Orientations and Memory

by Brandi Denison

“We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper (it cannot fail to be), but it doesn't count for much unless a more basic critique precedes it: a critique of human memory as such. For after all, what can memory actually do, the poor thing? It is only capable of retaining a paltry little scrap of the past, and no one knows why just this scrap and not some other one, since in each of us the choice occurs mysteriously, outside our will or our interests. We won't understand a thing about human life if we persist in avoiding the most obvious fact: that a reality no longer is what it was when it was; it cannot be reconstructed.” Milan Kundera, Ignorance

Growing up in western Colorado, my life was oriented around a variety of mountains. When I was in town, I only needed to head towards the Grand Mesa, a large, purple flattop mountain, in order to go home. At home, in order to go to school, I headed towards the sandstone rock formations that make up the Colorado National Monument.  In order to visit my grandparents, I headed towards a series of hills that formed the foothills of the Uncompahgre Plateau.  To go to the post office, I  turned towards the Bookcliffs. Growing up in a place with very little entertainment for young people, we found amusement along the river, in ditches, and in the surrounding mountains and desert. Even as I escaped what I felt at the time to be a provincial life through books, I often made my escape outside.

Now, my orientation is in relationship to the Atlantic Ocean, a powerful and massive landmark that is invisible even 50 feet from it. It has taken some time for me to get used to such a powerful, yet invisible landmark. I spend too much time inside: writing; prepping for classes; and escaping the heat. However, in my writing, I am never far from persistent orientation of the American West’s mountains.

What does an orientation towards the American West illuminate? The thing about religion in the American West is that it is not somehow specific or even unique to that place. After all, there are landscapes that are similar to the American West throughout the world. Mongolia has expansive deserts and Nepal even more impressive mountains than the American West. Other places have as much religious diversity and a similar history of colonialization. One thing that an orientation to the West does is disrupt the grade school narrative of American Religious history.  It also calls attention to other issues and frameworks that can prove useful in other settings outside of the American West. It’s not just about Indians, Catholics, and Mormons, but also about city-building, utopian dreams, court battles defining religion, the desire to find freedom, cultural reappropriation, land, both as sacred place and ownership over, difference, diversity, and identity crises.

Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about the study of religion in the American West as an act of memory. For many of us, novelist Milan Kundera’s words will be eternally true: “we will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past. . . who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other.” We, in this imagined community of scholars, bloggers, and readers, stand united against narratives of American religion that start with the Puritans arriving on the shores of the East Coast, insisting instead that maybe the narrative starts with the arrival of the Spanish, or that it starts with the indigenous peoples who were here long before any European.

The American West was constituted in part by both cultural memories of it (through Buffalo Bill shows, early Westerns, and reenactments of epic battles) and through academic scholarship. For instance, through his Frontier Thesis, Fredrick Turner created the definitional boundaries of what that actually was.  Scholars of religion in the American West have inherited these orientations, both in the constant struggle to assert that religion is important in the West and also that the West continues to be relevant past Turner’s artificial closing. Even as this work is rooted in evidence through academic methodologies, it is engaging memory.

But, how might an orientation toward the American West allow scholars of religion to account for what memory, Kundera’s poor thing, can actually do? Individual memories are fragmented, partial, and incomplete. Cultural memories are even more incomplete and partial, even as those memories are spun to hide holes or lapses. An orientation towards memory in the American West, then, reveals that the components of human identity—region, race, ethnicity, religion—are fundamentally fluid, porous, and uncertain even as acts of cultural memory attempt to make these identity boundaries certain.

Orientation to religion in the American West is a commitment to address impartial memories, through an inherently unstable category, and within an indefinable space. Even as the landmarks of that space overwhelm and frame day-to-day movements, our commitment as scholars of the American West is to recognize that orientations are fundamentally relational. In the words of Jonathan Boyarin, in his The UnconvertedSelf, my hope with orientating my scholarship in the American West is to “keep . . .the past open, or reopen. . . a chink in the past” (118).

Book of the Month

Jennifer Nez Denetdale. Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita. Tucson: The University Press of Arizona,2007.

