Emplacing Knowledge

In the reflection that opens the previous section, Alex notes the importance of agriculture to thinking, taking the work he does to the landscape as a point of departure for understanding his self and place in the world. Of course agriculture itself is a mode of extraction, converting the land and its products into energy for consumption. As his work of repairing fences, planting vegetables, raising sheep, and keeping a fire going in the woodstove shows, these are productive extractions, each dependent upon the conversion of energy from one form to another. Everyday, material practice is about, he argues, “Nitsa’akees (thinking). That’s how you get your ideas, from the land, from agriculture.” As such, energy practices become the basis for thinking, suggesting a landscape

epistemology which, in turn, reinforces the materiality of theory; that is, thought is rooted in particular practices of energy use and landscape-making, which in turn have specific outcomes (the construction of a fence, the planting and eventual harvesting of a row of squash), involving wider ecologies and actors than conventional understandings of epistemology allow. Knowledge, in this formulation, is the result of praxis and of relationships with a particular location. Knowledge is embedded in human and non- human relationships, and is never produced ex nihilo. In other words, knowing is always rooted in doing and in being, involving the work of and interaction with others who assist in producing knowledge and making it relevant. Such mutually constitutive processes of thought, action, and identity (or, said otherwise, of knowing, doing, and being) illuminate embodied ways in which Navajo subjects are producing themselves today, specifically in terms of redefining epistemology. The consequences of this epistemology hold that knowledge is not made “out there”, but rather is produced through particular practices,

embedded in specific landscapes and relations. At the same time, this is not a sterilized, “pure” knowledge or epistemology; its landscapes of power have been heavily influenced by practices such as agriculture or sheep-herding – both traceable to colonial techniques of making sedentary farmers out of the nomadic Diné. Nonetheless, thinking from a place – from the land – generates a landscape epistemology with historically particular,

embedded relationships. Recent projects of Diné knowledge production, discussed in this section, demonstrate different methods of development of a landscape epistemology. I argue that these epistemologies are tied to landscapes because they are partially

responding to the landscapes of power on the Navajo Nation produced through the dual legacies of anthropology and energy development.

In the case of anthropology, given the discipline’s foundational interest in the Navajo Nation (where it does often seem that “every Navajo has an Anthro” – or perhaps two anthros) emerging movements to redefine Diné epistemology are partly in response to the extractive and productive legacies of the discipline. Anthropology has profoundly shaped how “the Navajo” as a people and place have been understood, transforming Navajo ecologies, landscapes, and communities, its extractions of narratives, ceremonies, material remains, linguistic patterns, even bodies themselves traceable through products such as books, audio recordings, films, photographs, monographs, stories, museum collections, pottery fragments, jewelry, rugs, and subsequent generations of

ethnographers (among which I count myself, for better or worse). The dual move of extraction and production wrought by anthropology remains at the center of the politics of knowledge production in/of/with Native communities, when the question of who speaks about Native lifeways enervates redefinitions of indigeneity and knowledge. In

this sense, historic relations with non-Navajo epistemologies and projects such as

anthropology are assisting in producing new subjectivities and senses of place that – like our speaker above – are very much shaped by an historic sensibility and sensitivity. While this may at first glance seem like a continuation of the previous renaissance of indigeneity that occurred with the Red Power Movement of the 1960’s59, many emerging articulations of indigeneity and knowledge on the Navajo Nation are being worked out in relation to the problems associated with particular landscapes; this re-working includes rethinking energy production landscapes and how extractive industry has reshaped Navajo relations with their own understandings of history and place.

Yet, the energy development legacies of government reform through oil discovery and livestock reduction, combined with the projects of anthropology and archaeology in the Southwest have not been merely oppressive technologies as some resistance theories would suggest, but rather, have generated new representational objects and discourses, opening avenues of dialogue and response, producing debate about the politics, theories and practices of natural resource development and research. These dialogues have yielded new institutions of research on the Navajo Nation whose hybrid methods aim to redefine Navajo epistemology for the 21st century, taking energy development and government reform as a central, and interrelated, area of concern. In particular, the Navajo Studies Association and the Diné Policy Institute have become communities of practice in this re- thinking of Navajo history, identity, place, and knowledge, responding to the legacies of

59 _{See Paul Chaat Smith and Robert Allen Warrior (P.C. Smith and Warrior 1996)for an excellent history of}

this pan-Indian movement and some of its effects on the Navajo Nation. See Emily Benedek for more detailed discussions of the struggles surrounding the Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute (Benedek 1999).

anthropology and energy development and their effects. As examples, these two institutions of knowledge are discussed below.

