Category: Excerpt

Excerpt from “Landscapes of Movement and Predation”

Posted on October 22, 2024October 23, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

October 22, 2024

Landscapes of Movement and Predation: Perspectives from Archaeology, History, and Anthropology edited by Brenda J. Bowser and Catherine M. Cameron, is a global study of times and places where people were subject to brutality, displacement, and loss of life, liberty, livelihood, and possessions. Extensive landscapes of predation emerged in the colonial era when Europeans expanded across much of the world, appropriating land and demanding labor from Indigenous people, resulting in the enslavement of millions of Africans and Indigenous Americans.

Landscapes of predation also developed in precolonial times in places where people were subjected to repeated ruthless attacks and dislocation. With contributions from archaeologists and a historian, the book provides a startling new perspective on an aspect of the past that is often overlooked: the role of violence in shaping where, how, and with whom people lived. Using ethnohistoric, ethnographic, historic, and archaeological data, the authors explore the actions of both predators and their targets and uncover the myriad responses people took to protect themselves. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

“Landscape” is a familiar term for archaeologists. Over the past few decades, the concept of a landscape of the past has grown beyond the idea of human adaptation to a natural environment to include the understanding that humans actively shape their physical, natural, and social environments (Whittlesey 2009). Postmodern approaches to landscape that became common in the 1990s ushered in an increased concern with meaning. Archaeologists following the phenomenological approach used their own senses to assign meaning to landscapes (Tilley 1994; Van Dyke 2007). Increasingly, especially in North America, archaeologists today work closely with Indigenous people to understand landscapes in their terms. Writing about the American Southwest, Severin Fowles (2010) notes that the passage of a law in 1990 concerning the return of Indigenous human remains (the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act) forced archaeologists to engage with and learn from the descendants of the Indigenous people they study (see also Lekson 1996, 891). Consulting Indigenous descendants about the spaces their ancestors inhabited and the meanings they gave to natural and cultural features is now common for archaeologists (Bernstein and Ortman 2020; Duwe and Preucel 2019; in this volume see Kater et al.; Marshall and Biginagwa; Seyler and Leventhal; and Silva). Furthermore, Indigenous scholars themselves explore the history and archaeology of their own people (for example, Kuwanwisiwma and Ferguson 2009, Schneider 2021).

People in the past lived in spaces that were, to them, rich in symbolism and full of memories of ancestors and their activities. But we suggest that there are few places in the inhabited world that were not occasionally touched by violence (Keeley 1996, 3–24; Kim and Kissel 2018, 1–2; LeBlanc and Register 2003, 1–22). Our characterization of landscapes of predation is based on the scale of the violence: they are places in which violence became enduring and intense and forced widespread changes to the lives of the people who inhabited them. As noted above, we adopt, for example, Stahl’s (2008) depiction of Africa during the slave trade and Bowser’s (2008) representation of Amazonia during colonialism and call such places “landscapes of predation.”

As a group, the authors in this volume considered how to define landscapes of predation. A working definition frames the chapters that follow:

A landscape of predation is a geographic space primarily marked or characterized by predatory practices and their consequences. Instability and mobility are inherent. Experiences of predation may be inscribed in memory and may be integral to a sense of place and shared identity.

The geographic space in this definition is situational and not conventionally bounded. It is the space within which predation occurs, not necessarily an established territory or physically or environmentally bounded region. A landscape of predation, as considered here, also includes the consequences of predation, both for the predator and their target. Mobility as the result of predatory behavior is apparent in all of the cases considered in this book and is a fundamental aspect of a predatory landscape. Such mobility may seem chaotic and tumultuous as targeted people flee their predators, but a closer look can reveal strategies for resisting predation; in other words, intentional mobility to avoid or engage with predators (see the Resistance and Other Responses to Predation section below). Of course, predators also move in order to encounter their targets or to pursue actions of benefit to themselves.

“Landscape of predation” is a term that we fear might be misappropriated and used in a multitude of inappropriate situations from Roman wars of conquest to places of contemporary urban poverty. Therefore, we want to be clear about the sorts of times and places we include in the term and those we do not. Landscapes of predation are places of violence, but they are not a battlefield, nor even a theater of war. They are not just places where people live with oppression, however bad the oppression may be. They are places where people’s lives are profoundly disrupted, and the disruption extends to virtually every aspect of their lives. Predatory practices involve a wide range of activities that can be physically or structurally violent, can upend cultural traditions, including religious practices, can displace people from their homeland, sever their connection to their social identity, and can intentionally seek to annihilate an entire social group.

Predatory practices created landscapes of movement. Movement was common, almost universal in the small-scale societies that are the focus of this volume. People move for subsistence purposes, to trade with other groups, to attend social events, or to monitor the boundaries of their territory (Anthony 1990, 1997; Cabana and Clark 2011; Daniels 2022; van Dommelen 2014). Predation, however, results in distinctive types of movement, some of which are the direct result of predation and others that are the consequence of the targets of predation moving to protect themselves.

At the very most personal level, captive-taking, a form of movement that characterized many, if not most, landscapes of predation, took people from their homes, erased their social identity, and forced them into a new, generally subordinate identity. For those captives that became slaves, loss of social personhood was complete or nearly so (Cameron 2008, 2016; Santos-Granero 2009; Snyder 2018). At a broader level, predators can dispossess people of their land or exploit or destroy the resources people relied on to survive. Predators might impose ruinous tribute or taxes, leaving their targets facing starvation. They might use a variety of methods to terrorize their targets, including desecration of sacred sites or co-option of religious belief. Physical abuse and injury might be a regular outcome of an encounter with a member of the predator group and murder, persecution, and even genocide might be common in landscapes of predation. Such violence in landscapes of predation is chronic, although it may be episodic and there may be periods of calm. Even during periods of calm, violence is latent in landscapes of predation, never far from the minds of either predators or their targets.

Excerpt from “Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States”

Posted on October 10, 2024October 8, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

October 10, 2024

Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States by Rafael A. Martínez, takes readers on a journey through the history of the rise of undocumented youth social movements in the United States in the twenty-first century. The book follows the documentation trail of undocumented youth activists spanning over two decades of organizing. Each chapter carefully analyzes key organizing strategies used by undocumented youth to produce direct forms of activism that expose and critique repressive forms of state control and violence. This inquiry is particularly generative in relation to how immigrant bodies are erased, contained, and imagined as “aliens” or “illegal.”

Rafael A. Martínez, an undocu-scholar, intricately weaves his lived experience into this deeply insightful exploration. Martínez’s interdisciplinary approach will engage scholars and readers alike, resonating with disciplines such as history, American studies, Chicana and Chicano studies, and borderlands studies. Illegalized shows that undocumented youth and their activism represent a disruption to the social imaginary of the U.S. nation-state and its figurative and physical borders. It invites readers to explore how undocumented youth activists changed the way immigrant rights are discussed in the United States today. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

On May 1, 2006, on International Workers’ Day, undocumented communities across the United States came out of the shadows in the millions to demand immigration reform and to protest anti-immigrant legislation proposed at the federal level. Five months earlier, in December 2005, H.R. 4437, dubbed the “Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005,” aimed like many other predecessors to militarize the borderlands as a direct response to the 9/11 attacks just four years earlier. However, this new piece of proposed federal legislation attempted to move the borderlands to the interior of the country by funding and extending programs to detect, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants. Undocumented communities, mixed-status families, and allies recognized that if this piece of legislation passed, it could set in motion a witch-hunt atmosphere. Ethnic and multilingual radio stations became the vehicle by which people mobilized to spread word in households, car rides, and community spaces about massive public marches happening across major cities in the United States. Urban centers like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Las Vegas, Dallas, and Phoenix witnessed a wave of white T-shirts on diverse bodies waving multinational flags in a phenomenon many journalists described as “The Giant Awakens.”

