Navajo Land Research Articles

Empowering Navajo Nation's Water Quality Monitoring through State-of-the-Art Paper-Electrochemical Sensors

The NSF-PREM research collaborative effort between Navajo Technical University (NTU) and Harvard University aims to address the critical issue of water contamination within the Navajo Nation. Decades of uranium mining and mineral extraction have left a lasting mark on the Navajo land and groundwater resources, necessitating effective solutions. The Nano-electrochemical Analysis and Energy Storage Laboratory (NEST LAB) at NTU has developed flexible paper-based sensors integrated with advanced electrochemical techniques to detect heavy metal concentrations in water samples. These sensors are cost-effective, easy to fabricate, and highly reliable, offering real-time monitoring capabilities. The projects core goal is to expedite water quality analysis and empower the Navajo community to detect potential contamination promptly. By distributing these sensors to local chapter houses, residents can independently assess groundwater quality, fostering a sense of ownership and proactive environmental stewardship. This partnership exemplifies the power of community-driven solutions and trains Navajo students to get involved in scientific innovation to safeguard the environment for future generations in the Navajo Nation.

Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 by Jada Ach

Reviewed by: Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925 by Jada Ach Jenna Gersie Jada Ach, Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2021. 328 pp. Hardcover, $39.95; e-book, $19.95. In Jada Ach’s Sand, Water, Salt: Managing the Elements in Literature of the American West, 1880–1925, the ecomaterials of the West’s arid deserts and oceanscapes are radical, dynamic elements that become entangled with the human bodies that live there. Sand, water, and salt are neither waste materials nor commodities, but actants that resist control by the humans who try to manage both the elements themselves and their own bodies as they are exposed to the elements. “Try as we might, we can never manage our way out of ecological enmeshment” (9), Ach writes, and through her observations of intimate human–element engagements, Ach employs material ecocritical and queer ecology lenses to counter the top-down, hierarchical environmental management of the West’s wasteland spaces. Through her analysis of Progressive Era literature, Ach searches for hope in the porous spaces of environmental management, suggesting that we might learn from these texts how to “manage without mastery” as we approach human–environment relationships in the Anthropocene with compassion, care, and a focus on environmental justice (16). In McTeague: A Story of San Francisco by Frank Norris (1899) and The Land of Little Rain by Mary Austin (1903), Ach reads the desert sand as a queer actant with “revolutionary potential” as it works to undermine human attempts at management of desert spaces (76). As porous human bodies are inundated with sand in an intimate becoming, interactions with this lively element reveal human desires and longings as they resist the temporal progression and masculine ideals of administrative management. Similarly reading elements of desire and liveliness in the West’s water resources, Ach suggests that Progressive Era attitudes about water management can inform today’s water policy. In The River by Ednah Aiken (1914), The Virginian by Owen Wister (1902), and Life among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims by Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (1883), Ach shows how water is co-actant with the humans that attempt to [End Page 427] manage it, even as water, in its liveliness, remains beyond complete control. Finally, Ach heads further west, to the Pacific Ocean, where she reads The Sea-Wolf by Jack London (1904) and The American Diary of a Japanese Girl by Yonejirō Noguchi (1902) to explore how ocean salt permeates human bodies in culturally mediated ways, illustrating how both race and gender are managed in the production of imperial and transnational modern bodies. Throughout Sand, Water, Salt, Ach addresses contemporary environmental concerns, from uranium mining on Navajo land and managing radioactive waste to water crises at Standing Rock and in Flint. To address these environmental crises of the Anthropocene, Ach proposes “managing-by-drift,” allowing our engagements with the lively elements to inform and inspire decision-making about management. By drifting into moments of intimacy, activism, and pleasure, “situated managements” of “mutual care and shared governance” (29) can supplement already-established practices and policies as we “shift our attention from an ethics of fixing to one of living-with” (233 emphasis original). Together with the elements we can learn to resist hierarchies of management as we recognize our inseparability from the “strange agents and agencies” with which we are always intermingling in the West’s varied environments (233). Jenna Gersie University of Colorado Boulder Copyright © 2023 Western Literature Association ...

