"Travels in the Glittering World": Transcultural Representations of Navajo Country Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Burkhart, Matthew Richard Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 28/09/2021 23:53:13 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/195353 ‘TRAVELS IN THE GLITTERING WORLD’: TRANSCULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF NAVAJO COUNTRY by Matthew R. Burkhart _______________________ Copyright © Matthew R. Burkhart 2010 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2010 2 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Matthew R. Burkhart entitled “Travels in the Glittering World”: Transcultural Representations of Navajo Country and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy _______________________________________________________________________ Date: November 30, 2010___ Dr. Barbara Babcock _______________________________________________________________________ Date: November 30, 2010___ Dr. Joni Adamson _______________________________________________________________________ Date: November 30, 2010___ Dr. Manley Begay, Jr. _______________________________________________________________________ Date: November 30, 2010___ Dr. Franci Washburn Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate’s submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. ________________________________________________ Date: November 30, 2010__ Dissertation Director: Dr. Barbara Babcock 3 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the copyright holder. SIGNED: Matthew R. Burkhart 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am indebted to my committee, Barbara Babcock, Joni Adamson, Manley Begay, Jr., and Franci Washburn, for their countless insights and generous support of my dissertation. Each of you, at exactly the right time, has helped me locate pieces critical to transforming the beginnings of this project, as a cluster of interesting insights, into a coherent and sound work. Your guidance and your generosity with your time and knowledge has helped me shape this project into its current state and envision even further directions I might pursue. Without friends who travel this path with me, I would not have gotten this far. In the company of a number of professional colleagues and former mentors—too many to name—the beginnings of this project were shaped and refined. Please accept my gratitude. Several years ago, my fellow “thirteeners” and I collectively—and pragmatically—thumbed our noses at triskaidekaphobes as we scheduled our first meeting on Friday the thirteenth and named our writing group accordingly. Eric Chilton, Amy Hamilton, and Tom Hillard: I am glad that we are now all finished as much as I am grateful for your insights, continued support, and friendship. I am grateful, too, to family members who have been gracious in their support of me and this project: Brooke, John, and Ruby Bushman as well as Matt and Tom Craigie. This has taken numerous forms: sometimes this has meant kindly asking me about my work, sometimes just as kindly not asking me when it will be finished. Though they are not here to see me finish this, my grandparents—James and Mildred Burkhart, Stephen and Irene Blackhurst—supported my creativity and curiosity in uncountable ways. I appreciate this even more, now that a generation of parents—Leo and Rich Burkhart, Beth and Fred Craigie—are now grandparents to our son, Henry. It is impossible to quantify how this generation of parents has supported me and made this possible, but I am grateful for each and every of those efforts. I am grateful most to Heather, who has helped me expand the horizons of the possible: providing kind and loving support when I most needed it while also helping me envision the practical details of completing this project, both for its own sake for the sake of participating most fully in our life together with our beloved son Henry. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT …………………………………………………………………………….....7 INTRODUCTION: “TRAVELS IN THE GLITTERING WORLD”: TRANSCULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF NAVAJO COUNTRY………………………………………..9 CHAPTER I: LOCATING CULTURAL SOVEREIGNTY IN DINÉ LITERATURE…………………30 Nationalism, Peoplehood, and Cultural Sovereignty…………………………………..32 Diné Worldview, Aesthetics, and Cultural Sovereignty……………………………….47 Reading Bighorse the Warrior Through the Lens of Diné Aesthetics and Worldview. …………………………………………………………………………....62 CHAPTER II: ‘RIDING PONIES’ THROUGH ECONOMIC TRANSFORMATION: TRANSCULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF DINÉ BIKÉYAH IN ORAL HISTORY, POETRY, AND FILM…………………………………………………….......................79 Contemporary Spaces Shot through with History: Re-Storying the Past in a Contact Zone …………………………………………………………………………………...79 The Equestrian Unconscious and the Expropriative Zeitgeist………………………...86 Casting Old Stories through New Lenses: The Restorative Impulse in The Return of Navajo Boy…………………………………………………………………………103 CHAPTER III: PURLOINED MEMENTOS, FLIGHTS OF FANCY, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC HUBRIS: READING TROPES OF COLLECTING, AUTHORIZING, AND ABDICATION IN WILLIAMS’S AND LOPEZ’S PROSE…………………………...................................121 Purloined Mementos and the Expropriative Imagination in Terry Tempest Williams’s Pieces of White Shell: A Journey to Navajoland……………………………………..121 Writing Magic Carpets into Navajo Country?: Reckoning with Flight of Fancy in Barry Lopez’s Early Fiction………………………………………………………….131 Relinquishing “Infernal Questions and Menacing Curiosity”: Deflating and Redirecting Ethnographic Hubris in Lopez’s Recent Fiction……………………………………..142 CHAPTER IV: MOBILITY, IDENTITY, AND CULTURE IN THE WORK OF TAPAHONSO, BELIN, AND MORRIS………………………………………………………………...153 Mobility and Material Culture in Luci Tapahonso and Esther Belin’s Work………..153 Tracing Routes in Irvin Morris’s Prose……………………………………………....169 EPILOGUE: INTERSECTIONS OF CULTURAL SOVEREIGNTY AND ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE………………………………………………………...182 6 ENDNOTES…………………………………………………………………………….197 REFERENCES………………………………………………………………………….199 7 ABSTRACT In “Travels in the Glittering World”: Transcultural Representations of Navajo Country, I compare how Diné (Navajo) writers and Euroamerican nature writers represent their experience of Diné culture and the place of the Navajo Nation. This project repositions the scope of analysis common to broader regional studies of the U.S. Southwest by engaging the many ways that representations of Diné Bikéyah (Navajo Country), as a nation linked to other political entities, have refracted the cultural concerns of several twentieth and twenty-first century writers and filmmakers. Centrally, I consider how representations stand in relation to the cultivation of cultural sovereignty. In doing so, I consider the limits and applicability of interpretive models, including “communitism,” the “Peoplehood Matrix,” and expansive imaginings of literary nationalism. Following scholars such as Lloyd Lee, I consider how elements of contemporary Diné identity— “worldview, land, language, kinship . [and] respect for their ancestors’ ability to survive colonialism”—factor into twentieth-century texts (92). Responding to texts addressing several historical periods, I consider how artists address the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo, stock reduction, integration into wage economies and the development of extractive industries, relocation, and periods of contemporary migration. Throughout, I consider how rootedness in culture and place allows Navajos to embrace paths of mobility and mindful alliances, which counteract forces which would confine them to the space of the reservation, to the status of a resource colony, or to the role as imagined font of exotic otherness. I consider how Euroamerican nature writers, with limited success, work against the impulse to tint Navajo Country in the sepia hues of primitivist nostalgia 8 to embrace instead a restorative ethos that might support efforts to advance goals of cultural sovereignty. I consider how Diné authors call upon earlier Navajo literary traditions, as well as anti-colonial texts from other cultures, to negotiate the desire to “root” identity in a fixed place while traversing “routes” through and beyond Navajo Country, connecting that nation to larger networks of cultural exchange, urban relocation, economic necessity, travel, and pan-tribal, if not global, alliances working for the purposes of