May in Los Angeles features a bright, full-bodied sun shining across the concrete jungle. The skyscrapers cast a much-needed man-made shade for the millions of people who had taken over the streets of downtown Los Angeles by noontime. I remember exiting the Metro Blue Line station in downtown Los Angeles to what felt like the hum from a beehive coming from every direction. The energy from the crowd was contagious and motivating, but simultaneously disorienting and chaotic. Up to this point, as with many other fellow undocumented community members, my activism had been relegated to the shadows of traditional forms of civic engagement. Historically, immigrant communities were told by society and even long-standing activist organizations to not call attention to themselves, as their undocumented status placed them in a precarious position. However, the May Day immigrant rights marches, which became widely known and recognized as an annual event after 2006, flipped the narrative of undocumented immigrants remaining in the shadows and set in motion new possibilities outside of civic-engagement modes of organizing.

In the course of my education, in terms of my identity and politics as an undocumented scholar, I have come to value the ability to look back at pivotal moments in the history of undocumented youth social movements that have changed the ways in which immigrant communities are discussed in society and allowed people to see undocumented communities as knowledge producers. Situating my own positionality as an undocu-scholar—that is, someone who identifies as undocumented and as a scholar—is important in this research on undocumented youth activists. I define undocu-scholars as individuals who are conducting research, writing, documenting, producing artwork, and developing public projects based on the lived experiences of being undocumented or formerly undocumented. As such, the history that I am charting in my research represents my experience in the United States as an immigrant with no status for the majority of my life, and recently with protection under DACA that opened the doors to pursuing a career in academia. Thus, my positionality is a central component in the analysis I perform in my research and case studies.

Like other undocumented youth of my time in the mid–2000s, for me the May Day peaceful marches represented new possibilities in mobilizing for immigrant rights. For generations undocumented youth were subjugated to a vision of model citizens who were deemed worthy to the extent that they had potential in educational realms and could assimilate into American values. Politicians had begun categorizing undocumented youth as “DREAMers,” positioning them in terms of a future that was promised or always deferred. Young people were seen for the future prospects they could offer the state. So the offering of a pathway to inclusion rested on the expected deliverables that made them desirable in the first place. However, DREAMers only constituted a small percentage of the larger undocumented immigrant population.

Undocumented youth activists began creating local, state, and national organizations a few years after the 2006/7 May Day marches with the aim of changing the discourse around immigrant rights in the United States. In doing so, these activists realized that it was not enough to fight for the incorporation of a small minority, and that they needed to exchange the cultural capital gained from the visibility of the DREAMer movement at the national level for the ability to advocate for the larger undocumented immigrant population. The beginning of the twenty-first century, when undocumented youth movements grew to prominence, also coincided with high numbers of detentions in the interior of the country, an increase in deportation numbers, and the separation of mixed-status families across borders. Undocumented youth would address the issues of detention, deportation, and family separation head-on in direct forms of activism. This book captures some of the stories of activism that changed how immigrant rights are discussed in the United States.

Illegalized: Undocumented Youth Movements in the United States departs from the idea of undocumented youth movements as a single linear, homogeneous, or united movement. Instead, the case studies in the book characterize undocumented youth movements (UYMs) as a series of movements that are heterogeneous, diverse, and often contradictory, or that have frictions and limitations. Additionally, UYMs never occurred in a linear progression, as history rarely occurs in a continuum; rather, I argue that the case studies in the book are events that represent assemblages of organizational performances and showcase important ruptures related to the U.S. immigration system and its treatment of undocumented immigrants. One such rupture is the disruption and interrogation of the “DREAMer” identity or narrative. Another rupture is represented by an illegalized framework, which allows for the exploration of case studies in which undocumented youth activists take their activism to sites often kept in the shadows by the U.S. state. This book takes an (un)documenting approach—that is, it builds an archive that documents the activism of undocumented immigrant populations who resist violent forms of repression such as detention, deportation, and family separation. Assembling (un) documents represents social imaginaries in which undocumented youth organizers offer a discourse alternative to that of official U.S. immigration systems of policing and control.

Excerpt from “Five Hundred Years of LGBTQIA+ History in Western Nicaragua”

Posted on October 7, 2024October 7, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

October 7, 2024

Five Hundred Years of LGBTQIA+ History in Western Nicaragua by Victoria González-Rivera, reframes five hundred years of western Nicaraguan history by giving gender and sexuality the attention they deserve. González-Rivera decenters nationalist narratives of triumphant mestizaje and argues that western Nicaragua’s LGBTQIA+ history is a profoundly Indigenous one.

In this expansive history, González-Rivera documents connections between Indigeneity, local commerce, and femininity (cis and trans), demonstrating the long history of LGBTQIA+ Nicaraguans. She sheds light on historical events, such as Andres Caballero’s 1536 burning at the stake for sodomy. González-Rivera discusses how elite efforts after independence to “modernize” open-air markets led to increased surveillance of LGBTQIA+ working-class individuals. She also examines the 1960s and the Somoza dictatorship, when another wave of persecution emerged, targeting working-class gay men and trans women, leading to a more stringent anti-sodomy law. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

SEXUALITY, GENDER, AND LANGUAGE IN NICARAGUAN HISTORY

Spanish colonial authorities sought to punish those they believed to be guilty of what they considered to be the crime (and sin) of sodomy, and they called those who committed it sodomitas, someticos, or sodometicos. Not surprisingly, given that the country’s legal system has its roots in the colonial period, as recently as 2008, Nicaraguan law forbade “scandalous relations between people of the same sex” using exactly the same word: sodomy (sodomía). Pecado nefando (nefarious sin) was another Spanish term used by colonial authorities, a term they brought with them from Europe. But there are also occasional references in the colonial record to a Nahuat word, cuylon (sometimes spelled cuilon), which, according to the Spanish, referred to a man who had sex with another man among Indigenous peoples in western Nicaragua. The existence of the word suggests that at least some of the Nahuat-speaking Indigenous residents of what is now the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, members of a group known as Nicarao, thought of men who had sex with men as a category apart. Alternatively, this usage of the word could have been a simplified Spanish interpretation of a more complex Indigenous lived experience. We also do not know if Nicaraos used the word cuylon in derogatory ways, or if it was simply a descriptive term. An additional question that remains unanswered is whether other Indigenous groups in the area, like the Chorotegas, had terms in their own language that were comparable to cuylon.

Historical evidence suggests that the Nahuat word cuylon evolved over time into the ubiquitous Nicaraguan Spanish word cochón, a word that for much of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries was typically used in a derogatory fashion. It has now been reclaimed by LGBTQIA+ activists, but it continues to be used by others in Nicaragua, usually as an insult for men who have sex with other men. Women who have sex with other women are often called cochonas.

