Learning from Land: Lerma's Guided by the Mountains

Political science, if it is to have any relationship at all with minority groups, must become the midwife of new fields of study in which minorities would present their understanding of human legal and political organization.¹

Perhaps this conversation could be started here and now. Let's now enter our home in order to gauge and access what is needed for a good day … a good life.²

Almost twenty years have passed since Vine Deloria and David Wilkins proposed that "(r)acial and ethnic studies can immediately link with political theory because that specialty represents the initial conceptual framework within which the respective minority groups had to be accommodated historically."³ In reality, what has changed? What have we done? We still see too many projects that examine indigenous life as an object of anthropological interest, and not enough work from the situated perspective of Native subjects.⁴ Two generations of neoliberal reforms and the empty pluralism of identity politics haven't helped bear any living interdisciplinary offspring. Under a horizon of near-total austerity, scarce departmental resources now chase after whatever problem seems punctual (currently: the identity politics of working-class whites). We still don't have enough Niitsitapi researchers and scholars in political science,⁵ and we certainly don't have enough works like Michael Lerma's Guided by the Mountains.⁶ For this is without question a groundbreaking book. It should be fundamental for scholars who work in comparative political theory. It is also relevant for scholars interested in settler colonialism and what James Scott calls the "shatter zones" of sovereign states.

The work has two interrelated aspects: the first compellingly elaborates traditional Diné teaching on the Four Sacred Elements, the sacred geography of the Navajo nation, and the ethics or (in its original sense) economy of the household or hoogan. The second demonstrates the relevance of these traditions to contemporary political problems, especially in relation to private (i.e., corporate) and public (i.e., newcomer state) actors. The first aspect of Lerma's book contributes to the emerging (and powerful) field of critical indigeneity; like recent works by Coulthard⁷ and Simpson,⁸ the fundamental aim of the text remains a fully indigenous reworking of cultural and political (counter)sovereignty. Its emphasis on lived experience also situates the text close to works such as Bastien.⁹ The problem of good governance always remains a concern (a point I will address below), but throughout the text runs a single thematic thread that begins from the ground-truth of traditions and ceremonial practices. These teachings resonate with recent "new materialist" turns in philosophy and political theory, insofar as they foreground non-human persons, so-called objects and (as the title suggests) sacred geography.

The operative hermeneutic of the text attends to dormancy and recovery: Lerma shows that ethical and political answers don't need "discovery" (a term that settlers even now continue to love), they simply need disinterring and careful cultivation. Such answers find expression in what Lerma calls a kind of Diné "natural law," a term which may or may not be helpful to non-indigenous readers. There is religion here, to be sure, and of course ceremony, but there are none of the typical Abrahamic priorities (monotheism, creation ex nihilo emanating from a transcendent God, a priority on will and its universal application, what Derrida called Phallogocentrism) operating as part of a politico-religious field. Instead, following Deloria once more, the priority is on orientation and movement within desecularized space rather than an unfolding of text or spirit over time; if there is agency and will, it springs not from a deity or from sovereign lawmakers, but from the land. As Lerma emphasizes: "(n)o humans created the knowledge carried today."¹⁰ Or, restating Blackfoot scholar Leroy Little Bear's inversion of Lockean liberalism, it is not we who choose the land, but the land and its agents (animals, Holy Ones, ancestors, etc.) who choose...