Diné Bikéyah, or People’s Sacred Lands

2021 ◽  
pp. 78-126
Keyword(s):  
Sacred Lands

Instruments of Science or Conquest? Neocolonialism and Modern American Astronomy

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 293-319 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leandra Swanner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Special Issue ◽  
Physical Sciences ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Native Communities ◽  
Professional Activities ◽  
Indigenous Groups ◽  
Sacred Lands

This essay is indebted to Mary Jo Nye’s scholarship spanning the history and philosophy of the modern physical sciences, particularly her efforts to situate scientists within their social, political, and cultural contexts. Beginning in the second half of the twentieth century, members of the Hawai‘i astronomy community found themselves grappling with opposition to new telescope projects stemming from the rise of environmental and indigenous rights movements. I argue that the debate over the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) can best be understood as an exemplar of “neocolonialist science.” For indigenous groups who object to science on sacred lands, science has effectively become an agent of colonization. As the TMT controversy illustrates, practicing neocolonialist science—even unknowingly—comes at a high cost for all parties involved. Although scientists are understandably reluctant to equate their professional activities with cultural annihilation, dismissing this unflattering neocolonialist image of modern science has both ethical and practical consequences: Native communities continue to report feeling victimized while scientists’ efforts to expand their research programs suffer social, legal, and economic setbacks. This essay is part of a special issue entitled THE BONDS OF HISTORY edited by Anita Guerrini.

scholarly journals Victims of "adaptation": climate change, sacred mountains, and perverse resilience

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 704
Author(s):  
Adam Dunstan
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Climate Change Policy ◽  
Well Being ◽  
Adaptation To Climate Change ◽  
Sacred Sites ◽  
Northern Arizona ◽  
Policy Adaptation ◽  
Change Policy ◽  
Sacred Mountain ◽  
Sacred Lands

<p>Resiliency and adaptation are increasingly prevalent in climate change policy as well as scholarship, yet scholars have brought forward several critiques of these concepts along analytical as well as political lines. Pressing questions include: who resiliency is for, what it takes to maintain it, and the scale at which it takes place. The concept of "perverse resilience", for example, proposes that resiliency for one sub-system may threaten the well-being of the overall system. In this article, I propose the related concept of "perverse adaptation", where one actor or institution's adaptation to climate change in fact produces aftershocks and secondary impacts upon other groups. Drawing on ethnographic and sociolinguistic research in northern Arizona regarding artificial snowmaking at a ski resort on a sacred mountain, I elucidate resort supporters' and others' attempts to frame snowmaking as a sustainable adaptation to drought (and, implicitly, climate change). I counterpoise these framings with narratives from local activists as well as Diné (Navajo) individuals regarding the significant impacts of snowmaking on water supply and quality, sacred lands and ceremony, public health, and, ironically, carbon emissions. In so doing, I argue that we must interrogate resilience policies for their unexpected "victims of adaptation."</p><p><strong>Key words: </strong>climate change policy, adaptation, perverse resilience, sacred sites, Diné (Navajo)</p>

Sometimes It’s Necessary to Break a Few Rules

2021 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-12
Author(s):  
Michelle Téllez ◽  
Maribel Alvarez ◽  
Brianna P. Herrera
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Space And Place ◽  
Growing Up ◽  
Domestic Worker ◽  
Personal Experiences ◽  
Mexico Border ◽  
The University ◽  
Sacred Lands

In October of 2020, the University of Arizona’s College of Social and Behavioral Sciences hosted a lecture series called Womanpower. The final lecture was an interview between Michelle Téllez and Yalitza Aparicio—an Indigenous woman, actress, and activist. This interview transcript (originally conducted in Spanish) discusses Aparicio’s childhood, her experiences with discrimination, her role in the groundbreaking film Roma, and her activism on behalf of domestic workers and Indigenous peoples. In this interview, Téllez highlights issues of Indigenous rights, recognizing how Aparicio’s platform can bring visibility to the O’odham land defenders fighting for their sacred lands today, but also to Indigenous peoples fighting for their territories in Mexico, as alluded to in Roma. Téllez wanted to recognize the power that is ever-present in the bodies and minds of women workers who create possibilities despite their circumstances, and who maneuver between space and place, languages and cultures as they center homes, both their own and others. She points us to Aparicio’s role as a domestic worker to remind us of the silent but ever-present power of women. Téllez connects the interview with her own research and personal experiences growing up along the U.S./Mexico border in the cities of San Diego/Tijuana – where she was witness to the racial, gendered, and classed dynamics of power and exclusion.