In the twenty-first century, the terms cochón and cochona are commonly used in Nicaragua, along with other terms such as lesbiana, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and cuir. One of the most common umbrella terms used by LGBTQIA+ activists is the term diversidad sexual, a term that encompasses gender and sexual diversity. This term has been widely adopted, and LGBTQIA+ individuals will sometimes refer to themselves as being sexualmente diversos, diversos, diversas, or de la diversidad.

In this book I use the umbrella terms LGBTQIA+ and sexual diversity interchangeably, even when referring to people who lived hundreds of years ago, when neither of these terms existed. It is impossible to avoid
the anachronistic usage of terms, but I have made every effort to document the lives of people in the past as accurately as possible. The most difficult decision regarding terminology was deciding what term to use in English for those individuals whose lived experience did not correspond to the Spanish/Catholic gender binary. When referring to individuals alive before the mid-twentieth century, I use the term trans in the broadest way possible to refer to individuals who might have identified as trans had the term existed at the time, or had they lived in contemporary times. However, if I am referring to individuals who are currently alive or those who had the opportunity to go on the record with a preferred word, I use the term/s they prefer. For earlier periods I usually use the umbrella term LGBTQIA+ to refer to individuals who today might call themselves gender-fluid, nonbinary, asexual, and/or intersex. It is important to point out that I do not use the terms berdache, two-spirit, third gender, or Muxes. There is no evidence to postulate that any of these terms make sense historically in Nicaragua.

THE LITERATURE ON PRE-1979 LGBTQIA+ HISTORY

Many Nicaraguan writers have briefly described moments or individuals in Nicaragua’s pre-1979 LGBTQIA+ history. Erick Blandón and David Rocha, however, are the only two scholars who have written more than a few pages on the subject. Blandón and Rocha have written the only books that address Nicaragua’s pre-1979 LGBTQIA+ history, albeit from cultural studies and/or literary perspectives. Blandón’s Barroco descalzo, published in 2003, is a magisterial “cultural genealogy” that “investigates . . . the limits of what is considered ‘culture,’ what is excluded from the hegemonic concept of the national, what ‘interrupts’ the official history, [and] the inconvenient or the immeasurable.” It is within this cultural genealogy that Blandón sought to “understand what is the place of anomalous sexualities in the hegemonic culture.” While Blandón’s book is not a chronological LGBTQIA+ history, Barroco descalzo is foundational, for it addresses homosexuality in the colonial period as well as its presence and absence in different historical instances of “popular” and dominant culture.

Rocha’s book, Crónicas de la ciudad, published in 2019, is also a groundbreaking text that defies categorization. It is history, fiction, poetry, and cultural studies, but most of all it is a love letter to Managua and Managua’s LGBTQ+ population. Rocha writes: “This work is for the locas from yesterday, the current ones, the future ones and the urban locas who were born and who will be born in this Managua full of fugitive spaces.” His book constitutes the first “gay” history of Managua, focusing on the years between 1968 and 1972. Building on the Argentine activist and anthropologist Nestor Perlongher’s work, Rocha created a cartography of Managua to map sexual subjectivities based on oral interviews, ethnography, archival research, and participant observation. Like Blandón’s work, Rocha’s is heavily informed by theory and a critical interpretation of the lived experience (whether their own or that of their fellow Nicaraguans) of the Sandinista revolution. In that sense, Blandón’s and Rocha’s books are crucial to understanding not only Nicaragua’s pre-1979 LGBTQIA+ history but also Nicaragua’s postrevolutionary LGBTQIA+ history. They are indeed foundational, and my work builds on theirs.

METHODOLOGY

Between 1990 and 2023, I spent over three years in Nicaragua, conducting participant observation, dozens of interviews, and substantial archival research at the Archivo Nacional de Nicaragua (National Archive of Nicaragua), the Instituto de Historia de Nicaragua y Centroamérica (the Institute of Nicaraguan and Central American History), the newspaper La Prensa, the Biblioteca del Banco Central (the Library of the Central Bank), and multiple privately held collections in Nicaragua. I also conducted extensive research online at the Biblioteca Enrique Bolaños (the Enrique Bolaños Library) and the British Library’s Endangered Archives. Additionally, I visited the Bancroft Library in Berkeley and the National Archives in Washington, D.C. Over the course of my research for other projects, I encountered snippets of Nicaragua’s LGBTQIA+ history, and I knew that the topic deserved a book of its own. I have devoted the last decade specifically to this project.

Excerpt from “El Fin del Mundo”

Posted on October 1, 2024February 25, 2025 by Cameron Quan

October 1, 2024

In a remote desert corner of Sonora, Mexico, the site of El Fin del Mundo offers the first recorded evidence of Paleoindian interactions with gomphotheres, an extinct species related to elephants.

El Fin del Mundo: A Clovis Site in Sonora, Mexico editors Vance Holliday, Guadalupe Sánchez, and Ismael Sánchez-Morales bring together the work of 14 contributors that present and synthesize the archaeological, geological, paleontological, and paleoenvironmental records of this important Clovis site.

Below. read an excerpt from Chapter 1 by Vance T. Holliday, Guadalupe Sánchez, Ismael Sánchez-Morales, and Edmund P. Gaines.

The Clovis occupation of North America is the oldest generally accepted and well documented archaeological assemblage on the continent, dating to ~13,000 cal yr B.P. (Meltzer 2021). The distinctive Clovis points have been reported from throughout most of the lower 48 United States, parts of Canada, as well as Mexico, throughout Central America, and possibly in Venezuela (Smith. Smallwood, and DeWitt 2015; Pearson 2017). Clovis is classically associated with mammoth, although only about 12 firm Clovis/mammoth associations are known (Grayson and Meltzer, 2015). Associations of Clovis and other late Pleistocene megafauna are more rare, consisting of mastodon and bison (Grayson and Meltzer 2015). In this volume we provide a full report on the site of El Fin del Mundo, the first documented Clovis association with gomphothere (Cuvieronius). The site is in Sonora, Mexico (Figure 1.1), making it the northernmost dated late Pleistocene gomphothere and the youngest in North America. It is the first documented intact, buried Clovis site outside of the United States and the first in situ Paleoindian site identified in northwestern Mexico. The site also includes a Clovis activity area on the “upland” surface (described in Chapter 2) that rises gradually from the area with the buried features. In addition, a paleontological bonebed below the Clovis level includes a rare association of mastodon, mammoth, and Cuvieronius sp. The site also provides a paleoenvironmental record rare for the region spanning the Late Glacial Maximum (LGM), Bølling-Allerød Chron, Younger Dryas Chron, and the early Holocene. These archaeological, geological, paleontological, and paleoenvironmental records are presented and synthesized here.

…

In June 1997, during a visit to the municipal museum in Carbó, Sonora, north of Hermosillo, Guadalupe Sánchez and Vance Haynes observed an unfossilized mammoth femur and rib. The bones were recovered more than 30 years earlier on a remote ranch in the municipio of Pitiquito. The owner, Gustavo Placencia, invited the group to his ranch. They had to decline his generous offer due to the time (four hours one way) involved and lack of access to a suitable field vehicle required in the rainy season. The principal objective of the Spring, 2007 field season of the Proyecto was to visit all the known localities in northern Sonora where Paleoindian artifacts and/or remains of late Pleistocene megafauna were reported. A priority on this list was the remote ranch in the municipio of Pitiquito.

