Held Hostage by a Paradigm

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Nat’aah Nahane’ Bina’ji O’hoo’ah: Diné Archaeologists & Navajo Archaeology in the 21st Century" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Anyone who has studied southwestern archaeology is familiar with the paradigm that dictates how Navajos are understood in the trajectory of indigenous life written by anthropologists and archaeologists in the academic study of the southwest. The paradigm is this: descendants of migratory Athapaskans, Navajos arrived somewhere along the San Juan River in northwestern New Mexico sometime in the sixteenth century and quickly adapted to life in the arid southwest by becoming prolific cultural borrowers and perpetual recipients of acculturative forces.

It isn’t as simple as outsiders declaring, and publishing what Navajo origins and culture are and from where they derive. Like other paradigms about indigenous people, there are cultural consequences, legal implications, and political ramifications that arise from research based on unquestioned assumptions and rigid ways of thinking about living people. In this paper I discuss the relative absence of Navajo archaeology in discussions around using oral history in southwestern archaeological studies that began in earnest with the passage of NAGPRA almost thirty years ago.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Nat’aah Nahane’ Bina’ji O’hoo’ah: Diné Archaeologists & Navajo Archaeology in the 21st Century

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24283