Working the Navajo Way

Working the Navajo Way

Author: Colleen O'Neill

Publisher: University Press of Kansas

Published: 2005-10-20

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 0700618945

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The Dine have been a pastoral people for as long as they can remember; but when livestock reductions in the New Deal era forced many into the labor market, some scholars felt that Navajo culture would inevitably decline. Although they lost a great deal with the waning of their sheep-centered economy, Colleen O'Neill argues that Navajo culture persisted. O'Neill's book challenges the conventional notion that the introduction of market capitalism necessarily leads to the destruction of native cultural values. She shows instead that contact with new markets provided the Navajos with ways to diversify their household-based survival strategies. Through adapting to new kinds of work, Navajos actually participated in the "reworking of modernity" in their region, weaving an alternate, culturally specific history of capitalist development. O'Neill chronicles a history of Navajo labor that illuminates how cultural practices and values influenced what it meant to work for wages or to produce commodities for the marketplace. Through accounts of Navajo coal miners, weavers, and those who left the reservation in search of wage work, she explores the tension between making a living the Navajo way and "working elsewhere." Focusing on the period between the 1930s and the early 1970s-a time when Navajos saw a dramatic transformation of their economy—O'Neill shows that Navajo cultural values were flexible enough to accommodate economic change. She also examines the development of a Navajo working class after 1950, when corporate development of Navajo mineral resources created new sources of wage work and allowed former migrant workers to remain on the reservation. Focusing on the household rather than the workplace, O'Neill shows how the Navajo home serves as a site of cultural negotiation and a source for affirming identity. Her depiction of weaving particularly demonstrates the role of women as cultural arbitrators, providing mothers with cultural power that kept them at the center of what constituted "Navajo-ness." Ultimately, Working the Navajo Way offers a new way to think about Navajo history, shows the essential resilience of Navajo lifeways, and argues for a more dynamic understanding of Native American culture overall.


Water in New Mexico

Water in New Mexico

Author: Ira G. Clark

Publisher: UNM Press

Published: 1987

Total Pages: 866

ISBN-13: 9780826309235

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The most comprehensive reference on the state's most precious resource is now back in print.


Navajo Tribal Code

Navajo Tribal Code

Author: Navaho Indians

Publisher:

Published: 1962

Total Pages: 476

ISBN-13:

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Codification of the general and permanent provisions of the resolutions of the Navajo Tribal Council and its Advisory Committee.


The Navajo Political Experience

The Navajo Political Experience

Author: David E. Wilkins

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2013-10-25

Total Pages: 331

ISBN-13: 1442226692

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Native nations, like the Navajo nation, have proven to be remarkably adept at retaining and exercising ever-increasing amounts of self-determination even when faced with powerful external constraints and limited resources. Now in this fourth edition of David E. Wilkins' The Navajo Political Experience, political developments of the last decade are discussed and analyzed comprehensively, and with as much accessibility as thoroughness and detail.