I have to get in on this: as one of the first attorneys to work in federal
Indian law as part of the 60's "war on poverty" (read, war on the poor), I
have been deeply involved with these issues for more than 20 years; from
my perspective, I can assure Dr. May and other Nativenet readers that Ellen
Kemper is no "solidarity type" person in indigenous affairs. Ellen is one
of the most comptent legal people in the country on Indian affairs.
Her opinions reflect more than "taking sides with the most vocal group, etc."
As to the rest of Dr. May's statement:
>I strongly support the just cause of the Navajo as a people who have been in
>North American for thousands of years. They share with all native peoples in
>the Americas oppression and lack of opportunities in education, health, and
>other aspects of life. However, on the Joint-Use Area problem let me play
>devil's advocate and provide a little of the untold Hopi viewpoint. A little
>education is in order here. First, the Hopi have been in Arizona for thousands
>of years, the Navajo have not. Some say the Navajo came about the time of the
>Spanish or shortly before as Athabascans from Northern Canada and/or Alaska.
Seems like a contradiction here: "the Navajo as a people who have been
in North America for thousands of years." .... "the Hopi have been in Arizona
for thousands of years, the Navajo have not." Which is it?
>Anyway, it is clearly not Dine ancestral land. Athabascans, by the way, are a
>distinct racial group separate from Amerinds and came in a separate wave across
>the Bering Straits thousands of years after the Amerinds. Their languages are
>unrelated to those of the indigenous people they met here. A relationship to
>Sino-Tibetan languages has been postulated.
Seems like we have a conflict of truths here; "some say that Navajo
came about the time..." Who's saying that? The Navajo? The Hopi? Anglo
anthropologists? And, "...clearly not Dine ancestral land." Who says? Is there
some sort of proof of ancestry that we are being offered that is guaranteed
to distinguish between one set of claims and another here? Is there some
sort of "first in time, first in right" principle here that would justify
dispossession of 10,000 people in the present?
And the Bering Strait argument again!
>The problem we have today it that the Navajo greatly outnumber the Hopi in
>historically Hopi land areas. What to do? What has been worked out is a
>compromise that may need to be reviewed in light of TODAY'S demographics.
Well, I'll accept the recognition of "TODAY'S demographics" as at least a
relevant factor, if not decisive; but I quarrel with the implication
that Hopi people have ever actually *lived* in these "historically Hopi
areas." For thousands of years (we agree about this... :-)), the Hopi people
have been part of the scene around the mesas on which they live; but they
have not *lived* away from the mesas -- their traditional use of the
surrounding areas has not been incompatible with the Navajo use... not, that
is, until the imposition of reservations and most intensely since the
marketing of coal, oil, etc., became feasible; the reservation and resource
extraction policies are at the root of this conflict; the ancient rivalries
between Navajo and Hopi are not the basis of this current problem, except
insofar as they have set the preconditions for the political and economic
exploitation by federal, state, and corporate entities; these entities
will profit from the removal of people from the land in question; since
the Hopi people have virtually never lived there, they don't pose a problem;
the "problem" is the Navajo people, whose presence on the land is and has been
a direct conflict with the resource extraction.
Enough! I don't want to rant and rave; but I want to say enough about this
to support Ellen's comments and to challenge the comment that views her
as some sort of know-nothing liberal, as in Dr. May's concluding sentence:
>However, to have outsiders inflame the situation for non-native causes helps
>neither the Navajo nor the Hopi.
Peter d'Errico
Legal Studies/American Indian Studies
University of Massachusetts/Amherst