Critical Indigenous Studies: A Lifetime of Theory and Practice

In the early 1990s, I walked into the History Department at Northern Arizona University to inquire about their PhD program. I was nearing the end of the MA in English Studies and thinking about a degree that might help me garner a job. Walking into the History Department that day led me to Dr. Susan Deeds, who ultimately became my advisor and mentor. That day I had a vague idea for my dissertation: I would write a biography of my great-great-great-grandmother, known in the historical record as "Juanita" and who was known as the favorite wife of the Navajo leader Manuelito or, as my people know him, "Hastiin Ch'iil Hajiin." My idea to write about my great-great-great-grandmother turned into a vastly different research project that ultimately led me to mount critiques of Native history as a subfield of American history and the ways in which Navajo/Diné history has been shaped by American and Native historiography, to articulate the relevance of Indigenous oral histories and traditional knowledge as foundational to reinvigorating Native and Indigenous Studies within the academy, and to contribute to Diné Studies. This essay is based upon my life's work as a Diné feminist historian who fell in love with Native and Critical Indigenous Studies, its intersection with Diné Studies, and, over at least thirty years, witnessed and participated in its conversations, theorizing, and practice. In sharing my scholarship and practice, I hope to demonstrate a continuity of Native and Critical Indigenous Studies that contributes to the vitality of Indigenous life.

As a child, I spent my formative years on Navajoland and attended American public schools, which by the 1960s and 1970s had fully embraced article six of a treaty that Navajo male leaders signed with representatives of the U.S. government in 1868. The article reads:

In order to insure the civilization of the Indians entering into this treaty, the necessity of education is admitted, especially of such of them as may be settled on said agricultural parts of this reservation, and they therefore pledge themselves to compel their children, male and female, between the ages of six and sixteen years, to attend school; and it is hereby made the duty of the agent for said Indians to see that this stipulation is strictly complied with; and the United States agrees that, for every thirty children between said ages who can be induced or compelled to attend school, a house shall be provided, and a teacher competent to teach the elementary branches of an English education shall be furnished, who will reside among said Indians, and faithfully discharge his or her duties as a teacher.¹

My great-great-great-grandfather, known in the American historical record as Manuelito and to his own Diné as Hastiin Ch'iil Hajiin (Man from Black Weeds) led the Navajo resistance against American invasion into Navajoland. Cast as the fierce leader of the resistance, he was pursued by the U.S. Army from 1863 to 1866 until he surrendered near Fort Wingate, New Mexico Territory. A prisoner of the United States, he and his relatives, including his warriors, made the forced march to Hweéldi, the Bosque Redondo reservation at Fort Sumner in New Mexico Territory, where between ten and twelve thousand Navajo prisoners lived in squalid conditions for four years. In 1868, Navajo leaders successfully negotiated a treaty with the United States in which their people were allowed to return to a portion of their homeland that had been carved into a reservation. One of the provisions of the treaty stipulated that Navajo children would be educated in American schools. Keeping to the treaty agreement, Hastiin Ch'iil Hajiin sent two of his sons to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania with a group of Navajo children in 1882. As one of the signatories on the last treaty signed between Navajo leaders and the U.S. government, Hastiin Ch'iil Hajiin agreed to the provision that required Navajo children to be schooled in the American educational system. After sending his own sons to Carlisle...