Navajo poetry, linguistic ideology, and identity : the case of an emergent literary tradition
Abstract
This research concerns the emergence of Navajo orthographic poetry written in
both English and Navajo. This research is based on fifteen months of ethnographic and
linguistic fieldwork on the Navajo Nation. Navajo poetry is influenced by a number of
factors, including linguistic ideologies that inform the form, content, and language codes
used in a variety of poems. The poems connect with a number of oral traditions along
both thematic and poetic parameters. Navajo poetry can be seen, then, as a way of
circulating and affirming Navajo identity. By investigating the points at which Navajo
poetry emerged first in English and then later in Navajo, I show how the poetry fits into
an ideology that sees these poems as exemplars of proper language usage. Likewise, the
use of code-switching from English to Navajo is important as an index of Navajoness and
becomes more and more prominent over time. Code-switching clusters around salient
Navajo concepts and themes, such as place names and kinship terms. This poetry also
connects with verbal art in that is uses a number of poetic devices including certain
particles, parallelism, metonymy, themes, and onomatopoeia. Further, one cannot take
Navajo written poetry as the animating force behind poetry performances. Rather, one
needs to understand that the written form is only a way station of the continual journey
from oralization to reoralization. Poetry is, in this case, performance. There is no primacy
towards the written form. Likewise, these performances can be seen as a part of the
circulation of a Navajo identity, especially in poems that retell crucial moments in Navajo
history and bring those moments to life the enactive performances, that is performance
that do not just describe the past but enact and evoke the past through quoted speech and
first person accounts. Navajo poetry can be seen as a social phenomenon that attempts to
circulate certain features of Navajoness as well as affirm and perpetuate certain beliefs a
about language.
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