Born in the Blood: On Native American Translation

3. Translating Time: A Dialogue on Hopi Experiences of the Past

Translating Time A Dialogue on Hopi Experiences of the Past Chip Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Stewart B. Koyiyumptewa Introduction This chapter takes as its focus the question of how Hopi feelings, experiences , and knowledge of the past are, or can be, translated. Our motivation for this chapter grew out of our work together and conversations about the first author’s own (non-Pueblo) experiences at ancient sites compared to how the second author perceives the role of the past in his own life and more broadly in Hopi society. From our exchanges we have to come to believe that addressing the ways in which these two disparate affinities for the material past—and ultimately closing the gap between non-Pueblo and Pueblo experiences—depend upon a thoughtful and respectful dialogue. That is, we suggest that through the methods of collaborative research we can have a richer, more complex understanding of past lives, the role of the past in the present, and even how the past may inform the shape of things to come. Because dialogue provides equitable and fruitful avenues of research and engagement, we thought it appropriate to present here a dialogue between ourselves about Hopi history, concepts of time, and the challenges and opportunities of translating the Pueblo past through the lens of anthropology and archaeology. Three more philosophically driven interludes help frame the narrative. Time often appears self-evident, but it is neither straightforwardly a natural given nor a universal precept. Rather, time is a culturally shaped, perceived, and lived phenomenon. The disparity between how the Pueblo past is presented to the general public and how Pueblo people themselves 61 understand their own community’s past is important to acknowledge and untangle. To ignore this disparity is problematic, because we ought to care about how people who lived in these ancient villages perceived their own world—and the best, if not the only, way of doing this is by fully engaging with the living descendants of the people who once occupied these places. Disregarding Native values and viewpoints presents these places as scientific playgrounds for the national imagination instead of places of Pueblo heritage that give a deep sense of identity and belonging to Pueblo peoples. Also, it distances Pueblo people from their own history. This is of concern not just for the touristic gaze or abstract battles over heritage, but also when it comes to laws—such as the National Historic Preservation Act (1966), the National Environmental Policy Act (1969), and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (1990)— different understandings of the material past by different stakeholders can ultimately mean the preservation or destruction of sacred objects, burial grounds, and traditional cultural properties. Translation means cross-cultural understanding (Rubel and Rosman 2003:1). As such, translation is most fully articulated in anthropology as a formal discipline: translation is what anthropologists do. But of course intercultural exchanges have taken place for millennia, as indeed, even anthropology itself rests upon the shoulders of centuries of colonial travelers (Whiteley 2008). Over much of the twentieth century, anthropologists assumed that translation was a rather straightforward proposition, one that involved first observing others on their own terms and then writing about the others in one’s own terms. However, in the 1980s anthropologists began looking at the hidden complexities of translating cultural ideas, ideals, practices, and processes into texts, driving a stake into the heart of anthropological authority (Clifford and Marcus 1986). Anthropology remains committed to the ideals of cross-cultural translation (this is deemed a worthwhile project), but anthropologists are now keenly aware of the limitations of translation—how translations can warp reality when anthropologists weave a story (Clifford 1997). Archaeologists too have come to acknowledge and grapple with how writing the past incompletely translates lived experiences, cultural meanings, and multifaceted histories (Bender, Hamilton, and Tilley 2007; Hodder 1989; Joyce 2002). Time, as a subject of anthropological translation, has largely been the domain of archaeologists. This is not to say that all anthropologists have not used time as a mechanism to frame their subjects, as Johannes Fa62 Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Koyiyumptewa bian (1983) has illustrated in his classic Time and the Other, but rather that archaeological authority is deeply and uniquely embedded in arguments of time. (Cultural anthropologists admit that an ethnographic text represents merely an “ethnographic present,” whereas archaeologists fight tooth and nail over whether Site X is older than Site Z.) Research such as ours...