This article draws upon ethnographic fieldwork within a Navajo community to illustrate how weaving knowledge and practices shape contemporary notions of community identity and belonging. The ongoing exchange of Navajo weaving taboos and the careful management of weaving teachings offers community members various opportunities to share and keep…

In reading queer Native American images, Lisa Tatonetti (2010) criticizes film in which the "boundaries of nation in indigenous contexts are constructed and maintained by the heteronormative gaze" that restricts lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2) representations. The author's own work differentiates the mere…

This paper uses Philip Deloria's "Indians in Unexpected Places" as a lens by which to understand the expectations and reviews of Navajo author Blackhorse Mitchell's "Miracle Hill." Written in Navajo English, the book, from an introduction by T. D. Allen to a number of reviews of the book in the popular press, consistently misrecognized the…

Much has been written of the Navajo Long Walk period when the Navajo people, following what appears to be a fairly short resistance, surrendered in droves to the US military, collected at Fort Defiance and other designated sites, then moved in a series of "long walks" to Fort Sumner (Hweeldi) on the Pecos River in eastern New Mexico.…

Beginning in 2005, a five-year survey of cultural resources began to unfold in southeastern Utah along a prominent sandstone rock formation known as Comb Ridge. This visually dramatic monocline stretches a considerable distance from the southwestern corner of Blue Mountain (Abajos) in Utah to Kayenta, Arizona, approximately one hundred miles to…

In this article, the author raises a few examples of incompatible concepts and languages in US federal environmental and cultural laws affecting the management of indigenous sacred lands. She explains these examples by describing the management of a selection of Navajo (Dine) sacred places and elsewhere. Through fundamental concepts rooted in…

This article's thesis is that a cross-cultural brokerage composed of Indians and non-Indians was essential for bringing the Navajo Community College (NCC) to fruition. To explain this brokerage, the study first examines the concept of cultural brokerage and then uses the concept as a lens through which to explore the roles of various…

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…

The concomitant secondary consequences of an electrification program and the potential long-term benefits of such a program are described. An electrification program can stimulate a move toward true self-determination and self-sufficiency for the Navajo nation.

An example of the way finding process when using verbal and other traditional maps among the Navajo Indians of the southwestern United States is presented. The scholarly literature on the Southwest offers examples of verbal maps that construct both linear space, such as trails, and broad geographical space, including hunting territories and large…

In the 1960s an increasing number of Native Americans began to express the need for an Indian college or university. Three major developments of the decade inspired them. The first was the rise of Indian activism in the 1960s. The second major development was the package of socioeconomic reforms of the Great Society, inaugurated by President…

Hantavirus, caused due to close contact with mice in a dwelling, first emerged in the spring of 1993 on the Navajo Reservation and although it is by no means an Indian disease, there are four times as many cases of hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS) among non-Indians. Inadequate rural housing, especially common in western Indian Country,…

Navajo women have been at the core of economic and social control in their traditionally matrilineal society. Interviews with Navajo women in southeastern Utah suggest that the increasing educational attainment and career aspirations of young Navajo women are creating internal pressures for cultural change and modernization. (SV)

Extended interviews with 50 Navajo men, aged 21 to 45, provided information on peer relationships and gang formation among male Navajo youth in the 1960s through the 1980s. Results suggest that gangs are an extreme example of traditional hell-raising among young Navajo men and that most gang members "age out" of their gangs. Suggestions for gang…

Interviews with 76 Navajo grandmothers, midlife mothers, and young mothers examined their life course patterns in cultural and historical contexts. In their educational, work, marriage, and childbearing patterns, these women confronted challenges posed by historical events with culturally constructed courses of action arising from persistent…