COVID-19, Medical Care, and Data Sovereignty

Abstract During the COVID-19 pandemic, Native American communities were not only heavily impacted by the virus but other socioeconomic factors as well. The Navajo Nation was at the forefront, setting an example for the United States and general public on establishing policies and ground efforts to minimize the spread of the virus through Navajo land. However, as the virus spread, it also revealed the interconnectedness surrounding Indigenous communities and Indigenous women. Through the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) Movement, researchers found a lack of data as reports present unreliable and underreported information involving racial misclassification and data genocide. Data regarding Indigenous community COVID-19 statistics reflect historical trauma, especially in the exclusion of Indigenous communities from data sets and analyses used to make health policy decisions. I conclude this article by emphasizing the necessity of including Indigenous sovereign bodies in the dispersal of gathered data sets and establishing an amicable relationship promoting the well-being of Indigenous communities between social scientists and Native communities.

Reel Restoration in Drunktown’s Finest

Drunktown’s Finest, a 2014 feature-length film directed by Sydney Free-land (Diné), tells the stories of Luther “Sick Boy” Maryboy (Jeremiah Bitsui), Nizhoni Smiles (MorningStar Angeline), and Felixia John (Carmen Moore), set in the fictional border town of Dry Lake. Freeland renders a visual counternarrative of her hometown, Gallup, New Mexico, featured in an episode of the TV show 20/20 (ABC) that highlighted the alcohol epidemic and gave Gallup the derogatory nickname “Drunk Town, USA.” The characters’ stories on the virtual reservation parallel the real-life stories of many Indigenous people on reservations and in border towns, urban areas, and rural communities. As representative of diverse Diné cultural and political identities, Sick Boy’s, Nizhoni’s, and Felixia’s stories unfold from their aversion to the Navajo Nation to embracing it. The analysis is framed with the Diné philosophy and epistemology of hózǫ́, translated as to be in a state of wellness, balance, peace, and harmony, culminating in beauty. Acknowledging the significance of k’é (kinship and family), ceremony, stories, and language anchored in Navajo land, the film addresses disharmony, sickness, alcoholism, and disconnection and seeks restoration through hózǫ́. “Reel restoration” conveys how Drunktown’s Finest benefits Indigenous peoples from creatives to viewers against decades of aggressive, violent, and anti-Indigenous imagery, restoring their indigeneity, humanity, and ultimately their hózhǫ́.

Uranium and arsenic unregulated water issues on Navajo lands.

The geologic profile of the western United States lends itself to naturally elevated levels of arsenic and uranium in the groundwater and can be aggravated by mining. The Navajo Nation, located in the American Southwest, is the largest contiguous Native American Nation and has over a 100-year legacy of hard rock mining. Concentrations of uranium and arsenic above drinking water standards in unregulated water sources pose various human-health risks to the Navajo Nation due to the lack of public water infrastructure that exists. Although high natural background concentrations may occur in some environments, anthropogenic contamination concerns are especially troublesome for the Navajo Nation, where past uranium mining activity and natural sources affect unregulated water supplies. Community engaged research on uranium and arsenic present in unregulated water wells in the western portion of the Navajo Nation has been a focus of the Ingram laboratory since 2003. These studies have provided important information, particularly for uranium and arsenic, to the communities and the Navajo tribal leaders.

Wastelanding: Legacies of Uranium Mining in Navajo Country

In this sophisticated and insightful book, Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the process of “wastelanding” helps explain the history and persistence of environmental injustice. Environmental racism stems not only from constructed discourses of race but also from constructed conceptions of place. Asserting their colonial dominance over the Navajo, Euro-Americans defined indigenous lands in the American Southwest as wasted and useless, making those landscapes, and the people who inhabited them, pollutable. Wastelanding enabled the development of uranium mining and milling on Navajo land, a continuation of the colonial project with dramatic, if slowly evolving, violence inflicted on both the land and people. “The power exerted over environmental resources,” Voyles explains, “and the ways in which those in power construct knowledge about landscapes, are a central part of how what we now call social injustices are produced” (p. ix). In exploring the legacy of uranium mining in Navajo country, Voyles draws from tremendously powerful histories: the forced sterilization of indigenous women paired with the reproductive health impacts of radiation exposure; Navajo houses constructed from radioactive uranium mill tailings; and the virtually unknown Rio Puerco accident in 1979, when the containment barriers of a tailings pond in New Mexico failed and sent a radioactive slurry into the river and through reservation lands—the largest accidental release of radioactive material in American history. From these and other stories Voyles builds a convincing case for connections between colonialism, wastelanding, and environmental injustice. She brings her account to the present by examining grassroots activism regarding land tenure, environmental health, and the prospect of renewed uranium mining, underscoring her historical argument by demonstrating the ongoing link between the demands for decolonization and justice.

