1 October 2000, finished 7 Oct.
To: Lois Risling, Director,

Center for Indian Community Development
From: John W. Powell

Philosophy
Re: 12^th Navajo Studies Conference, Report
I'd like an official position as Liaison to the Navajo Nation, or at least to the Navajo Studies Conference. This was terrific.

This year's conference, after the plan to hold it at the Gallup Campus of UNM fell through when the coordinator had to withdraw, was hosted by several departments at San Juan College in Farmington, and took place in the Henderson Fine Arts Center, a new, spacious complex with views looking Southeast across Farmington at the river and the bluffs on its south side, and a clear view of the sunrise for the opening Navajo traditional blessings. The conference was coordinated by Freda Garnanez, Director of Native American Studies at SJC. She and the committee rescued this year's conference and made it rich in variety and solicited terrific keynote presentations on important topics from some of the very best thinkers in the field.

More on how the presentations were on a wide variety of topics in a wide variety of styles. We sung examples of both Navajo songs and Belagaana songs translated into Navajo for use in teaching Navajo to school students; we heard a summary of Navajo creation mythology with an eye toward avoiding some typical oversimplifications from a noted medicine man; we heard a philosophical investigation of the issue of who has a right to tell a tribe's stories, by the author of a standard work on Navajo philosophy; we heard about and then looked at excavated pots from 15^th and 16^th century sites, piecing together sources for styles and characteristics of Navajo pots (later we saw dozens and dozens of potsherds on Gobernador Knob, and could tell which were Anasazi and which the standard Navajo cookware); we heard from Ms. Garnanez an analysis of the effects of culture shock upon Navajo young people whether raised traditionally or not; we saw plays and videos produced by Navajo about their people and their people's stories; we heard advice regarding linguistic survival by a linguist who has looked at a wide variety of similar efforts; we laughed and were moved by stories from Wilfred Billey, one of the Navajo Code Talkers (later, standing in line for the banquet, he told us other stories he had wanted to tell in his keynote address-another highlight). The discussions included several scholars and singers whose work I have read-a remarkable group of old hands, complemented by talk with young and thoughtful scholars in training, many of them Navajo. One morning's keynote address was in Navajo, which made that experience for me a lot like sitting through many presentations at philosophy conferences.

I'll summarize two presentations which are most applicable to Northern California Indian issues, and then summarize my own presentation and some of the responses I got.

Charlotte Christ Schaengold, a linguist at Ohio State University, presented on "Navajo Language Maintenance: Purism and Survival." This was on the issue of whether to tolerate young people's modifications of Dine Bizaad, the Navajo language, by importing English and Mexican vocabulary and abbreviating the syntactic patterns and slurring and simplifying the phonology of Navajo. She presented material from a wide variety of other efforts to maintain languages, from Switzerdeutsch to Gaelic to Pennsylvania Dutch among the Amish to Montana Salish to Hebrew to make the claim that elders should continue to speak Navajo with their young even if they disapprove of the ways the young speak it. Some quotes: "The only languages which do not change are dead." "If someone else is empowering you then the power is theirs, not yours." "The alternative to nontraditional Navajo language for the young is English."

The discussion afterwards was terrific-thoughtful and heated. There were worries about distinguishing the science in her presentation from the advice, about the place of literacy or written work as an especially important problem in Navajo language survival, about the place of intellectual work in that survival, about whether the sample size of other languages is enough to justify generalizations about language survival.

A related presentation was Herman Cody's on using songs to teach the Navajo Language. It was wise and funny and subversive and delightful.

Freda Garnanez, the conference director, presented "The Socially Changing Navajo but Culture Shocked Forever." This presentation was closely related to themes developed by other presenters, especially Rena Martin's "This Old Dine Landscape: Its Stories, People, and Changes." One comment of Rena Martin's from the discussion after her presentation could serve as a summary: "When you don't know who you are it can make you sick." Social pathologies are not the only effects of having to survive in a strange culture-there's subclinical depression and loss of motivation and loss of contact with those who can help you heal, which makes the cycle worse. Even when young people are relatively successful at making their way in a white world the effects of culture shock are often very deep. The language can be a crucial marker of achieving a Navajo identity and yet the nation has given inadequate attention to it. Providing a Navajo-based narrative of what the white culture is about, especially the academic white culture, can provide a tremendous boost to young people who have to construct a bridge for themselves so they can go back and forth.