On February 5, 2007, Guadalupe Sánchez, along with Edmund Gaines and Alberto “Beto” Peña, led by Alejandro “Jano” Valdez, the ranch cowboy, visited the locality that produced the bones on display in the Carbó museum. The exposure was an “island” of sediment in the middle of an arroyo system. Two bone layers were observed, exposed in the profiles around the island (Figure 1.2). The size of the bone and presence of tusk fragments (Figure 1.3) indicated that both layers contained the remains of Pleistocene megafauna. The first artifact found was a yellow chert uniface (#45980) that had recently fallen from the exposed upper bone layer, confirming that the bonebed was archaeological. Shortly thereafter, a large rhyolite Clovis-style biface (#46021) was discovered about 3 meters from the island exposure, followed by discovery of the middle portion of a quartz crystal biface (#46022) next to the north wall exposure (Chapter 4). The team knew they had found a potentially important archaeological and paleontological site and named it “El Fin del Mundo” (the end of the world) on the basis of a comment made when the team first arrived at the site. On a return trip two days later, a complete Clovis point of white chert (#46023; Figure 1.4) was found about 28 meters to the south of the island, confirming the team’s suspicions that they had a new Paleoindian site.

…

When necessary, fossil material recovered via excavation was stabilized using a 1:10 mixture of Resistol™ (akin to Elmer’s glue) and water. This was applied with either a paintbrush or an aerated sprayer along with ample water to ensure maximum penetration of the bone. In some cases, however, identifiable elements were removed without adding this material to keep them free from contamination that would affect radiocarbon analysis.

In some cases, the remains were encased in polyurethane foam to remove them in sound condition. This was accomplished by first applying wet tissue entirely around the bone surface. As the tissue dried it formed a protective casing that prevented the foam from sticking to the bones and facilitated removal in the laboratory. The remains were then encased in polyurethane foam that forms a 10- to 20-cm thick hardened jacket that holds them together and protects them during removal. Cardinal direction, unit number, and grid coordinate information were recorded on the polyurethane casing prior to removal. When possible, individual elements were jacketed separately. It was, however, necessary to group large concentrations of multiple bones together in a single polyurethane jacket.

Excerpt from “Healing Like Our Ancestors”

Posted on August 29, 2024July 2, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

August 29, 2024

Healing Like Our Ancestors: The Nahua Titiçih, Gender, and Settler Colonialism in Central Mexico, 1535-1660, by Edward Anthony Polanco, offers a provocative new perspective the examines sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Nahua healers in central Mexico and how their practices have been misconstrued and misunderstood in colonial records.

Early colonial Spanish settlers defined, assessed, and admonished Nahua titiçih (healing specialists) and tiçiyotl (healing knowledge) in the process of building a society in Mexico that mirrored Iberia. Nevertheless, Nahua survivance (intergenerational knowledge transfer) has allowed communities to heal like their ancestors through changes and adaptations. Polanco draws from diverse colonial primary sources, largely in Spanish and Nahuatl (the Nahua ancestral language), to explore how Spanish settlers framed titiçih, their knowledge, and their practices within a Western complex. Polanco argues for the usage of Indigenous terms when discussing Indigenous concepts and arms the reader with the Nahuatl words to discuss central Mexican Nahua healing. In particular, this book emphasizes the importance of women as titiçih and highlights their work as creators and keepers of knowledge. These vital Nahua perspectives of healing—and how they differed from the settler narrative—will guide community members as well as scholars and students of the history of science, Latin America, and Indigenous studies. Read an excerpt from the book’s introduction below.

“From the Peruvian Andes to the French court, the potato’s voyages”—thus reads the title of a sign explaining how the potato made its way to Spain. In July 2022, I had the privilege of visiting the Real Jardín Botánico (Royal Botanical Garden) in Madrid. I had read about the garden in books and was curious about its contents. When I asked a garden employee where I could see plants indigenous to the Americas, she informed me that the gardeners had dispersed them throughout the grounds and that the garden’s sections were not organized by geographic location. I immediately looked for corn (Zea mays) and tobacco (Nicotiana sp.), which I was surprised to find growing next to each other in the huerta, or orchard, section. There, like thousands of visitors every year, I was also able to see squash, beans, potatoes, sunflowers, tomatoes, and peppers. Though many of the plants in the orchard are native to Turtle Island (what is now called North America) and Abya Yala (what is now called Central and South America), there was no such descriptor or recognition. I then moved on to the medicinal section, which contained only two plants from Abya Yala, huevo de gallo (Salpichroa origanifolia) and epazote (Dysphania ambrosioides).

In the entire botanical garden, the only placard I found that explained an “American” plant was a sign for what Spaniards call the patata, or the papa in Quechua and Latin American Spanish (potato in English). Most of the text about the potato revolved around its European “discovery” in the Americas and the untapped knowledge about its nutritional attributes, unknown to Europeans until the eighteenth century. One short sentence explained that papas had been domesticated in the Chilean and Peruvian Andes eight thousand years ago. The placard made no mention of the Native cultures that had cultivated (and continue to cultivate) the root, nor did it explain the cultural significance of the papa in what is today known as South America.

This situation embodies the erasure of Native knowledge and culture that occurs with the extraction of native plants. The Real Jardín Botánico presents corn, tomatoes, beans, squash, and tobacco as plants with no Native history or culture. Though this is largely true for many of the plants in the garden irrespective of their origin, it is particularly troubling when the plants were extracted from other parts of world through colonial ventures. In the case of the papa, it appears as a once exotic plant that Europeans haphazardly dominated with their culinary and economic control. The botanical garden’s thousands of visitors could be learning about the vibrant, complex, and diverse knowledge and goods that Native people have willingly and unwillingly provided Spain and its once global empire. Visitors could also learn the importance of native plants in their Native contexts, their uses, and their indigenous names. For instance, corn is originally from Mesoamerica, and it is important to many Native communities throughout Turtle Island and Abya Yala for sustenance, healing, and as a relative. Tobacco, similarly, is a spiritual medicine, and the aromatic plant enjoys therapeutic uses as well.

Before Columbus arrived in the Western Hemisphere, Native peoples throughout Turtle Island and Abya Yala knew about corn and tobacco and grew it. Jesuit priest and settler Francisco Clavijero noted in the late eighteenth century that to Nahuas in Mexico tlaolli (corn kernels) were one of the most important food items, like wheat to Europe and rice to Asia. Nahuas had diverse types of corn that were nutritious and often eaten as “bread” (i.e., tortillas) made by women, and atolli (atole, a corn-based beverage), which had medicinal properties. Nahuas in the sixteenth century often gave cocoxqueh (sick people) atolli to nurse them back to health. Cintli (the entire corn plant) forms a core component of Indigenous foods from Mesoamerica, including tortillas, tamales, and atoles.

Moreover, many Native communities attributed special powers and reverence to tobacco. The Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas reported in the sixteenth century that the Taíno people in what is now the Dominican Republic and Haiti smoked leaves resembling lettuce, which they dried and rolled into the shape of a musket (the musket was called a tabaco). The leaves functioned as a corporal sedative, and Taínos also used them to suppress hunger and fatigue. Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo y Valdés further recorded sixteenth-century ceremonial uses of tabaco among the Taíno, who employed the leaves to gain unknown information. Las Casas reported that in what is now Mexico, the Tlaxcalteca used tobacco (piçiyetl in sixteenth-century Central Mexican Nahuatl and iatl in modern variants of Nahuatl) to tranquilize snakes and that it also boasted many medicinal properties, though he did not expand on them. By the 1570s, the physician Francisco Hernández had learned of a number of health benefits to be gained from smoking the dry leaves: tobacco was a great expectorant, cured asthma and difficulties breathing, was good for women having irregularities with their uterus, fortified the mind, caused drowsiness, and calmed pain. Fresh leaves were good for digestion and cured empacho (abdominal bloating and pain). Nahua specialists also used piçiyetl as an entheogen—a substance to release a nonhuman life force within. For example, healers used piçiyetl and other entheogens to communicate with nonhuman forces and to diagnose and prognosticate illnesses and injuries. Thus, it seems that tobacco might have been better suited to the Real Jardín Botánico’s medicinal section.