Arboreal archaeology and early Navajo land use

Arboreal archaeology is the use of tree-ring data to examine past human exploitation of forest resources. Arboreal archaeology can identify how and when past groups procured wood for artifact manufacture, medicine, fuel, and construction timbers. More importantly, dendroarchaeological sampling of these non-site resources can significantly enhance our understanding of past land use patterns. This research shows the utility of the arboreal archaeological record in understanding early Navajo land use in northwestern New Mexico, USA, and suggests archaeologists should promote wider application of the research on these endangered parts of the archaeological record.

Early Navajo land use in northwestern New Mexico: Big Bead Mesa in regional perspective

Big Bead Mesa (LA 12351) is the most famous Navajo archaeological site ever investigated and has played an important role in the interpretation of Navajo culture history. It remains a sacred place to the Navajo, both for historical and spiritual reasons. Pioneering work by Dorothy L. Keur resulted in the publication of the first Society for American Archaeology Memoir and brought Navajo archaeology national recognition. James Hester used Big Bead Mesa as the type site for his Cabezon Phase, although he conducted no research at the site. Big Bead Mesa is not the only Early Navajo site in the Rio Puerco Valley; however, the surrounding area has never been adequately investigated or reported. This paper documents a variety of Navajo sites in the Rio Puerco Valley and indicates that Big Bead Mesa was only a small part of a much larger Navajo occupation that extended to the north, west, and south.

“No Explanation, No Resolution, and No Answers”: Border Town Violence and Navajo Resistance to Settler Colonialism

“No Explanation, No Resolution, and No Answers”Border Town Violence and Navajo Resistance to Settler Colonialism Jennifer Nez Denetdale (bio) Dakota Elizabeth Cook-Lynn’s scholarship has been influential in shaping Indigenous studies for at least four decades. She has steadfastly criticized how scholarship in Native studies has been hijacked by American exceptionalism so that the historical treatment of Indigenous peoples and our present dilemmas continue to be erased, sanitized, and denied as the United States poses to the rest of the world as a multicultural nation that treats all of its citizens equally across race, class, and gender. Against scholarship that sustains such U.S. claims, Cook-Lynn insists that our responsibility as scholars is “to the tribal nations that have survived terrible wars, that have signed solemn treaties with our enemies, that possess vast resources, the rivers people live by, the lands where our relatives are buried. This legacy is our constituency.”1 As a Diné woman who struggles with academia precisely because of the kinds of challenges that Elizabeth Cook-Lynn speaks of, I take her writing to be inspiring first for my own efforts to sustain the criticism of American imperialism that is founded on the genocide and disappearance of Indigenous peoples and second as sources that can be built on to move the conversation in ways that are productive and regenerative. Cook-Lynn’s insistence that Indigenous scholarship must be devoted to the support of tribal nations, sovereignty, and self-determination has been taken up in various ways and sometimes in ways that have limited our definitions of what sovereignty and self-determination mean. [End Page 111] By limitations, I mean that Indigenous studies has been slow to take up the historical and lived experiences of Indigenous peoples in what is marked as urban and non-reservation or non-tribal lands.2 Because of land dispossession, the processes of capitalism, and ethnic cleansing, Indigenous peoples’ defining experiences have included displacement, relocation, and migration into urban spaces. Yet discursive practices connected to federal Indian policies have cast Indigenous peoples who reside in urban spaces and off legally recognized Indian lands as somehow less “traditional” and as instead “modern” or “progressive.” Although Native people’s experiences in urban spaces and border towns have been studied, there remains much to understand about how land dispossession and U.S. policies of ethnic cleansing have shaped the contours of movement from U.S.-designated tribal lands to urban spaces and border towns and how Indigenous people are endlessly cast as the outsiders and aliens in formerly recognized Indigenous spaces. This essay, then, presents Diné historical and lived experiences in towns that border the Navajo Nation, with a focus on Gallup and Farmington, New Mexico, but with the recognition that other towns like Winslow, Holbrook, Flagstaff, and Page, Arizona, also have histories of violence against Navajos that have everything to do with the United States as a settler nation whose thirst for Indigenous land and resources remains unabated. A history of Navajo and Native protest against the violence in border towns momentarily disrupts and unsettles, and concessions are made. Very few studies have been undertaken of border town violence, even though this violence is pervasive and a feature of Native life in these communities. Further, most of the understanding of border town violence pathologizes Navajos as both the victims and perpetrators from a health risk perspective. This violence against Navajos is evident across decades and usually is only remarked on when the violence appears extraordinary or spectacular. For the most part, settlers remain innocent in the narratives that are created about their relationships with Navajos in border towns.3 As a Diné woman who has spent most of her life on Navajo land and moving back and forth from my home community of Tohatchi, New Mexico, to urban spaces like Gallup, Flagstaff, Farmington, and Albuquerque, I participate in a pattern of travel and movement across invisible boundaries that demarcate space as either “tribal” or “urban and non-Indian” and which supposedly limit “Indians” to designated tribal spaces. When “Indians” leave these spaces, they are cast as out of place, “modern,” “progressive,” “urban,” and even “non-traditional.” My mother shares stories of...

