-
Chapter 9. Blood Talk: Violence and Belonging in the Navajo–New Mexican Borderland
- University of Pennsylvania Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
PART IV Spaces and Memory This page intentionally left blank [54.85.255.74] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 06:29 GMT) chapter 9 Blood Talk: Violence and Belonging in the Navajo–New Mexican Borderland Brian DeLay It’s a few hours before daylight, somewhere, and there’s a commotion outside . You bolt upright out of your blankets, heart pounding in the darkness. Men are yelling to each other in a language you don’t understand. A familiar voice cries out. You grab a weapon and stumble into the freezing night, just in time to see most of the animals being driven out of your corral. In the darkness you see the outline of a young man (your nephew?) lying face down on the other side of the fence. You shout and two men on horseback wheel ’round and glare. You raise your weapon but hear a familiar windwhistle sound and then something buries itself in your shoulder. The riders watch you slump to the ground, then say something to one another. One dismounts, strides past you into your home, and then emerges with a terri- fied girl—your daughter. He heaves the child onto a horse, climbs up behind her, and in ten seconds you can’t even hear the hoofbeats over the howling wind. Who did this? Had the attack happened yesterday in, say, Nebraska—that is, somewhere inside a sovereign nation-state capable of enforcing its laws—authorities would pose the question with a particular, individualistic aim in mind. They would set about trying to discern the personal identities of the assailants, locate and apprehend them, and punish them, as individuals . But in borderlands, places defined precisely by their plural sovereignties , the question who did this is more complicated and more perilous. In 230 Brian DeLay contested spaces, individuals always imply collectives in ways that confer power even as they invite danger.1 When personal injuries threaten collective violence, to ask by whom something was done is also to ask for whom it was done. There may be an objective answer to the first question, but this is rarely the case for the second. Instead, acts of cross-cultural violence usually spark rival discourses of culpability. These take place both across the divide, between the societies involved, and also within each society as factions vie with one another through statements about alienation and belonging. The perpetrators acted on our behalf, championing our rage and our interests. They acted alone, for selfish, base reasons. The perpetrators belong to us. They don’t belong to us. Such statements seek to frame the original injury in a particular light, and in so doing to stop, manage, or encourage escalation and war. Sometimes they are conveyed through words. But they can also be registered through further actions—acts of communicative violence meant to punish and terrify through demonstrations of unity as much as through wounds. Violence and community are mutually constitutive in contested borderlands. Residents of these volatile places are compelled to engage in what I call ‘‘blood talk’’: dialogues about belonging performed not only through words but also through acts of violence and their attendant, urgent statements about who belongs to whom.2 There are few places better suited to an analysis of blood talk than the region between Diné (Navajos) and New Mexicans—the most enduring colonial borderland in all of North America. Navajos and New Mexicans interacted regularly with each other as members of independent polities in the same region for more than two hundred and fifty years. The relationship ’s durability depended on several things, including the absence of imperial rivals, isolated New Mexico’s relatively small colonial population, a dearth of precious metals, and the fact that most of the land between the two societies was unsuited for agriculture. Few North American borderlands fit this profile. In all of Spanish North America, only certain groups of Apaches and Utes could be said to have comparable stories, and neither interacted as regularly with a fixed colonial center as Navajos. Nothing as durable can be found in French North America, if for no other reason than the simple fact that New France only lasted about one hundred and fifty years. British North American interactions with the great Iroquois, Cherokee , and Creek confederations come closer, but even these iconic borderland relationships start later and end (in forced removal) far earlier than Blood Talk 231 the one forged by Diné and New Mexicans. The unique longevity of...