Effacing or obfuscating the names and knowledge of indigenous plants is part of the colonial game. Now operated by the Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, the Real Jardín Botánico could use its privilege and status to acknowledge the Indigenous names of native plants when making use of plants, technologies, and knowledge acquired from Indigenous peoples.

Excerpt from “Kidnapped to the Underworld”

Posted on August 14, 2024August 19, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

August 14, 2024

Víctor Montejo’s Kidnapped to the Underworld recounts the near-death experience of his grandfather, Antonyo Mekel Lawuxh (Antonio Esteban), who fell gravely ill in Guatemala in the late 1920s but survived to tell his family and community what he had witnessed of the afterlife.

Narrated from Antonio’s perspective, the reader follows along on a journey to the Maya underworld of Xibalba, accompanied by two spirit guides. Antonio traverses Xibalba’s levels of heaven and hell, encountering instructive scenes of punishment and reward: in one chapter, conquistadors are perpetually submerged in a pool of their victims’ blood; in another, the souls of animal abusers are forever unable to cross a crocodile-infested river. Infused with memory, the author illustrates Guatemala’s unique religious syncretism, exploring conceptions of heaven and hell shared between Catholicism and Indigenous Maya spirituality. In the tradition of both the Popol Vuh and the Divine Comedy, Montejo’s narrative challenges easy categorization—this is a work of family history, religious testimony, political allegory, and sacred literature. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

It was already late as I was coming back from working in the milpa that day. Though I knew the way to my pueblo very well, I suddenly found myself lost in the thick woods, unsure where I was going. The solitude took my heart prisoner, and I grew sad thinking that no one accompanied me on that grim and desolate path. Oh, how terrible is solitude! I walked and walked with no one to give me directions or point the correct way home. Time passed, bit by bit, and I began to lose hope. Father Sun was dying, and night darkened the peaks of the far-off mountains.

The birds in the forest started flying like crazy, their melodious trills bidding farewell to the melancholy afternoon. Everything seemed to be falling asleep under the looming black cloak of night. Only my constant and hurried steps broke that sepulchral silence, and from time to time I whistled, hoping it could help me escape the overpowering fear. Thousands of thoughts pecked at my brain like a crazed woodpecker, forcing me to reflect on my past life. And so, pensive and sweaty, I gave myself over into an uncontainable soliloquy.

My thoughts took wing, flying to the infinite, forgetting my poor body that walked fatigued within that shadow of chilling monotony. Soon something called powerfully to my attention, shaking me from my meditations. It was a bird of many-colored feathers that hopped in the middle of the path, not a bit disturbed by my presence. Oh, how beautiful was that bird!

I approached cautiously, hoping to catch it, but just when my hands almost had it, the bird would jump nimbly from the ground, making me fail each time. I took off my hat in hopes of using it to catch the bird, but again it scurried away from my clumsy hands. Ah, I didn’t want to let that most beautiful and strangely colored fowl get away, but my efforts kept proving futile.

Before my eyes the bird arose and flew to a small branch, nearly within my reach. I jumped as high as I could, but I couldn’t grasp it because it flew to a higher branch. Now very desperate, I picked up a round stone and rashly threw it. In vain! The bird had flown higher, to a ceiba branch. Frantically, I hurled a second stone, but the extraordinary bird kept ascending and going further away. Meanwhile, I was dying from the intense desire to contemplate and caress it between my hands. I kept throwing my hopeless stones, but the colorful bird continued until it was lost in the topmost canopy of the enormous ceiba.

It was as if that multicolored bird had guided me to the highest elevations, toward a higher goal that I would have to reach, but which would require much more effort. Saddened by my failure, I sat down, sweaty, at the foot of that tree without even caring about the time passing by. I felt so sad, as if I had just lost the most valuable treasure, or as one who loses part of their own being.

Weariness finally took me over, and I decided to lie down on the ground and rest. But as I was doing that, my head started spinning like I was drunk. Then the earth seemed to move dizzily from under my feet, and I collapsed on the ground, losing consciousness.

Suddenly I was in great danger, as I somehow found myself attached to the roots and vines growing on the wall of a great abyss.

Poor me! There I was, clinging helplessly to the rock like a climber stuck on that vertical wall. I had managed to reach the middle of the abyss when I began to lose strength and give up. From below, I heard the frightening rumble of a prodigious river running precipitously through gigantic rocks. Over my head rose the vertical side of the ravine, impossible to climb.

I couldn’t even take another step, I was stuck, holding onto those fragile roots to keep from falling into the precipice. One false step meant certain death. Who could save me if there was no one with me? To whom could I scream? Where could I direct my voice if no one could hear me? Never in my life have I felt so alone and wretched as I found myself in those moments. But I had one hope; and therefore, I made a great effort to maintain my balance. More than anything, I had the desire to keep living and return to my pueblo with my family.

There I was, fighting desperately against the death that was stalking me, when I was amazed to see a ball of fire come falling from the sky to strike my trembling chest. That unbelievable light strengthened my body and infused me with tremendous valor. In this way I felt myself a man full of bravery and with new hopes to keep living. Then, with utmost care I began the dangerous ascent, holding tightly to those tenuous roots in the vertical wall of that overwhelming precipice. Great was my astonishment when I found I had reached the top of the abyss and could finally move unscathed from that immense danger.

I don’t know how I happened to expose my life to the middle of that great precipice, nor did I see the benevolent hand that rescued me from such horrible risk, placing me on the most accessible path.

Tired and dazed, I lay down at the foot of some old guava trees. The afternoon continued on its sad way, grey and unforgettable, and the clouds rolled apart and back together, forming strange figures that found no exit from the sky. There was sun, but it was a pale sun whose rays brought no heat.

There I stayed, quietly contemplating the grey and nebulous sky. I was so engrossed that I failed to dodge the droppings a damned vulture left on my head. At that precise moment also a husky-voiced owl began to sing, sometimes sounding like the cackle of the very devil, laughing at my lamentable situation. That owl was the messenger of the lords from beyond, and its song sounded to me like the funeral chimes that tolled when they buried someone in my pueblo.

Excerpt from “Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities”

Posted on July 12, 2024May 14, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

July 12, 2024

Accompaniment with Im/migrant Communities edited by Kristine E. Yarris and Whitney L. Duncan, brings together the experiences and voices of anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a feminist, care-based, decolonial mode of ethnographic engagement called “accompaniment.”

Accompaniment as anthropological research and praxis troubles the boundaries of researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community to explicitly address issues of power, inequality, and the broader social purpose of the work. More than two dozen contributors show how accompaniment is not merely a mode of knowledge production but an ethical commitment that calls researchers to action in solidarity with those whose lives we seek to understand. The volume stands as a collective conversation about possibilities for caring and decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement with im/migrant communities. Read an excerpt from the book’s Introduction below.

