SERVICIO DE INFORMÁTICA Y COMUNICACIONES

It is inherently complex to present a cogent narrative of a people and place, rife with ontological politics and complexities. My attempt is to go beyond representation, however, by shifting the emphasis from a people to a problem – or in this narrative, two problems: the legacies of anthropology and energy development. To that end, this chapter constructs a narrative of Diné distinction following these legacies with extraction as the metaphor that binds them together.

In what follows, I first discuss three historic events that fundamentally

transformed the landscapes of power constituting the Navajo: (1) oil discovery, federal recognition, and mimetic governance; (2) U.S. energy interests and federal livestock reduction; and (3) women ethnographers and Southwestern archaeology. I show how these transformations were matters of both extractions and productions enacted through historically particular encounters between, on the one hand, a Native population and the

settler state with which they were forced to negotiate, and on the other hand, the growing regime of knowledge known as anthropology. First, as a transformative vector, energy development sets the stage for the construction of the modern Navajo Nation, therefore, the section opens with a discussion of the creation of the Navajo Nation as a political entity by the U.S. government, vis-à-vis oil discovery on Navajo territory in the early 20th century. Second, I follow energy development’s transformative effects into the 1930’s, showing the intimate interdependencies between federal livestock reduction and energy development, considering the interests of two contesting, imagined geographies – the settler state and Navajo homeland – as they battled through the bodies of sheep, residue of the Spaniards (the earlier settler state) and emblems of Navajo sustainability. Third, I explore the legacies of Southwestern archaeology and cultural anthropology –

particularly the latter’s feminist strain – and how these regimes of emerging disciplinary knowledge depended upon Navajo material culture and extant intellectuals, extracting artifacts and stories which, in turn, generated an image of “the Navajo” for universities, museums, photography, and other epistemic and aesthetic projects.

These three historic relations and their attending technologies have had effects far beyond the Colorado Plateau, producing an image of “Navajoness,” contributing to globally circulating representations of indigeneity through the artifacts and landscapes these technologies have produced (energy infrastructure, laws, books and monographs, museum exhibits, photographs, and a meaningful livestock economy). At the same time that these products of Navajo history and identity fed academic and popular interest in the western frontier, they laid the foundation for responses to this imaginary by Diné people in subsequent decades.

In the final section of this chapter, I explore how the extractions and productions of these historic relations may appear at first to be one-way, exploitative engagements, but have in fact been marked by mutuality in many cases, generating productive effects, generating hybrid knowledges, counter-knowledges, and interdependencies in emerging movements of Diné critical knowledge production. At once distinct from and mutually constitutive with the exploits of energy and anthropology, these Navajo-centered knowledges work against, work with, and work otherwise from the material and intellectual legacies championed by the institutions of the settler state and disciplinary knowledge. Although often cast as “Western” or Bilagáana (“white”)versus “Navajo” knowledge, this false dichotomy does not do service to the creative, critical, hybrid epistemologies being mobilized and produced by Diné intellectuals today, who draw upon multiple legacies – from the Emergence Story to postcolonial theory – to examine the present conditions of indigeneity, economy, governance, and sovereignty for the Navajo Nation. To this end, I focus on the work and products of two contemporary knowledge-practices on the Navajo Nation and its related networks: the Navajo Studies Association and the Diné Policy Institute41, two epistemological projects that not only advance particular knowledges of people, place, and power, but embody the creative,

41 _{A third, recent institution that responds to the history of anthropology and to some degree, of energy}

development (at least as coal and uranium mining and other extractive technologies have transformed the landscape, burial sites, and other material and human remains) is the Navajo Nation Historic Preservation Department (HPD), through which I received my permit to conduct ethnographic research. It is, along with the Navajo Nation Institutional Review Board (IRB), its own type of contemporary knowledge project, invested in protecting and regulating knowledge produced on and about the Navajo Nation – including this dissertation. Because of its recursivity and rebalancing of power over the “outside” anthropologist (though Navajo anthropologists are subject to the same protocol), I discuss the Navajo Nation IRB and HPD in the Epilogue, “Reflections on Methdology,” though I have it in mind here in this chapter, as part of a wider set of contemporary, responses to the epistemic and material extractions that have occurred on the Navajo Nation.

hybrid epistemologies guiding critical knowledge production and redefinitions of “the Navajo Nation” today. At the heart of these historic negotiations their mutually constitutive knowledges lies energy development – its material legacies and unwritten future.

II. Oil Discovery, Livestock Reduction, and Anthropological Encounters

“My family has sheep, cattle, horses, and the land, a lot of crops – corn, potatoes, squash, chilies. Keeping the fire going, keeping the tradition going. Nowadays, if you look at it, who is willing to invest their money in these kinds of things? We’re switching gears to every two-week paychecks and NHA [Navajo Housing Authority] housing. There’s a lot of Navajos who have gotten away from this lifestyle. For me, I try to work on these properties like fencing, and we have a large chunk of land out in the forest area. That’s part of … that’s where you get your thinking. Let’s say you have livestock – sheep and the grazing area – and you maintain what’s going on, and the history, that’s like your strength. It’s not just only you, but your family. Nitsa’akees (thinking). That’s how you get your ideas, from the land, from agriculture.”42

My colleague Alex Mitchell shared these thoughts from across his neatly

organized desk in his 4th floor office at Diné College, where he curates the museum’s art and archaeological collections. Though his nostalgic reflections on social change might sound like that of an older man, Alex is in his mid-30’s, speaks Navajo as a first

language, and when not working in the museum, travels the few miles back and forth between the cinder block hogan on campus that the college provides to him and his parents’ more remote homestead in Wheatfields, not far through the pines from where I am living. Or, he travels to Santa Fe, where he collaborates with leaders in museum

42 _{Interview with Alex Mitchell, Tsaile, AZ, June 20, 2008. Unless otherwise noted, all interviews were}

studies, anthropologists and archaeologists. His emphasis on the direct relationship between the land and human thought is the most explicit I’ve heard, though it is a theme that runs through many conversations I’ve had. Using the land – and not just “land” in the abstract, but a particular, located, familiar and familial area – Alex theorizes what it means to be Diné today.

This profound association with place is the axis for understanding the way in which “the Navajo Nation” has been shaped in the 20th century vis-à-vis various extractive technologies. At the same time, these extractive technologies – like power itself – are productive. Oil discovery and the establishment of the Navajo Nation as a political entity, federal livestock reduction, and anthropological encounters each extract some objects in order produce others. By tracing these extractions and the things they are producing, we can trace the emergence of particular knowledges about Navajo identity as well as the Diné knowledges that sometimes intersect and other times parallel these knowledge projects.