I raised my children to speak Navajo...my grandkids are all English speaking people: Identity, resistance and social transformation among Navajo women.

Abstract

Tribal and gender identities and social-structural change were examined through analysis of historical documents and in-depth interviews with 31 women aged 15 to 76 who were living on the Navajo Nation in Northeastern Arizona. Analysis of United States Indian education policies from 1880 through 1990 identified European American assumptions about race/ethnicity and gender encoded in those policies as they changed throughout this period. In-depth interviews with contemporary women living on the Navajo Nation explored the impact of those changing policies on women's lives, as well as women's strategic responses. The women who participated in the study identified three major arenas of change that had important implications for Navajo women throughout the 1900s: (1) the impact of the United States Indian education system; (2) the shift from an economy based in horticulture and shepherding to increasing participation in wage work; and (3) changes in language, traditional knowledge and practices, and spirituality that were fundamental to Navajo identity. These arenas of change posed recurrent problems for the women who participated in this study. Tribal and gender identities whose meanings were intertwined with language, spirituality, economic patterns, and social organization were disrupted and transformed as these social forms changed. Identity was examined in this analysis as an arena of resistance as well as a resource upon which women drew to respond to economic and social change, and which itself re-negotiated in the process. The analysis explores the dialectical nature of social and cultural change as it shapes and is shaped by women's tribal and gender identities.