A word, however, on epistemic difference: Though the interdependencies

between Diné knowledge and so-called Western knowledge shape contemporary research practice and policy work, Diné epistemology is not solely formed in a dialogic process between powerful external agents and the Diné.60 As a dynamic system of knowing, being and doing, it calls upon a distinct trajectory, rooted in historical difference. It incorporates an oral historical knowledge illuminating the epistemic and ontological difference of the Diné people, evident even in translation, as excerpts from The Emergence story at the outset of this chapter demonstrate. Moreover, as Alex’s reflections suggest, there is a crucial relationship with a specific place and landscape- making in Diné identity formation.61 Of course, this was precisely the lure for

anthropology, especially in its early, Boasian, “salvage” methodology, when theories of difference depended on essentialist notions, possibilities of erasure and extinction and Orientalist notions of “the other.” Thus, Diné ceremonial, medicinal, philosophical, and practical knowledge became the subject of anthropological inquiry in the early 20th century, its extraction yielding tomes of research penned by early ethnographers with the assistance of Diné intellectuals like Adella’s grandfather, Curly Mustache.

60 _{I use “dialogic” and “dialogism” in the sense developed by M. M. Bakhtin, which emphasizes the}

distinctiveness of those dialogically engaged but also recognizes the dynamics of power differentials, offering useful ways of conceptualizing those differentials (e.g., means of incorporating authority, social image, dependence on the genres of the powerful, etc.) (Bakhtin and Holquist 1981).

61 _{There is a vast literature on the intimate relationships between indigeneity and place, theorizing the}

relationships between humans and environments that produce identities and heritage (Basso and Feld 1996; Ingold 2000, 132-152).

As should be clear by now, these research extractions were co-eval with the landscape extractions exacted by energy industry, yet with both legacies producing while extracting. The result of the anthropological legacy, of course, was the production of a vast literature on Diné knowledge – written by non-Diné scholars for consumption by non-Diné scholars. The fact that anthropologists translated this ontologically and

epistemically different parallel trajectory of knowledge to the “outside” world, and that in subsequent years many Diné have consulted these translations as they re-interpret the stories for new generations is part of the complex interplay and mutual dependencies of knowledge regimes in this history of ethnographic research. These refractions of speech, and their shifting narrators, speak to what Mikhail Bakhtin called the “heteroglossia” of stories (Bakhtin and Holquist 1981) and show the complications in pursuing “authentic” Diné perspectives in their English language, anthropological translations. On a related note, the legacies of anthropology and energy development produced new Diné subjects with new possibilities of laboring in these industries. Navajo anthropologists emerged, as did Navajo energy specialists, though the historically particular dynamics of

power/knowledge in the region meant that, in general, most Diné knowledge workers were research assistants or “informants” and most energy workers were miners or heavy equipment operators. Expertise was still located “outside.”

The complex productivity of this power/knowledge dynamic has, however, opened a critical space for Diné intellectuals to engage these legacies of anthropology and energy on the Navajo Nation, producing knowledge today that calls upon and

reinvents Diné epistemology and research practices. Recognizing the historical inequities of knowledge and energy production on the Nation, Diné intellectuals are building new

institutions of research as intellectual and political projects. In what follows, I present two recent trajectories of ongoing Diné intellectual movements that I encountered during my fieldwork in order to show how Diné epistemology, identity, history, and place is currently being re-thought by Diné scholars, for both Diné and non-Diné audiences. I choose to approach this ethnographically to emphasize the vibrant, living practices and political urgency among Diné intellectuals as they engage these legacies. An

ethnographic approach to these intellectual movements further underscores the

knowledge-practices62 Diné intellectuals deploy that include but also exceed the written text.