As the Rez Turns: Anomalies within and beyond the boundaries of a Pueblo community

American Indian Culture and Research Journal

Volumn 35, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 87-109

  Debenport, Erin ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 79959541429     PISSN: 01616463     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.17953/aicr.35.2.e22v33412156010g     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. San Antonio Pueblo is a pseudonym for the indigenous community in Central New Mexico where I continue to conduct ethnographic and linguistic fieldwork. I also use pseudonyms for the names of individual tribal members and present all examples of the Tiwa language that appear in quoted texts in English translation.
2. For more on Pueblo secrecy and literacy, see Erin Debenport, "The Potential Complexity of 'Universal Ownership': Cultural Property, Textual Circulation, and Linguistic Fieldwork," Language and Communication 30, no. 3 (2010): 204-10;
3. Paul V. Kroskrity, Language, History, and Identity: Ethnolinguistic Studies of the Arizona Tewa (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1993);
4. Paul V. Kroskrity, "Arizona Tewa Kiva Speech as a Manifestation of a Dominant Language Ideology," in Linguistic Ideologies, ed. Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 103-22;
5. Paul V. Kroskrity, "Language Ideologies in the Expression and Representation of Arizona Tewa Ethnic Identity," in Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Identities, ed. Paul V. Kroskrity (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research, 2000), 329-59;
6. Paul V. Kroskrity, "Narrative Reproductions: Ideologies of Storytelling, Authoritative Words, and Generic Regimentation in the Village of Tewa," Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 19, no. 1 (2009): 40-56;
7. Regis Pecos and Rebecca Blum-Martinez, "The Key to Cultural Survival: Language Planning and Revitalization in the Pueblo de Cochiti," in The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, ed. Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale (San Diego, CA: Elsevier, 2001), 75-82;
8. Christine P. Sims, "Language Planning: A Pilot Process in the Acoma Pueblo Community, in Hinton and Hale, The Green Book of Language Revitalization in Practice, 63-74.
9. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2004).
10. Charles L. Briggs and Richard Bauman, "Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power," Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2, no. 2 (1992): 131-72;
11. Richard Bauman, A World of Others' Words: Crosscultural Perspectives on Intertextuality (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).
12. Bauman and Briggs define entextualization as "the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit-a text-that can be lifted out of its interactional setting." Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, "Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life," Annual Review of Anthropology 19 (1990): 59-88; the quotation is on p. 73.
13. Mikhail Bakhtin, "The Problem of Speech Genres," Speech Genres and Other Late Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), 60-102.
14. This is not to say the form of English spoken at San Antonio Pueblo isn't a distinct form, with its own grammatical and stylistic characteristics, only that it is outside the focus of this article to examine these issues in detail. For more on Native American English, see William Leap, American Indian English (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1993).
15. Kroskrity, Language, History, and Identity; "Arizona Tewa Kiva Speech as a Manifestation"; Regimes of Language; and "Narrative Reproductions."
16. Eva Marie Garroutte, Real Indians: Identity and the Survival of Native America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003);
17. Circe Sturm, Blood Politics: Race, Culture, and Identity in the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
18. Jane Hill, "'Today There Is No Respect': Nostalgia, 'Respect' and Oppositional Discourse in Mexicano (Nahuatl) Language Ideology," in Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity Language Ideologies, 103-22. I detail the creation, content, and circulation of John's text in an upcoming publication (unpublished manuscript, University of New Mexico, Department of Anthropology).
19. Leighton Peterson, "'Reel Navajo': The Linguistic Creation of Indigenous Screen Memories," American Indian Culture and Research Journal 35, no. 2 (2011): 113.
20. Although Kokopelli is recognized as a religious deity in Pueblo, specifically Hopi, culture and history, stylized depictions of the flute-playing figure are also very popular images in the Southwest United States and are used as decoration on everything from garage doors to greeting cards. For an ethnographic and historical account of the Kokopelli image, see Ekkehart Malotki, Kokopelli: The Making of an Icon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).