The rainbow is our sovereignty: Rethinking the politics of energy on the Navajo Nation

This article offers a political-ecological reflection on Navajo (Diné) sovereignty, emphasizing lived and territorial interpretations of sovereignty, expanding our standard, juridical-legal notions of sovereignty that dominate public discourse on tribal economic and energy development. Operating from a critical analysis of settler colonialism, I suggest that alternative understandings of sovereignty – as expressed by Diné tribal members in a range of expressive practices – open new possibilities for thinking about how sovereign futures might be literally constructed through specific energy infrastructures. The article follows the controversy surrounding a proposed coal fired power plant known as Desert Rock, placing the phantom project in a longer, enduring history of struggle over energy extraction on Navajo land in order to illuminate this contested future. Broadly, these re-significations of sovereignty point toward a distinct modality of environmental action that suggests other kinds of relationships are at stake, challenging assumptions made by adversaries and allies alike that the politics of protesting (in this case) coal technologies is a practice with self-evident ethics. To intervene in these broad debates, I propose that there are multiple landscapes of power shaping Navajo territory, which must be brought into the ongoing, urgent debates over how the Navajo Nation might develop a more sustainable energy policy for the future.Keywords: political ecology, sovereignty, Navajo, environmentalism, ethics, territory, practice, sustainability, landscapes of power

Indigenous Circuits: Navajo Women and the Racialization of Early Electronic Manufacture

From 1965 to 1975 the legendary Silicon Valley company Fairchild Semiconductor operated a state-of-the-art integrated circuit manufacturing plant in Shiprock, New Mexico on Navajo land. In the face of concerns about high-tech pollution, increasingly empowered labor organizations, and a newly politicized and visible American Indian civil rights movement, indigenous electronic workers at Shiprock were pressed into service as examples of the peaceful coexistence and integration of the past and the future, the primitive and the modern, creativity and capitalism. Navajo women workers were described as ideal predigital digital workers, uniquely suited to the job by temperament, culture, and gender. Their labor as platform builders was cited as evidence that digital work—the work of the hand and its digits—could be painlessly transferred from the indigenous cultural context into the world of technological commercial innovation, benefiting both in the process.

