioned Lands has employed and called upon place-based relational politics, cultural values, and daily practices of refusal to endure under the harshest conditions of colonial invasions, internal and external changes and resource extraction. My interlocutors shared stories that make stark the brutality of federal Indian policies on Navajo life, and at the same time show resilience and determination in the face of colonialism. Through ethnographic narratives, I highlight the central role of sheep and shepherding as a continued practice of the everyday resistance to the colonial conditions imposed upon them. I bring together theoretical frameworks and literature that reveal how Navajo history traverses and coheres within both settler colonialism and resource colonialism. Lastly, I focus on the role that women, matrilineal kinship and specific female deities play in the continuity of their struggle.
American Indian epistemology in Deborah A. Miranda’s 'Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir
Beyond Philology An International Journal of Linguistics, Literary Studies and English Language Teaching, 2018
The essay proposes that Deborah A. Miranda’s Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir (2013) is a work animated by the principles of American Indian epistemology. First, a model of Native philosophy is outlined after Native philosopher Thomas Norton-Smith. Secondly, four dimensions of Miranda’s work – its ethical and procedural purpose, generic location, metalinguistic strategy, narrative as a vehicle of knowledge – are analyzed in the light of Norton-Smith, Roland Barthes, California historians, American Indian literary studies, decolonial theory, and auto-ethnography. In conclusion, it is posited that Miranda’s story is an animated entity enacting ontological, intersubjective, historical difference, and that it intervenes into the genre of memoir/autobiography.
Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty: The Voices of Navajo Railroad Workers
New Labor Forum, 2012
10 I especially want to thank those who have steadfastly encouraged me in this work, including my wife, Mary Ellen Vogler; my mother, Pat Youngdahl; my daughter, Coleen Youngdahl; and my friends Bill Haymes, Peter Zarifes, Bill Deverell, and Christine Irizarry. My friend and scholar of the English language, David Schiller, has repeatedly buffed and polished my diction, a difficult task indeed. The remaining mistakes are all mine. Preface xvii disputes are legendary, numerous careful ethnographers have come before me, leaving behind important information and analysis. 11 As projects like this often do, my work went in directions unintended at the beginning. Based on my recorded talks with Navajo people, my efforts have driven me down the historical path of Navajo railroad work. I was able to document the history of the tremendous growth in the numbers of Navajo railroad workers after World War II through studying the archives Many have helped in the editing and construction of the work, including John Alley and all those at Utah State University Press and my son, Benjamin Youngdahl. Archivists and librarians have been uniformly helpful to me in a number of locations, and I thank them. 11 The legendary and ongoing disputes among those who work in Navajo studies wax and wane according to the academic fashions of the day. For example, the pioneering work of Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton, in many ways the founders of this anthropological field, has been criticized by respected Navajo scholar Gary Witherspoon, who wrote, "The accepted literature, mostly compiled during the Kluckhohn era of Harvard psychoanalytical research projects conducted mainly at Ramah, New Mexico, should, in my opinion, be transferred from the category 'accepted' to the category of 'questionable.' Many of the culture and personality studies of this era have come under so much unfavorable scrutiny that the whole effort has been largely discounted by many anthropologists." Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 195. Yet, a little over a decade later, Witherspoon's work was sharply criticized by Thomas Patin, a scholar influenced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Patin argued that Witherspoon ignored issues of power in his work on the Navajo and was part of a Western colonialist mindset "unable to apprehend cultural differences without first circumscribing it with its own desires." Thomas Patin, "White Mischief: Metaphor and Desire in a Misreading of Navajo Culture,"