Explorations in Navajo Poetry and Poetics

5: Narratives of Navajoness and Indigenous Articulations

152 Narratives of Navajoness and Indigenous Articulations In this chapter, I want to continue exploring the work that poetry and poetry performances do in constructing narratives of Navajoness. In the previous chapter I looked at how Tohe performed poetry that was connected to her own life story—“Cat and Stomp”—and the ways that such stories could reverberate outwards to audience members. In this chapter, I want to explore how Tohe performs narratives of Navajoness, through her poem “In Dinétah,” that connect to a wider conception of Navajo historical consciousness. Here I again take up House’s (2002) recent book on Navajo language shift and her initial discussions concerning “narratives of Navajoness.” Part of understanding narratives of Navajoness, I argue, is to understand the particular poetic devices that connect one narrative of Navajoness with other narratives of Navajoness. That is, we need to understand how narratives of Navajoness are implicated and entangled within the specific poetic and narrative traditions of other Navajos and non-Navajos. Thus we need to move beyond merely accounting for narratives of Navajoness as the stories that Navajos tell about themselves, to investigate how narratives of Navajoness are actually structured and circulated. That is to understand the kinds of dialogue that such narratives are engaged in. In the following example, Tohe intertextually links to narrative traditions outside what we would term Navajo tradition as well as to Navajo formulaic devices. By intertextuality, I mean the ways that discursive resources interanimate each other (see Hanks 1999). As William Hanks (1999:13) notes, “each text is an intertext, an object whose FIVE Narratives of Navajoness and Indigenous Articulations Poetry, therefore, is something more philosophic and a higher thing than history. Aristotle, Poetics narratIves of navajoness and IndIgenous artIculatIons 153 meaning potential was realized in the context of other texts, under certain discursive conditions.” Tohe has constructed this poem through “massive intertextuality” (see Sherzer 1994:922). The goal of this chapter is to understand Tohe’s long narrative poem as embedded in “communicative processes in broader social fields” (Hanks 1999:13). Denetdale (2006b, 2007b) offers a useful and insightful starting point for considering “narratives of Navajoness,” the Long Walk, and their relationship with Western historical scholarship. As Denetdale (2006b:79) notes, “non-Navajo versions emphasize both the military actions that led to Navajo surrender and the role of Manuelito in the final defeat of the Navajos.” In contrast to this, Denetdale (79) notes that Navajo oral tradition is focused on the “return from Hwéeldi, the prison camp, and emphasize[s] the reestablishment of life in Diné bekéyah.” She further notes that such stories concerning the Long Walk and the return focus on the role of Navajo women as well. As Denetdale (2007b:41) argues, “Navajos’ own stories about their identity and their past challenges established constructions of Navajos.” Her recent interrogation of Navajo historiography echoes the work of Spicer, who noted, concerning the Long Walk, that, A Navajo is concerned, for example, with the meaning of the Long Walk. Was it something that happened to Navajos because they were resisting civilization and were defeated by that brave frontiersman, Kit Carson? Or was it an event in which Navajos were forcibly removed from their homeland, suffered deeply together, showed their spiritual strength, and won back possession of their own land? (Spicer 1975:50) Identity, then, is also a part of history or tradition making. This is, I argue, a narrative view of identity construction (see also Erickson 2003). Following Rumsey’s (2006) work on innovation of style and content in Ku Waru chants, we might ask, then, how poetic devices interanimate —that is make connections—with what James Clifford terms (2001) indigenous articulations. According to Rumsey (2006:50), indigenous articulations “draw selectively on their past to articulate a positively valorised position of difference.” I argue that that is the identity work 154 chapter fIve behind Tohe’s poetry as narratives of Navajoness. Tohe’s poetry and performances valorize Navajo history from a particular perspective. Her poetry and performances, as expressions of narratives of Navajoness, are then also indigenous articulations. One of the ways they accomplish that task is to intertextually connect with other Navajo verbal genres (by poetic forms, parallelism, tropes, and performance features). Another way is through Tohe’s use of the rhetoric of movement and the projective “we.” Here, Tohe’s poetry performances are reminiscent of Yaqui narratives about movement to and from...