My presentation got squeezed some for time and I found myself trying to do too much-trying to summarize several years of fussing about some philosophical issues in which Navajo examples provide a corrective to some typical White mistakes. I told the audience I wanted them to help me not lie to my students. Two of the major themes I was interested in were in philosophy of art and in social and political philosophy, and in both of these issues it seemed to me that Navajo thinking was ahead of the Anglo traditions. One is the problem in philosophy of art about definition of art. What is art, really? and Are sandpaintings art? are perfectly good questions if you think like an Anglo philosopher, but in fact they are bad questions because of several reasons. I reviewed some typical ways Anglos think about art-that it is separate from the rest of the day-to-day life we lead, a disastrous major to choose as far as many families are concerned, that the success of artists and artworks is a function of novelty and eccentricity and public opinion and purchase price and artworks being bought and shut away from the artist and the community in museums. I can shake students loose from these easily assumed ways of thinking about art by teaching them about ritual sandpaintings among the Navajo, where none of these things are true, where there's no collecting, no physical permanence, no art critics but instead health care professionals running the show, and so on. The artwork, if that's what it is, is an integral part of something crucially important going on in the community. Further, definitions are taken in Anglo philosophy to perform some important function, but that's a mistake. And so on. Anyone who wants more detail on this can send me an e-mail.

The other is Michel Foucault's claim that cultures have to maintain their identity by disempowering those on the margins-by labeling some as crazy, for example, and then robbing them of their voice and shutting them out of the culture. Here again the Navajo practice shows that this often- accepted view is just false. The person on whose behalf the community gets together for a sing is a prompt for the community to remind themselves of who they are, where they came from, why they are a community, and how they live to maintain that community. Rather than being excluded, they are pointedly included and made the occasion for all to be included again. I find this profound and therapeutic.

-Hmm. I guess it could have been even shorter. The discussion was at first dominated by Anglo anthropologists wanting clarifications, but I finally got questions and approving comments from Navajo members of the audience, including some later on in the conference when they introduced me to other Navajo.

I want to comment on the function of humor at the conference. It showed up at several points, and a couple of the presenters remarked on humor as a part of Navajo attitudes and survival skills. One of the reasons I like this conference so much is the wisecracks and the jokes. On Saturday I went with about a dozen others to climb Gobernador Knob, a sacred place to the Navajo, and to tour other ancient and sacred sites, with Herbert Benally as our guide. Herbert is a professor at the Shiprock campus of Dine College, a careful and mild intellectual whose insights I have been using after I had been told some of them several times before I finally got to meet him at this conference, and one of the reasons I signed up for this trip. We rode with a mix of anthropologists, geographers, Navajo and Navajo-wannabes in an SUV for an hour and a half in the morning and for what seemed three days over dusty washboard in the afternoon, and a main activity was telling anthropologist jokes. I expect my readers know most of these-the three Indians and the three anthropologists on the train, the anthros mispronouncing words with disastrous effects, the purification ritual for Indians who have shaken hands with anthropologists, the reason Navajo introduce themselves by saying their families and clans rather than giving their occupations as the Belagaana do, and so on. Some of the old Navajo origin accounts include jokes, of course, in addition to the accounts of how First Man and First Woman quarrel which sound just like how we quarrel now, so that laughter at them is laughter at ourselves too. Coyote in some of the Blessingway incidents strikes me as very like Socrates in Plato's accounts in his methods and in his irony. In desperate situations humor preserves sanity. In everyday life humor helps re-establish harmony and perspective. Becoming overly serious (when and what is appropriate seriousness is a tough issue, of course) divides people from each other, and humor allows friendship to re-enter those relationships.

I got to talk to three more authorities in Navajo Studies I've been wanting to meet. One is Herbert Benally, mentioned above. Another is John Farella, author of The Main Stalk: A Synthesis of Navajo Philosophy, who presented on the question of who has the rights to tell tribal stories. Another is Oswald Werner, emeritus anthropology professor from Northwestern University, who trained many of the researchers, including Navajo researchers, on the Navajo as part of his directorship of the Field Studies Program as Northwestern.

I'm happy to answer questions about the conference. This report feels terribly abbreviated.
John W. Powell