Review by Stan Thayne

Recognition of the value and place of oral traditions in understanding how Navajos perceive their past, how narratives are used to shape their perceptions of the past and their own experiences, and how they convey beliefs and values from ancestors enlarges the historical scope to include those people conventional western history has ignored and excluded. (9-10)

Jennifer Nez Denetdale's stated goal in this work is to counter the colonizing forces of past scholarship, historical and anthropological, done primarily by non-Navajo scholars, by providing a work based in Navajo ways of knowing the past. "Until fairly recently," Denetdale states, "the Navajo past has been largely studied, classified, and written by non-Navajos with reliance on Western categories of historical production for meaning. These renditions of the Diné past have not adequately represented our own perspectives of the past." As, apparently, "the first-ever Diné/Navajo to earn a Ph.D. in history," as her faculty page at the University of New Mexico states, Professor Denetdale sets out to do just this by placing Navajo oral narratives at the heart of her study. But she begins by dismantling some of the distorting tendencies of past scholarship to portray the Diné people as recent newcomers to the American West (as anthropologists have tended to emphasize) or as an aggressive nomadic people who needed subjugating in order to stabilize the region, as historians have often portrayed the Navajo. Both of these views, historical and anthropological, Denetdale explains, have served Euro-American interests by justifying federal displacements, policies, and treatment of Diné people, and by confirming Euro-American understandings of Navajos and Native American peoples. 

At the center of the story, and stories, Denetdale tells is the life of former Navajo chief Manuelito and his wife Juanita, Denetdale's great-great-great grandparents. Past written accounts of Chief Manuelito's life, based primarily on accounts recorded in Spanish, Mexican, and American sources, have tended to diminish any recognition of the role Juanita played in the past of the Diné people, rendering her, with all other Navajo women, virtually invisible (within this historiographical tradition—in contrast to Navajo narratives, where they have remained central). Navajo women have remained visible in the Western archive, when they have, primarily through photographs, which is one of the sources Denetdale creatively utilizes—focusing particularly on the way returning these photographs to Diné communities has rejuvenated traditions of story-telling centered around matrilineal clan-based organization. One of the major goals of this work is to re-center Navajo women in representations of the Diné past and present. Clan-based oral traditions about Juanita's life, Denetdale states, "reveal the centrality of women’s roles in Navajo society and illustrate how oral tradition is used to organize social units, connect Navajos to the land, and interpret life experiences and the past" (16).

Navajo creation narratives figure prominently in this work. "Drawing upon a body of studies that interrogates the relationship between 'oral tradition' and 'history,'" Denetdale writes, "I propose that traditional Navajo perspectives on the past are grounded in the creation narratives that contain within them Diné beliefs and values" (7). One of the particularly interesting ways she does this is by demonstrating how narratives told by Diné elders about their grandparents, and in particular about Juanita, "mirror the creation stories in form and motifs" (139). In a particularly enlightening moment in the text she demonstrates how the elders' narratives about their ancestors' return to Navajo Land (Dinétah) from Fort Sumner, where they were held as prisoners from 1863-68, are told in ways that mirror the shape and form of traditional Diné creation stories, and these narratives, told again and again, renew and re-cement Navajo connections to, and claims on, the land of their ancestors (140, 144). "The fact that my grandparents' and my mother's generation retain connections to lands where their ancestors once lived, in spite of these dislocations," Denetdale concludes, "attests to the enduring relationships created and recreated through narratives, narratives that link us as Navajos to the land" (161). And from the fragments of her ancestors' lives, which she collected through her elders' stories, "new stories are woven," continuing the tradition (161).

Based on narratives Denetdale collected primarily from her own relatives, this is a very personal work, which is something Denetdale is very upfront about. "As a Diné scholar, I follow the paths of other Native scholars who have begun the process of remapping and reclaiming our territory, geographical and cultural" (10). Telling stories of her own people, from their perspective, Denetdale states—drawing from critical studies by other Indigenous scholars such as Haunani-Kay Trask and Linda Tuhiwai Smith and scholars such as Edward Said—is one way that Indigenous and colonized peoples can resist and counter the forces of colonizing discourses by asserting their own traditions, their own ways of knowing, and their own claims to the land.

Casual Friday: The Columbus of Denver

When I was in Denver for the Western History Association conference last month, I was wandering around downtown and noticed a few monuments in a park. Two of them didn't surprise me, bronze sculptures titled "Bronco Buster" and "On the War Path": stereotypical images you expect to see in the West.

A third monument, not far from the other two, however, surprised me. It was not something I was expecting to see in Denver. It is a monument to Columbus. He apparently had four arms and four legs.

What was even odder than the image, however, was the wording on the plaque. Here's the text, placed there in 1970:

Italian Visionary and Great Navigator 
This bold explorer was the first European
to set foot on uncharted land, on a West Indies
beach in 1492. His four voyages brought Europe
and the Americas together, forever changing
history. A new nation was to rise. A new
Democracy was born.

In researching a little about the monument, I discovered that Denver has apparently become the host of two annual Columbus Day parades, one honoring Columbus with the other being a counter demonstration. During a 1989 demonstration the monument was splashed with fake blood, for which AIM activist Russell Means was tried and found not guilty for defacement of the monument.

So, for those of you more familiar with the patriotic and religious makeup of Colorado, what is this monument doing in downtown Denver?