Tribe at a Crossroads: The Navajo Nation Purchases a Coal Mine

Tribe at a Crossroads: The Navajo Nation Purchases a Coal Mine

PSYCHOSOCIAL AND HEALTH IMPACTS OF URANIUM MINING AND MILLING ON NAVAJO LANDS

The uranium industry in the American Southwest has had profoundly negative impacts on American Indian communities. Navajo workers experienced significant health problems, including lung cancer and nonmalignant respiratory diseases, and psychosocial problems, such as depression and anxiety. There were four uranium processing mills and approximately 1,200 uranium mines on the Navajo Nation's over 27,000 square miles. In this paper, a chronology is presented of how uranium mining and milling impacted the lives of Navajo workers and their families. Local community leaders organized meetings across the reservation to inform workers and their families about the relationship between worker exposures and possible health problems. A reservation-wide effort resulted in activists working with political leaders and attorneys to write radiation compensation legislation, which was passed in 1990 as the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) and included underground uranium miners, atomic downwinders, and nuclear test-site workers. Later efforts resulted in the inclusion of surface miners, ore truck haulers, and millworkers in the RECA Amendments of 2000. On the Navajo Nation, the Office of Navajo Uranium Workers was created to assist workers and their families to apply for RECA funds. Present issues concerning the Navajo and other uranium-impacted groups include those who worked in mining and milling after 1971 and are excluded from RECA. Perceptions about uranium health impacts have contributed recently to the Navajo people rejecting a resumption of uranium mining and milling on Navajo lands.

Uranium in Drinking Water: Low Dose Acts as Endocrine Mimic

Uranium, the heaviest naturally occurring element, is well known as a radioactive toxicant capable of damaging the kidneys and DNA. A new study has shown for the first time that uranium also acts as an estrogen mimic in mice at concentrations below the U.S. EPA’s safety limit of 30 μg/L in drinking water [EHP 115:1711–1716; Raymond-Whish et al.]. Other metals, including arsenic, cadmium, lead, and mercury, also are known estrogen mimics. The researchers manipulated the reproductive status of female mice in several ways. They exposed one group of immature female mice to uranium as they matured, a second group of mature female mice to uranium at environmentally relevant concentrations for 30 days prior to breeding and through gestation, and a third group of female mice to uranium immediately after their ovaries were removed. In a fourth group, they removed the ovaries of female mice, then exposed subgroups of this cohort to either uranium or the synthethic estrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) alone or in combination with the antiestrogen ICI 182,780. All uranium exposures were via the mice’s drinking water at concentrations of 0.5 μg/L–60.0 mg/L. Uranium had estrogen-like effects at varying dose ranges throughout the suite of experiments. In the first group, exposure resulted in fewer primary and more secondary ovarian follicles among adult females. In the second group, female pups of exposed dams had significantly fewer small primary ovarian follicles. The researchers conjecture that this primary-to-secondary follicle ratio may lead to fewer ovulated eggs and early-onset menopause. In the ovariectomized mice, the researchers found higher uterine weights and accelerated vaginal opening (indicators of earlier puberty onset). In addition, estrogenic activity was blocked in the mice exposed to ICI 182,780 after DES or uranium exposure. The current study is of immediate relevance to the Navajo Nation of Arizona and New Mexico, where many rural Navajo water supplies currently contain uranium at concentrations exceeding the U.S. EPA standard. The uranium boom of the 1950s and 1960s left thousands of abandoned mine sites and derelict milling operations on Navajo lands. Uranium mining has been banned there, but there are active efforts to revive uranium mining in the Navajo town of Crownpoint, New Mexico. The findings may also soon apply to other populations living amid the uranium boom now under way in central Colorado, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere.

Returning Navajo-Churro Sheep for Navajo Weaving

Navajo-Churro sheep provided a traditional fiber resource for handwoven textiles produced by Navajo people. Sixteenth-century Spanish explorers seeking riches in the American Southwest introduced their Spanish Churro sheep, a hardy desert variety whose descendants are the breed known today as Navajo-Churro. As a stable base for Navajo pastoralism, these sheep adapted to the harsh desert landscape of Navajo homelands and provided wealth, food, wool, and social cohesion for the Navajo people. After the mid-nineteenth century when more Anglo-Americans migrated into the Southwest, vast herds of Navajo-Churro sheep were reduced to near extinction through outright destruction and by crossbreeding with high-production breeds. During the 1970s, Navajo and non-Navajo herders and weavers joined in coordinated efforts to return the Navajo-Churro breed to Navajo lands and people. The contemporary Navajo organization Diné be' iiná (abbreviated to DBI and translated as The Navajo Life way) provided leadership for the return of Navajo-Churro sheep. In this article, we explore how the return of Navajo-Churro sheep and wool can strengthen cultural identity, rekindle ideological teachings, and revitalize material culture. The analysis provides an example of development intervention at the level of raw materials, as opposed to design, product development, or marketing intercession with textile traditions.