21. Closely analyzing the complex processes of identity production and management that occurred during the creation of As the Rez Turns and considering their application as part of various theories of identity are outside the purview of this article, but two works that are particularly applicable warrant mention here. During the processes of entextualization that yielded this text, its authors utilized "authenticating" and "denaturalizing" discourses, opposing "tactics of intersubjectivity" that Mary Bucholtz and Kira Hall ("Language and Identity," in A Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, ed. Allessandro Duranti [Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004], 369-94)
22. identify among other dyadic semiotic processes used by interlocutors to index various stances and constitute identities. Scott's denaturalizing move, which portrays those that employ exaggerated Native imagery as inauthentic, recalls Adi Hastings and Paul Mannings's ("Introduction: Acts of Alterity," Language and Communication 24, no. 4 [2004]: 304) analysis of identity, the construction of which, they argue, relies as much on differentiation as it does on processes of identification. They state, "These voices attributed to others-'anti-registers'-create monstrous or deviant figures of alterity, with respect to which the (normal) identity of the speaker emerges as a sort of unmarked ground to the figure of abnormal alterity. Where registers involve the asymptotic imitation, adoption, or appropriation of a figural voice, mockeries and say-fors involve sharp demarcations between one's own voice and the voice imitated: in the typical case, a stance of alterity is constructed between the interactants and some other(s), who may be present but are usually not." With his Buffalo Thunder quip, Scott is contrasting himself and the other authors of the soap opera with users of a cheesy "anti-register" and casting noncommunity members as "figures of alterity."
23. See Bucholtz and Hall, "Language and Identity";
24. Hastings and Manning, "Introduction: Acts of Alterity," 291-311.
25. Kroskrity, Regimes of Language.
26. Jessica R. Cattelino, High Stakes: Florida Seminole Gaming and Sovereignty (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).
27. Kroskrity, Regimes of Language.
28. Margaret Field, "Changing Navajo Language Ideologies and Changing Language Use," in Native American Language Ideologies: Beliefs, Practices, and Struggles in Indian Country, ed. Paul Kroskrity and Margaret Field (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 31-47.
29. Shaylih Muehlmann, "'Spread your ass cheeks': And Other Things That Should Not Be Said in Indigenous Languages," American Ethnologist 35, no. 1 (2008): 34-48.
30. Peterson, "Reel Navajo."
31. Ward Keeler, "What's Burmese about Burmese Rap? Why Some Expressive Forms Go Global," American Ethnologies 36, no. 1 (2009): 2-19;
32. David Samuels, Putting a Song on Top of It: Expression and Identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004).
33. Samuels, Putting a Song on Top of It, 8.
34. Ba or bah are interjections used in place of English terms including whatever, right, or, in some nonironic cases, well, as in "oh well." I am unsure of the exact etymology, but would venture a guess that it is the Tiwa word for and, which is often used as a discourse marker in spoken Tiwa.
35. This pattern has been changing, with several families choosing only to give their children Tiwa names.
36. Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967);
37. Carla De Meis, "House and Street: Narratives of Identity in a Liminal State among Prostitutes in Brazil," Ethos 30, nos. 1-2 (2002): 3-24;
38. Niko Besnier, "Polynesian Gender Liminality through Time and Space," in Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, ed. Gilbert Herdt (New York: Zone, 1994), 285-328;
39. Niko Besnier, "Sluts and Superwomen: The Politics of Gender Liminality in Urban Tonga," Ethnos 62 (1997): 5-31;
40. Kira Hall, "Intertextual Sexuality: Parodies of Class, Identity and Desire in Liminal Delhi," Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15, no. 1 (2005): 125-44. Although I utilize the concept of liminality to look at different phenomena than Besnier did, his depictions of liminality as closely connected to performance apply to the present case. (Pubitemid 43135145)
41. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places.
42. Mikhail Bakhtin, "Discourse in the Novel," in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), 263.
43. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places, 225
44. James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985).
45. Daniel F. Suslak, "The Sociolinguistic Problem of Generations," Language and Communication 29, no. 3 (2009): 199-209.