This edited volume brings together anthropologists whose engaged work with im/migrant communities pushes the boundaries of ethnography toward a mode of engagement inspired by feminist care ethics, decolonial methodologies, and Latin American activist traditions of acompañamiento, or accompaniment. Collectively, this volume contributes to applied anthropological scholarship by challenging prescribed boundaries and dichotomies, such as researcher-participant, scholar-activist, and academic-community member. In so doing, the chapters collected here unsettle received ways of doing anthropology and explicitly address issues of power, positionality, inequity, and the broader social purpose of our work. We also situate this work within a longer trajectory of applied, engaged, and activist anthropological research and within contemporary decolonial and feminist critiques of anthropology, which seek to redress historical inequities within the discipline and beyond. Drawing together an array of anthropologists working with im/migrant communities in various research settings and experimenting with different modes of doing and writing ethnography, the volume represents a collective conversation about possibilities—both epistemic and empirical—for caring, decolonial forms of ethnographic engagement.

Many of the authors featured in these pages originally came together in the fall of 2016, at the American Anthropological Association (AAA) meetings in Minneapolis. There, we attempted to gather our collective
responses to the rise of a xenophobic, racist, and white supremacist political moment in the United States, which culminated in the election of the forty-fifth president. Reeling in the wake of the presidential election, we organized a late-breaking AAA session to talk and strategize about how best to support our im/migrant research participants, students, friends, family members, and communities experiencing overt and rhetorical attacks on their safety, health, wellbeing, and very existence. From this initial encounter, we established the Anthropological Action Network for Immigrants and Refugees (AANIR), an informal collective of engaged anthropologists working with immigrant communities. AANIR has continued to meet regularly since our 2016 founding, acting as a space of solidarity, information-sharing, inspiration, and organization. We have shared strategies for creating sanctuary campuses and advocating for policy change; we have offered webinar series; we have organized conference sessions; we have collectively drafted op-eds, policy papers, and position statements together. In the process, we’ve offered and received care, community, and encouragement. In these ways, AANIR itself has served as a space of accompaniment that helps inspire this volume.

We are mindful of the historical specificity and the collegial solidarity that has given rise to and sustained the ethnographic engagements detailed here. At the same time, of course, troubling xenophobic, racist, and anti-immigrant tendencies have deep roots in the United States, just as efforts to build a more welcoming and inclusive society and polity also have longstanding roots in social movements for civil rights and immigrant justice in this country and beyond. Though we represent a variety of training backgrounds and perspectives, as U.S.-based anthropologists our work collectively responds to and addresses present sociopolitical conditions: entrenched inequality, heightened xenophobia, unbridled white nationalism, and the challenges associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, with its disparate impacts on marginalized and impoverished communities. We have invited all volume contributors to reflect on how the current political and historical moment has inspired and shaped our scholarship and relationships as engaged anthropologists working with im/migrant communities.

The central questions guiding this volume are: How do we understand and enact accompaniment with im/migrant communities? What does accompaniment offer our engaged anthropological work—as research modality, as practical engagement, and as a collaborative option for thinking and writing together and with our interlocutors? While we situate our approach to accompaniment historically within related theoretical concepts and methodologies, we do not intend to provide a definitive account or to foreclose avenues for thinking about accompaniment. Indeed, one commonality across the work of the authors in this volume is our willingness to engage with the uncertainties and discomfort that our shifting subjectivities as anthropologists accompanying im/ migrant communities require. We seek to draw forward these tensions, describing how and why our roles may shift from scholar to social worker, observer to friend, witness to advocate. Across the chapters, then—as contributors describe fighting deportations, engaging in social protest, writing reports and editorials, developing immigrant-friendly programs, advocating for inclusive health and social policies, and fostering systems of support for migrants—accompaniment acts as a grounding force, a being-with and standing alongside, a form of care that shifts us away from received ways of doing ethnography into more unsettled but productive spaces of possibility for solidarity and social justice.

Excerpt from “Indigenous Health and Justice”

Posted on June 18, 2024May 9, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

June 18, 2024

Colonial oppression, systemic racism, discrimination, and poor access to a wide range of resources detract from Indigenous health and contribute to continuing health inequities and injustices. These factors have led to structural inadequacies that contribute to circular challenges such as chronic underfunding, understaffing, and culturally insensitive health-care provision. Nevertheless, Indigenous Peoples are working actively to end such legacies.

In Indigenous Health and Justice, edited by Karen Jarratt-Snider and Marianne O. Nielsen, contributors demonstrate how Indigenous Peoples, individuals, and communities create their own solutions. Chapters focus on both the challenges created by the legacy of settler colonialism and the solutions, strengths, and resilience of Indigenous Peoples and communities in responding to these challenges. It introduces a range of examples, such as the ways in which communities use traditional knowledge and foodways to address health disparities. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter “Indigenous Peoples’ Involvement in the U.S. Justice System, Trends, Health Impacts, and Health Disparities” below.

To more fully grasp the significance of strides made in recent decades to introduce Indigenous cultural and spiritual practices into correctional facilities, these practices must be understood within the context of colonialism. The Indigenous experience with settler-colonial states through systemic means of oppression is a long one. Countries such as the United States, Canada, and Australia have historically passed and upheld national and state or provincial laws aimed at dismantling Indigenous cultural identities and traditions through religious suppression—instituting bans on practices and rites expressive of Indigenous spirituality, obstructing access to sacred sites, and outlawing possession of ceremonial objects such as peyote and sacred pipes (Irwin 2006).

Attempting to simplify Indigenous religious beliefs and practices for generalizable consumption is a daunting and nearly impossible task. Generally, most Indigenous Peoples around the world view their everyday cultural ways of being and living as being spiritually purposeful and significant. Hence, culture and spirituality (or religious practice) are inextricably connected because one structures the other. Unlike Euro-Western notions of religion, which impose a separation between God and the world we exist in, Indigenous spirituality and religious orientations see a Creator or multiple sacred deities as a part of the world. This difference in the perception of religion and the human relationship to the “holy” is but one aspect of the Othering process employed by Westerners to cast Indigenous Peoples as primitive, ahistorical, unsophisticated, uncivilized, unstable, and savage nonhumans. This was a means to justify colonial tactics of genocide (e.g., subjugation of Indigenous Peoples, atrocious acts of violence, removal from homelands, and cultural assimilation) that were employed in order to lay claim to Indigenous land and natural resources for the establishment of settler-colonial expansion, wealth, and prosperity (Nielsen and Robyn 2019).

Indigenous individuals have only been granted U.S. citizenship within the last century through the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, which also conferred the right to vote. After that, it took another half century before all Native citizens were afforded protection of the right to practice their religious, spiritual, and cultural beliefs, with the 1978 passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act (AIRFA). Between 1993 and 2000, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act (RLUIPA) were passed to increase these protections. Regarding RFRA and RLUIPA, a guidance document produced by the Native American Rights Fund (2016) and intended for Indigenous people in correctional facilities explains, “Both statutes prevent the government from substantially burdening [an inmate’s] religious practice unless it has a compelling reason to do so in [the inmate’s] particular case,” and that prisons may only burden or hinder religious practices if they have “no other, less restrictive alternatives available.” Admittedly, this is a very condensed presentation of some of the historical strides made by the U.S. government to suppress and then protect and preserve Indigenous traditional religious beliefs and practices, but this contextual information is pertinent for understanding the advances made from the 1960s forward.