The Ethical Issues in Uranium Mining Research in the Navajo Nation*

We explore the experience of Navajo communities living under the shadow of nuclear age fallout who were subjects of five decades of research. In this historical analysis of public health (epidemiological) research conducted in the Navajo lands since the inception of uranium mining from the 1950s untill the end of the 20th century, we analyze the successes and failures in the research initiatives conducted on Navajo lands, the ethical breaches, and the harms and benefits that this research has brought about to the community. We discuss how scientific and moral uncertainty, lack of full stakeholder participation and community wide outreach and education can impact ethical decisions made in research.

Breaking Clean by Judy Blunt

BOOK REVIEWS 2 8 3 form of numerous interviews with the family and friends that knew Navajo Oshley best. Ultimately, along with his research in A History of San Juan County (1995) and Navajo Land, Navajo Culture (2002), McPherson’s editing of Navajo Oshley’s life demonstrates a well-rounded approach to regional and cultural history that is quite impressive. Grounded in simplicity, TheJourney of Navajo Oshley provides a unique and narrow look at a life enjoyed, reminding readers that throughout history, “[a]1 1 of these things that a Navajo does and prays for are . . . part of one’s journey through life,” and the exchanges within contested spaces, though frequently ending in conflict, may end in harmony, humor, and a soft handshake as well (58). Breaking Clean. By Judy Blunt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. 303 pages, $24-00. Reviewed by D oug Werden West Texas A & M University, Canyon, Texas Breaking Clean’s title and the first chapter are hooks, leading the reader to believe that this will be a memoir of Judy Blunt’s break from an unsatisfactory marriage, but it’s not. BreakingClean is a “reaching back” as she delves into her attachment to the rural Montana ranch life, despite having left it because of her frustration with male dominance, primogeniture, isolation, and silences. In her story, she celebrates rural life, rural people, and the plains, while staring their shortcomings in the eye. The fourteen topically arranged chapters move freely across time to give depth to the raw, riveting stories. Blunt includes many traditional ranching tropes, but she always makes them original. She talks about prairie fires the children set so that they could play firemen and about the one that flared out of her brother’s control and blackened a wall of the barn before being extin­ guished. Her description of the blizzard of 1964 focuses on keeping frost-bitten cows alive long enough so that they can deliver their calves. Hooves fall off, flesh rots, and every day cows that can’t stand have to be rolled out of their own muck. “Saving them was the only way left of beating the storm,” yet many of the cows had stillborn calves (58). Blunt delivers powerful images with unblinking stoicism, including slipping and sliding a four-wheel-drive truck fifty miles over rain-soaked gumbo roads to take her daughter, whose temperature had spiked to 106 degrees, to a hospital. She tells of her father lancing the abscessed jaws of cattle, so she decides to lance her growing breast to avoid becoming a woman. She accidentally hangs her kit­ ten when it attempts to crawl off the hayrack she has tied it to. These stories are tempered with humor and delivered with a straight face. The most incredible story is of her little sister, Gail, who at the age of three 2 8 4 WAL 3 7 . 2 SUMM ER 2 0 0 2 goes into the pasture, gets on all fours, paws the dirt, snorts, and charges the Angus bull who lies quietly chewing his cud. He calmly flips her with a push of his nose. She summersaults away but comes back for more. After her mother has rescued Gail, she grills her, but Gail responds that “she knows better than to go outside the fence. Yes, she knows better than to wander off. But on the last and most important issue, she refuses to budge. No one ever told her not to fight with bulls. She’s sure of it” (132). Blunt’s silences and unspoken stories say volumes. When she goes to high school, she boards in the same house as her brother, yet they agree to stay out ofeach other’s business both in and out ofschool. After her marriage, she breaks the glass of the front door and spreads her blood all over the house; she claims that she fell over the dog and accidentally put her hand through the window: “The story I told was one of the most transparent lies I’ve ever passed. Yet it stands today, unchallenged, never mentioned” (215). Her father-in-law forbids her to smoke cigarettes. She doesn’t quit, and he catches...

The Navajo Healing Project.

