Changing Words, Changing Worlds: Symbolic and Material Context of Legal Language in Administrative Practice and Local Narrative on the Hopi Reservation

Abstract

In this dissertation, I am interested in understanding the after-lives of law, where problems now begin elsewhere after laws have passed, both those developed for the benefit of Native Nations, in general, but also laws promulgated by the Hopi Tribe itself. I analyze how Hopi people talk about laws, when speaking English, as discussed further below, in terms of local narratives and administrative practices. I seek to understand what explains the ways in which people speak and act in relation to these laws as a matter of local social realities and cultural practices, social changes, and developments. The research variables are Hopi Mesas, clans, and gender. I use here a legal semiotic methodological approach, because semiotics helps to explore ideas, beliefs, and attitudes. I am interested in how Hopi people construct a politics of self-knowledge through statements regarding their ideas and values attributed to a Hopi natural law which perhaps compete with Bourdieu’s notion of law existing as a “universalizing attitude.” Here, Hopi people seem to construct a framework of cultural sovereignty, which is defined herein as, a means of manifesting rejection of external, conflicting values, and affirming internal cultural values, that exist on par with, if not superseding to the actions of Hopi inherent political sovereignty and United States sovereignty. The two research questions I explore are: (1) what explains Hopi participants’ statements about the law on the basis of local social categories of Mesa, clan, and gender, and (2) how does legal language use function to explain Hopi cultural sovereignty and its meanings. I answer the first question by tabulating responses on the basis of different kinds of Hopi social semiotic registers of identity and cultural practice and cross-referencing them to the three variables in order to look for inconsistencies and distinctions that prove salient according to each of the three variables. The second research question is answered by looking particularly to statements that relate to Hopi positionality within villages and the tribal government, as well as in terms of outside relations.