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

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.

Agricultural work on the sacred lands of Attica IV B.C. according to epigraphica

This article deals with the issue of carrying out agricultural work on the sacred lands of ancient Attica (Athens region) in the IV century B.C. The author relies on epigraphic sources, which are inscriptions on stone steles containing texts of lease agreements on sacred lands of the IV century B.C, and also uses information from ancient authors. The author also attracts scientific works of domestic and foreign authors devoted to the problem of agrarian relations in the ancient Greek polis. According to the author, the analysis and study of agricultural work on the territory of the sacred lands of Attica deserves a separate article, since the study of this issue makes it possible to more thoroughly consider agricultural relations in the Athenian polis of the IV century B.C, to present the meaning of sacred land ownership. In the first part of the article, the author analyzes the types and nature of agricultural work on sacred lands (temenos). The second part is devoted to the problem of responsibility of tenants and landlords for the performance of work on the territory of temenos. As a result, the author comes to certain conclusions. In the fourth century B.C, the sacred lands of Attica required special care after the end of the devastating actions of the Peloponnesian War. The temenos were at the disposal of the polis, with demes and religious unions as their landlords. The leasing of land made it possible to ensure the stable preservation of the land fund, to ensure the agricultural development of the temenos. Tenants (private individuals) were required to provide careful care for the leased land. At the same time, the author draws attention to the fact that in some cases the tenants were very well-known, wealthy citizens of the polis, for whom participation in the lease of sacred lands was a kind of liturgy. In such cases, it is difficult to determine who performed agricultural work on the leased land, most likely, it was special employees, whose work was paid by the tenant. At the same time, according to the epigraphica, there was no sublease.

Sometimes It’s Necessary to Break a Few Rules

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

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

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.

Conclusion

This concluding chapter gives a nod in the direction of successful negotiated settlements and other agreements that grab fewer headlines and leave fewer public traces because they can avoid the courts altogether and proceed in the context of the nation-to-nation relationship. For an example, it turns to the newly created and recently embattled Bears Ears National Monument, a collaboratively managed preserve of sacred lands, cultural landscapes, and traditional knowledge in southern Utah. Since the quiet goal for most Native people is to protect what is sacred to them without calling attention to themselves, the best outcomes for Native American religious freedom are so far beyond the First Amendment and its legal counterparts, they can remain entirely off line. Here, the story of Bears Ears is less the story of the Obama administration than it is the story of decades of activism and the concerted strategic efforts of a consortium of Native nations. When President Barack Obama designated 1.35 million acres of southeast Utah lands as Bears Ears National Monument, he authorized a new experiment in cooperation, even collaboration, between the United States and Native nations in safeguarding sacred lands.

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

<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>