Reclaiming Indigenous Intellectual, Political, and Geographic Space: A Path for Navajo Nationhood

The tribal governance standards of the past are not obsolete. They were focused on maintaining the health and wellness of every member of the community. Safety, health, wellness and protection were facilitated, not by dominance, confrontation, conflict and coercion, but by ethics, communication, cooperation and reverence for the creator and the laws of nature. To continue to preserve our cultural strengths in self-governance, we must renew our cultural teaching and restructure our tribal government according to the spiritual values of the Holy People and our ancestors because our children deserve balanced living, harmony in communication, peace in the family, beauty in the environment and joy with our hearts, homes, and communities.

Carol Perry and Patricia Anne Davis, "Dineh Sovereignty Is Spiritual Empowerment and Self-Identity"

For millennia, Navajo society was self-sufficient.¹ After 1863, beginning with Kit Carson's murderous rampage among the Navajo and the subsequent removal to the Bosque Redondo reservation, Navajo nationhood changed.² Navajo society began a slow transformation away from the distinct Diné way of life. In the twentieth century Navajo nationalism was born.³ Henry Chee Dodge, Deshna Clah Cheschillige, Thomas Dodge, Henry Taliman, Jacob C. Morgan, Annie Wauneka, Ned Hatathali, and many other leaders worked to protect the well-being of the Navajo people. During this process, Navajo government and, more specifically, the Navajo Nation became an institution and agency many ancestors never envisioned or contemplated. It became a Westernized political organization, a three-branch governmental system that includes 110 chapter houses designed to be community links to the centralized political structure.⁴

Today, many socioeconomic problems exist, and, despite the existence of a Western-style system of political representation designed to address them, the Navajo people—from grassroots activists to writers—are not only disenchanted with the centralized government system but calling for and theorizing sovereignty from intellectual positions grounded in a distinctively Navajo epistemology. For instance, Navajo grassroots leader Norman Brown stated his frustration with the tribal government in 2003: "If we can't go to our government, we can't go to our president, where else can we go? We believe the federal government, the Navajo Nation Council and the Navajo president are the same. Look at their policies."⁵ Diné educator Eulynda Toledo-Benalli has called for the need to reconceptualize Navajo sovereignty: "New ideas and thoughts need to be put into our leaders' heads and also our future leaders."⁶ Diné writer Reid Gomez has also expressed the need for Native people to think about sovereignty in terms of the people's ability to think, speak, and act on their homelands: "When we practice an intellectual spiritual sovereignty, we step outside those narratives [the ideologies of the conquerors] and work from within our own worldviews and from our own origins and migrations."⁷ As these examples suggest, Diné people are beginning to rethink and reconceptualize the meaning of true Navajo self-determination and how they can ensure its manifestation.

Various concerned Navajo citizens organized a grassroots group in 2002 called Diné Bidziil (Navajo Strength) with the idea of activating hope and action. One of the cofounders, Norman Brown, believes Navajo people must act now to reform Navajo government. Like many academically based Indigenous scholars, he views "sovereign" as a concept foreign to Navajo thought and theory. He advocates reform and leads efforts to reclaim Indigenous space.

What our ancestors have been saying is, we are independent people. We are an independent nation with our own customs, our own culture, our own language, our own science, our own medicine, and our own law. We were independent when Spain first came here, a 150 year war; Mexico, 100 years; Americans, what? 85–90 years, almost a century? We have been fighting for the past 350–400 years, our Navajo people, because we were independent. We have always been independent. But until we truly develop a government based on the wishes of the Navajo people, based on the historical ancient teachings of our Navajo people—we can't go across the world or even in Congress saying...