The 1960s and 1970s marked a social movement in the United States that was pushing for the right of Indigenous individuals who were incarcerated to exercise their Native religious practices. In the early 1960s, Clyde Bellecourt, an Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) man, met a young Anishinaabe spiritual leader named Eddie Benton-Banai when they were both serving time in Minnesota’s Stillwater prison (Reha 2001). Bellecourt and Benton-Banai, known for their founding roles in the American Indian Movement, formed the American Indian Folklore Group while incarcerated, to help incarcerated Indigenous people heal by learning about Native history, epistemologies, culture, and spirituality through pan-Indian frameworks (Tighe 2014). Tighe (2014, 5) describes this effort as a “model for Indian cultural renaissance within prisons.” Bellecourt affirms that ceremonies are an integral component of the healing process that can support individuals involved in the criminal justice system to make positive changes in their lives, and credits how establishing a spiritual base in his own life helped him to overcome his battle with alcoholism (Reha 2001).

With the aid of the Native American Rights Fund, one of the oldest and largest legal organizations committed to defending the legal rights of Indigenous people and nations, Indigenous individuals incarcerated in Nebraska won a federal court consent decree in Wolff v. McDonnell (1974), which allowed them to practice their religious and cultural beliefs in prison. This opened the way in Nebraska for sweat lodges to be conducted, Native clubs and spiritual collectives to be formed, and elders to serve as spiritual advisors and cultural-based counselors inside correctional facilities (Irwin 2006). Irwin (2006, 42) notes that the consent decree “established an important precedent for native prisoners in other states.”

Traction on this issue continued to grow in other parts of the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Incarcerated Indigenous people were increasingly bringing suits against prison administrators for denying their rights to religious freedom. In the Southwest, the Navajo Nation appointed a Navajo spiritual advisor who eventually was conducting ceremonies in nineteen prisons throughout the region (Echo-Hawk 1996). Incarcerated Indigenous women formed a spiritual organization within a Montana state prison in the early 1990s and perceived their unification as threatening to prison staff (Ross 1998). As a way of weakening the close bonds formed through the organization, the women felt staff strategically targeted Indigenous women who were labeled as “troublemakers” and then written up for “trumped-up charges” (Ross 1998, 243) which resulted in their transfer to a maximum-security facility. White women incarcerated in prison interviewed by Ross also noticed the same pattern, identifying it as “prejudiced” practice (265). At that time, Indigenous women made up 25 percent of the prison population while making up 6 percent of the Montana state population. In addition to the institutional discrimination experienced by incarcerated Indigenous women, Ross (278) notes the direct racist remarks about “Indians” and “Indian culture” made by prison staff and incarcerated white individuals to her and incarcerated Indigenous individual. By the time RFRA was passed in 1993, a large number of successful suits were being filed by Indigenous individuals incarcerated in prison, who were protesting infringement of their religious and spiritual needs and advocating for the right to bring traditional tobacco pipe and sweat lodge ceremonies into the prison complex (Irwin 2006).

Excerpt from “Restoring Relations Through Stories”

Posted on April 19, 2024May 6, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 19, 2024

This insightful volume delves into land-based Diné and Dene imaginaries as embodied in stories—oral, literary, and visual. Like the dynamism and kinetic facets of hózhǫ́,* Restoring Relations Through Stories takes us through many landscapes, places, and sites. Renae Watchman introduces the book with an overview of stories that bring Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or Shiprock Peak, the sentinel located in what is currently the state of New Mexico, to life. The book then introduces the dynamic field of Indigenous film through a close analysis of two distinct Diné-directed feature-length films, and ends by introducing Dene literatures.

While the Diné (those from the four sacred mountains in Dinétah in the southwestern United States) are not now politically and economically cohesive with the Dene (who are in Denendeh in Canada), they are ancestral and linguistic relatives. In this book, Watchman turns to literary and visual texts to explore how relations are restored through stories, showing how literary linkages from land-based stories affirm Diné and Dene kinship. She explores the power of story to forge ancestral and kinship ties between the Diné and Dene across time and space through re-storying of relations. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Per Diné protocol, I open with a decolonial Diné approach, “kodóó hózhǫ́ dooleeł,” translated as “it begins in beauty” or “in beauty it begins.” Situated in northwest New Mexico, within the four sacred mountains, Tsé Bit’a’í means “Winged Rock,” “Rock with Wings,” or “Wings of Rock,” but is called Shiprock Peak (or just Shiprock). Tsé Bit’a’í is located on the outskirts of a reservation town formerly known in Diné bizaad (the Navajo language) as Naat’áanii Nééz (“tall leader”), but it is now called Shiprock too. The town is a flourishing reservation metropolis on the northern edge of the great Diné Nation, which spans the states of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Locals are primarily Diné. Historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale explains, “We call ourselves the Diné or The People. We also name ourselves Náhookah Diné (Earth Surface People) and Bilá’ ashdla’ (FiveFingered Ones).” Shiprock (the town) prides itself as the “Naashjizhii’ Capital of the World.” Naashjizhii’ is dried steamed corn. This designation of Diné culinary pride is featured on the cover of every issue of the annually published Shiprock Magazine, edited by Eugene B. Joe. The magazine is organized by the Shiprock Historical Society (est. 2010), whose aim is to preserve “the cultural significance of the town, the annual Northern Navajo fair and the historical growth of the community.”

Existence, presence, being, and places are reliant on names, but whose version of a place-name, whose toponym, matters? Shiprock is an English name that eclipses two distinct Navajo names: one a landmark, Tsé Bit’a’í; and the other a nearby reservation community, Naat’áanii Nééz. In N. Scott Momaday’s The Names: A Memoir (1976), he makes a grave error. He refers to “Shiprock, which is called in Navajo Naat’aaniineez [sic] (literally ‘tall chief’; the town takes its name from the great monolith that stands nearby in an arid reach of the San Juan Basin). The name Shiprock, like other Anglicizations in this region, seems incongruous enough, but from certain points of view—and from the air, especially—the massive rock Naat’aaniineez resembles very closely a ship at sea.” The tendency for settlers to claim and name lands that they are unfamiliar with is not surprising; however, Momaday lived in Shiprock from 1936 to 1943. That he would retell a settler’s account of the anglicization of Tsé Bit’a’í is surprising. This demonstrates the prominence of settler narratives eclipsing Indigenous ones. Furthermore, Momaday misunderstands the meaning of Naat’áanii Nééz, which does not literally mean “tall chief.” It literally means “tall leader” or “tall one who speaks.” In the context of Shiprock, the town’s name meant “tall boss,” to describe the height of William Taylor Shelton (1869–1944), who in 1903 was assigned as superintendent for the San Juan Indian Agency by “President Theodore Roosevelt to go to New Mexico and establish the Shiprock Reservation for the Navaho [sic].” Momaday also attributes the wrong Navajo name to the pinnacle and does not acknowledge the Diné name Tsé Bit’a’í. Even more troubling is that he completely ignores the traditional Diné stories about Tsé Bit’a’í and privileges an “incongruous” colonial version. In 1860, prior to the Navajo Long Walk to Fort Sumner, Captain J. F. McComb called Tsé Bit’a’í “The Needle.” The Needle was replaced by the English name Ship Rock (two words) in 1870 because non-Navajo settlers believed that it resembled a nineteenth-century “full-rigged sailing schooner.” This renaming reflects an unimaginative and nonsensical nautical nomenclature that further stripped Tsé Bit’a’í of her origin stories. Place naming, and naming in general, is significant to Diné and other Indigenous Peoples. A narrative of “place links present with past and our personal self with kinship groups. . . . Our knowledges cannot be universalized because they arise from our experience with our places. This is why name-place stories matter: they are repositories of science, they tell of relationships, they reveal history, and they hold our identity.” Margaret Kovach’s observations are relevant to Tsé Bit’a’í and the stories of her presence.

