Navajo Women and the Politics of Identity

Abstract

This article examines intergenerational changes in the construction and reconstruction of Indian identity, and links those changes to changes in social, political, economic, and cultural contexts. Interviews with Navajo women revealed distinct patterns in their self-identification as Navajo and as Indian. Women who were born prior to the self-determination movements of the 1960s and who grew up in the context of Navajo communities distanced themselves from, and actively disrupted, negative and stereotypic representations of Indians, drawing on their specific tribal identities to do so. Women born after 1960 were less likely to distance themselves from Indian identity, but also reframed the meanings associated with that identity. These results illustrate the importance of womens strategies for cultural survival and their use of resources that are historically and socially patterned in the process of constructing distinct and positive identities as Indian and as Navajo. The point is that you know your language and your culture. That makes you a person. That makes you have an identity. Thats what you can fall back on. Lena, age 17, 1991 The past continues to speak to us. But it no longer addresses us as a simple, factual “past.” It is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are the points of identification, the unstable points of identification or suture, which are made within the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence, but a positioning. Hence, there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental “law of origin.” Stuart Hall, 1997:53.