Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country

4. ‘‘Language, Court, Constitution. It’s All Tied Up into One’’: The (Meta)pragmatics of Tradition in a Hopi Tribal Court Hearing

chapter 4 ‘‘Language, Court, Constitution. It’s All Tied Up into One’’ The (Meta)pragmatics of Tradition in a Hopi Tribal Court Hearing justin b. richland This chapter explores how legal actors in Hopi tribal court employ a common Hopi ideology that their native language is a central feature of Hopi cultural identity and political sovereignty and do so for significant rhetorical advantage. By analyzing how, in the course of one exemplary trial proceeding, a Hopi tribal judge, lawyer, and advocate raise and challenge metapragmatic formulations framing usages of Hopi language as indexical of Hopi tradition and legitimate tribal governance practices, we gain insight into a regular feature of Hopi court proceedings, in which discourses about language and its role in expressions of Hopi cultural identity become sites for the articulation and contestation of Hopi juridicopolitical power (Richland 2005, 2007, in press). My aims are twofold. First, I respond to the ongoing debate in scholarship of American Indian law and nationalism regarding the role and (in)authenticity of tradition and cultural identity in tribal politics by proffering a discourse-oriented analysis that foregrounds the manner, meaning, and force that talk of tradition and identity has for the indigenous interlocutors themselves. In so doing I partake of a theme evident in several contributions to this volume that considers American Indian ideologies that explicitly or implicitly link language and its use to aspects of Native cultural identity (see, e.g., Bender, Neely and Palmer, Jr.). Second, by focusing on the link between metapragmatic discourses (Silverstein 1993, 1998b, 2003a) and the ideologies of language that inform them (Kroskrity 2000c; Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998), I attempt to reveal the more immediate 78 justin b. richland effects that explicit talk about talk can have in the agentive constitution (see Kroskrity, this volume) of sociopolitical relations accomplished by such talk—a middle ground between macrosociological forces and microinteractional details that has only recently become the subject of anthropological research into law and legal institutions (e.g., Hirsch 1996; Matoesian 2001; Philips 1998a, 2000; Richland 2005, 2007, in press). To properly set the stage for this analysis and these aims I offer a brief description of the sociocultural contexts within which the Hopi tribal court operates and how notions of tradition, law, and governance invoked in the court’s rules and processes mirror prominent trends and debates in the scholarship on tribal law and sovereignty practices. The Hopi Tribe and Its Courts: A Brief Description The Hopi Reservation, established by executive order in 1882, currently occupies 2,532 square miles of aboriginal Hopi land in northeastern Arizona . Almost half of the more than ten thousand members of the Hopi tribe live on the reservation—along with more than two thousand nontribal members—and are generally associated with and occupy one of twelve villages located on and around three mesas (U.S. Census Bureau 2000). In many respects the full brunt of U.S. colonization did not hit the Hopi tribe until relatively recently. Among the indicia of this, perhaps most significant is the high level of Hopi fluency among adults over the age of twenty. The Hopi language is one of four subbranches of the Northern branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family (Mithun 1999). In a recent survey conducted by Northern Arizona University and the Hopi tribe, 49.3 percent of the Hopi tribal population surveyed claimed to be conversant in the Hopi language (Hopi Language Assessment Project 1997). In sociopolitical terms the relatively late effects of U.S. domination are most evident in the fact that it has been since only the 1930s that anything like a formal tribal organization has existed among the historically autonomous Hopi villages. In 1936 the Bureau of Indian Affairs federated these villages into the Hopi tribe under a Hopi constitution written and adopted pursuant to policies of the Indian Reorganization Act (25 USCA, secs. hopi tribal court hearing 79 461–62, 464–79). A representative tribal council was also convened at that time as the sole body of tribal leadership. And it was even more recent (1972) when the tribal council passed Hopi Ordinance 21, which established a Hopi judiciary to replace the BIA’s Courts of Indian Offenses operating on the reservation (Hopi Ordinance 21, secs. 1.1.1., 1.2.1, 1.3.1). Ordinance 21 relies heavily on the procedures of Anglo-American-style adjudication in its enumeration of the operations...