Georges Erasmus is Dene, or Tłįchǫ (Dogrib), from Behchokǫ̀ (which means “Big Knife” and replaced the town’s former name, Rae-Edzo) in the Northwest Territories. He advocated for restoration of Dene place-names and turned to Dene literary autonomy: “We made our own history. Our actions were based on our understanding of the world. With the coming of the Europeans, our experience as a people changed. We experienced relationships in which we were made to feel inferior. . . . They began to define our world for us. They began to define us as well. Even physically, our communities and our landmarks were named in terms foreign to our understanding. We were no longer the actors—we were being acted upon. We were no longer naming the world—we were being named.” This instance of Tsé Bit’a’í’s place-name is a case in point. This act of replacing and renaming our storied places interrupted the process of becoming hózhǫ́, affecting communities on both sides of the Medicine Line. If recognized at all, our stories have been dismissed as quaint storytelling and mythologizing. In thinking about Tsé Bit’a’í, my maternal family’s hometown mother, I am grappling with how the regenerative hane’ responds as a corrective.

Excerpt from “We Stay the Same”

Posted on April 11, 2024March 22, 2024 by Anissa Suazo

April 11, 2024

On a remote island in the South Pacific, the Lavongai have consistently struggled to obtain development through logging and commercial agriculture. Yet many Lavongai still long to move beyond the grind of subsistence work that has seemingly defined their lives on New Hanover, Papua New Guinea, for generations.

Following a long history of smaller-scale and largely unsuccessful resource development efforts, New Hanover became the site of three multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover over 75 percent of the island for ninety-nine-year lease terms. These agroforestry projects were part of a national effort to encourage “sustainable” rural development by tapping into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels. They were supposed to succeed where the smaller-scale projects of the past had failed. Unfortunately, these SABLs resulted in significant forest loss and livelihood degradation, while doing little to promote the type of economic development that many Lavongai had been hoping for.

It is within this context that Jason Roberts’ “We Stay the Same” grounds questions of hope for transformative economic change within Lavongai assessments of the inequitable relationships between global processes of resource development and the local lives that have become increasingly defined by the necessities and failures of these processes. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

New Hanover (Lavongai) is a relatively small, remote volcanic island located within New Ireland Province (NIP), Papua New Guinea (PNG). The island is 119,140 hectares in size, with a mountainous interior that can reach up to 1,000 m above sea level (Kaiku and Kaiku 2008). It is home to approximately 31,882 people, collectively called the Lavongai (PNG NSO 2021), who speak an indigenous language, Tungak, as well as one of the national languages of PNG—Tok Pisin. “Mipela stap olsem” is a Tok Pisin phrase that means “we live like this,” “we are like this,” or “we stay the same.” It is a phrase that I heard often during my time on New Hanover, normally when people would discuss issues related to economic development, or more likely, the lack of sustained development or positive material change on the island. In this way, the phrase was often used as an implicit critique of a subsistence lifestyle that many Lavongai presented as having existed relatively unchanged since time immemorial. At the same time, “mipela stap olsem” was also a critique of the structural forces that allowed some groups to achieve tremendous prosperity while others were seemingly destined for hardship and toil. While the Lavongai were only too familiar with the comparative affluence that outsiders like me enjoyed by mere circumstance of birth, they were also painfully aware that their own lives remained directly tied to the ground and the necessities of subsistence.

The Lavongai are, and always have been, self-sufficient. They make their living as shifting horticulturalists, producing a variety of food crops including staples such as taro (kirak), sweet potato (“kau”), banana (ur), cassava (“tapiok”), sago (ngavia), and greens (banga). People raise money for other necessities like salt, clothes, medicine, and school fees through the smallscale trade of cash crops like betelnut (vua) and mustard (sia), as well as surplus food crops. The work required to “find money,” therefore, is normally a difficult and slow task. Moving away from the rigors of subsistence living toward the anticipated prosperity of consumer-capitalist lifestyles has been, and continues to be, a prime objective for many Lavongai. Unfortunately, like other politically and economically marginal peoples throughout the world, their options for achieving development within the global market have been slim and poorly supported by successive colonial and national governments (Billings 2002; Tauvasa 1968/1969). Historically, what integration New Hanover has achieved within the global economy has been limited to the intermittent production and export of primary products such as copra, timber, and seafood.

In 2007, however, New Hanover became the site of three large-scale, multinational-controlled special agricultural and business leases (SABLs) that combined to cover approximately 79 percent of the island, for ninety-nine-year lease periods. These SABLs, like SABLs throughout PNG, were supposed to develop commercially viable agricultural plantations through the conversion of forested lands and the broad simplification of communal land tenure structures (95% of PNG’s land base), thought necessary to facilitate private investment (Filer 2011, 2012). SABL expansion throughout the country was part of a larger effort to promote national development and rural economic integration by combining the historically important logging and commercial agricultural industries in a way that would tap into the growing global demand for agricultural lands and crops like oil palm and biofuels (GoPNG 2011). These joint public-private development projects offered the Lavongai the opportunity to exchange timber and land rights for promises of fair-market timber royalties, commercial agricultural development, employment and job training, infrastructure improvements, and enhanced social service provisioning. As the New Ireland provincial administrator suggested above, this opportunity initially proved appealing for many Lavongai—particularly those in positions of decision-making power. People on the island had long been hoping for development to deliver these promises. SABLs seemed to offer a real path toward sustained global economic integration, as well as the social recognition that tends to go along with this integration. These projects appeared capable of succeeding where the smaller-scale, typically state-led projects of the past had failed.

As Abraham, a local landowner director in charge of representing the interests of his lineage group at Sulava village, as well as those of other Lavongai living within the 56,592-hectare Central New Hanover Limited SABL explained:

“The big motivation for making this [SABL] agreement was to improve life for the people of the island. Because we [PNG] got independence in 1975, and so far, there hasn’t been one good change for all of us who live here [on New Hanover]. We haven’t gotten one good service. From the time of the ancestors until now, we’ve stayed the same. There’s been no true development to come here because our government doesn’t work for us. New Hanover is a place where government has no mark. Our politicians only come around here at the time of elections. They make big talk with lots of big promises. Then we mark their names on the ballot and they go back [to town], and that’s where they stay. They forget about us—all of us who live out in the villages, out in the bush. They don’t work to create development for us like they say they will. All the government money that is supposed to be used for these things; it never turns out well. So, that’s why we finally decided that we must try to find a different road [to development]. That’s why we decided to bring the private sector to the island. We wanted the Company [Tutuman Development / Joinland Logging] to bring money, infrastructure, agriculture, and the savvy to help us develop.”

The University of Arizona Press