Religion as Cultural Resource

2020 ◽  
pp. 127-170
Author(s):  
Michael D. McNally
Keyword(s):  
Historic Preservation ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
Federal Agencies ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
Cultural Resource ◽  
Tribal Governments ◽  
Preservation Law ◽  
Traditional Cultural Properties ◽  
National Historic Preservation Act ◽  
Sacred Lands

This chapter explores what results when Native peoples articulate religious claims in the language of culture and cultural resources under environmental and historic preservation law. It argues that cultural resource laws have become more fruitful in two respects. First, there is more emphatic insistence on government-to-government consultation between federal agencies and tribes. Second, in 1990, National Historic Preservation Act regulations were clarified by designating “Traditional Cultural Properties” as eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places and in 1992, that law was amended to formally engage tribal governments in the review process. In light of these developments, protection under the categories of culture and cultural resource have proved more capacious for distinctive Native practices and beliefs about sacred lands, but it has come at the expense of the clearer edge of religious freedom protections, while still being haunted, and arguably bedraggled, by the category of religion from which these categories ostensibly have been formally disentangled.

Religion as Spirituality

2020 ◽  
pp. 94-126
Author(s):  
Michael D. McNally
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Native American ◽  
Religious Beliefs ◽  
Religious Freedom ◽  
The United States ◽  
Sacred Places ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Sacred Lands ◽  
American Spirituality ◽  
Religious Claim

This chapter examines the failure in the courts of Native appeals to religious freedom protections for sacred lands, and it extends the previous chapter's analysis of the reception of Native claims to religion as religion. Where a religious claim conforms to the subjective, interior spirituality that has become naturalized in the United States, it has worked reasonably well in the courts. This is emphatically not the case where claims involve religious relationships with, uses of, and obligations to, land. The chapter explains how courts reason their way out of taking steps to protect Native American religious freedom when sacred places are threatened, a puzzling matter in that courts consistently acknowledge the sincerity of the religious beliefs and practices associated with those sacred places. Along the way the chapter develops a fuller sense of the workings of the discourse of Native American spirituality as it comes to control judicial comprehension of Native religious freedom claims.

scholarly journals “First in Time, First in Right”: Indigenous Self-Determination in the Colorado River Basin

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 153-175
Author(s):  
Paul Formisano
Keyword(s):  
River Basin ◽  
Colorado River ◽  
Grand Canyon ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Colorado River Basin ◽  
Clean Water ◽  
Water Access ◽  
Basin Water ◽  
Sacred Lands

This article adopts the premise “first in time, first in right” to bring Indigenous knowledge about the Colorado River Basin and the natural world more broadly out of the mainstream’s obscurity to reposition these perspectives at the foreground of the region’s water cultures. To initiate what is in essence a decolonization of Colorado River Basin water knowledge, I examine texts representing various tribal affiliations and genres to consider how their particular use of story engages the historic and ongoing environmental injustices they have faced and continue to negotiate in their fight to preserve their sacred lands, identity, and access to reliable, clean water. Such a decolonization occurs through these texts’ use of narrative to work within and against the scientific and instrumental discourses and their respective genres that have traditionally constructed and dictated mainstream Colorado River knowledge and activity. My treatment of narrative within the Ten Tribes Partnership Tribal Water Study (2018) and the Grand Canyon Trust’s “Voices of Grand Canyon” digital project (2020) sheds greater light on the essential relationships the Basin’s nations and tribes have with the Colorado River. Through these counternarratives to the West’s dominant water ideologies and cultures, the Basin’s tribal nations draw attention to past and ongoing struggles to secure equitable water access while amplifying their resilience and determination that defines their calls for environmental justice.

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