The articles in this issue represent some of the first fruits of the Navajo Healing Project, a collaborative work by a group of Navajo and non-Navajo researchers dedicated to understanding the nature of the therapeutic process in contemporary Navajo religious healing. Life in Navajo land today proves the outdatedness of any simple dichotomy between tradition and modernity/postmodernity. Many of those who explicitly define themselves as traditional Navajos do so in full awareness of the contemporary context in which that identity takes on meaning, while at the same time the anomalies of modern life are often taken very much in stride by even elderly, monolingual Navajo people. One of the most striking ways in which this complexity is evident is in the large area of Navajo life in which religion and spirituality are intimately entwined with health care and healing. Indeed, healing is the central theme of Navajo religion, while the sacred is the central element in Navajo medicine. Just as Navajos orient themselves geographically within a territory defined by four sacred mountains aligned with the four cardinal points, today they orient themselves medically in a field of vital interaction among four modes of healing: conventional biomedicine, Traditional Navajo healing, Native American Church (NAC) healing, and Navajo Christian faith healing. The Navajo, or Dine, are speakers of an Athabaskan language, and their contemporary homeland is located geographically in the four-corners region where New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado meet. The reservation is an institution of the U.S. federal government, its boundaries established by an imposed treaty in 1868 as the condition for the Navajos' release from captivity at Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico. The collective trauma of the Long Walk, their forced march into captivity following military defeat at the hands of the infamous Kit Carson, is critical to contemporary Navajos' identity as a people. According to the 1990 census, the population of the Navajo Nation was 155,276, of which 96 percent was American Indian. Although precise figures are not available, as many as another 50,000 Navajos, for a total population of roughly 200,000, may live in various other regions of the United States, many maintaining close ties to their homeland. Given the size and geographical expanse of Navajoland, it is not surprising that there exists a degree of regional cultural variation among Navajos, though this may have become less salient as more paved roads have decreased isolation over the past 20 years.

Poverty, Politics, and Petroleum: The Utah Navajo and the Aneth Oil Field

The land was soft, still going through its creative process when the Navajo people first emerged into this world. They traveled from worlds beneath this one, entering into the Four Corners region, ready to establish a new life. Yet few things are ever as easy as they initially appear. Monsters also inhabited the land and destroyed the Dine, or People, at every opportunity. Many of these creatures assumed different forms and powers, such as Ye'iitsoh, a man-eating giant that had an uncanny ability to ferret out people in hiding; another monster killed with its eyes; another pushed unsuspecting travelers off cliffs; another, with large horns, skewered its victims, while others flew in the air, carried off their prey, and smashed them on the jagged peak of Shiprock, New Mexico. Into this chaos were born two supernatural twins, sons of Changing Woman and Sunbearer. The boys, Monster Slayer and Born for Water, eventually journeyed to their father who lived in the heavens and received from him arrows made of chain lightning, sheet lightning, sunbeam, and rainbow. They returned to the earth and set about ridding the People of these monsters. The remains of the vanquished foe still dot the landscape: Cabezon Peak, New Mexico, is the severed head of Ye'iitsoh; his dried blood the lava flow outside of Grants; and petrified wood his bones. Dinosaur tracks and fossils belonged to other creatures slain by the Twins. The sands of Red Mesa, Arizona, were stained with the blood of a monster that killed with its breath; the remains of other creatures are found in the igneous and sandstone rock formations that cover Navajo land. Each serves as a reminder of the battle once waged to free the People from destruction. Yet some of the monsters and their remains survived in different forms to eventually help the Navajo. For instance, flint came from the armor of Ye'iitsoh. From the flying monsters came the eagle that provides bones for whistles and feathers for ceremonies, the owl that prophesies of man's future, and small birds to beautify the earth. Tracking Bear Monster gave from his body yucca fruit for nourishment, soap from its roots, plus needle and thread from its spines.' The list goes on.

Ecological and Historical Perspectives on Navajo Land Use and Settlement Patterns in Canyons De Chelly and Del Muerto

Canyon de Chelly and its major tributary, Canyon del Muerto, have been considered a Navajo "heartland" in the American Southwest since the 1700s. The canyons are usually referred to as a single social and economic community whose unique topographic features afforded an unusually dependable indigenous horticultural base. This paper describes important differences between the canyons in the history of Navajo land-use and settlement patterns. It is suggested that microregional differences can be linked with broader cultural processes and that both historical and ecological factors must be considered when interpreting such variation at whatever level it occurs.