Radmilla’s Voice: Music Genre, Blood Quantum, and Belonging on the Navajo Nation

Posted in Anthropology, Articles, Arts, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, United States, Women on 2014-05-26 05:46Z by Steven

Radmilla’s Voice: Music Genre, Blood Quantum, and Belonging on the Navajo Nation

Cultural Anthropology
Volume 29, Issu3 2 (May 2014)
pages 385-410
DOI: 10.14506/ca29.2.11

Kristina Jacobsen-Bia, Assistant Professor of Music
University of New Mexico

Window Rock, Navajo Nation, Arizona, September 1997. A young woman butchers a sheep as the crowd at the Navajo Nation Fairgrounds watches. Her hair tied back in a tsiiyéél, a woman’s hair bun, she wears a velvet top, silver concho belt, long satin skirt, and leather moccasins—the markers of traditional Navajo femininity. As she expertly slits the sheep’s throat to begin the arduous process of dissecting the animal, her skirt remains spotless: Not a drop of blood touches it.

Sheep butchering, a traditional Navajo art of subsistence, constitutes the first part of the Navajo Nation’s annual Miss Navajo pageant. The second is singing, and the same young woman—Radmilla Cody—performs a traditional “skip dance” song in the Navajo language. But something makes her performance different. As Radmilla’s voice carries across the fairground, she adds melismas, or vocal flourishes, note glides, and a bluesy inflection to the more nasal sound of traditional skip dance songs, which are typically sung by men (McAllester 1954). Onlookers cock their heads to listen more closely, and they hear for the first time the singer who will become known as the “Navajo Whitney Houston.” The crowd responds ecstatically; Radmilla, a twenty-one-year-old from Grand Falls, Navajo Nation, is publicly crowned the forty-sixth Miss Navajo Nation, 1997–1998.

When I introduced myself in Navajo to Radmilla in 2011 at a CD signing (for I had long been a fan of her music), she seemed amused to hear an Anglo, a bilagáana, speaking her language. She joked that we try performing some skip dance songs together in a perhaps improbable duo—a white woman and she, a half-black, half-Navajo one, performing old Navajo standards. As she autographed a glossy poster for my friend’s nine-year-old niece, who is of mixed Navajo, Korean, and French descent, she wrote in flowing cursive: “Beautiful you are! Many blessings to you. Always remember that, and walk in beauty.”

Radmilla dramatically broke the mold in more ways than one. There was, most obviously, her distinctive, hybrid singing at the intersection of Navajo tradition and African American rhythm and blues; that style reflected Radmilla’s own mixed heritage: she was the child of a Navajo (Tł’ááshchí’í clan) mother and a Naakai Łizhinii, or African American, father. In the documentary Hearing Radmilla (2010), she recalled being singled out as a child living on the Navajo reservation for her African American appearance, being perceived as different from other Navajos. There was also the later denouement to Radmilla’s story, her arrest in 2003 for aiding an abusive, drug-selling boyfriend and her subsequent attempt to rehabilitate her public image as a good citizen of the Navajo tribe. Fully fluent in Navajo and a citizen of the Navajo Nation, she embodied a unique story, and Radmilla’s voice became a lightning rod for reflection and debate about the twenty-first-century politics of race, blood, music genre, and belonging in Navajo country.

What, then, does Radmilla’s story reveal about the relationship between sound, racial identity, and blood quantum on the Navajo Nation? And what, in particular, can be said about the role of the singing voice in the politics of indigeneity? In this article, I use two case studies to show the tensions still surrounding black-Native parentage in Native American communities such as the Navajo (or Diné)5 and analyze reactions to Radmilla’s voice as a partial reflection of larger racial stereotypes about blackness and criminality that permeate U.S. society. These ideas tie crucially into issues of tribal citizenship in Native North America in the era of casinos, where the affective and political stakes of belonging have been dramatically raised, and citizenship and enrollment have come to signify more rigid demarcations between who belongs and who does not. Second, I demonstrate how sound itself becomes an “ethnic trope,” defined as symbols constructed as “allusions toward an ideal that has no living model” (Fast 2002, 23), where voice, musical genre, phenotype, and heritage-language skills index a speaker as more or less “authentically” Diné. Here, I distinguish sound from music, defining sound as a broader framework encompassing both music and language, which allows me to talk about the singing and speaking voice within a single frame. In Radmilla’s case, the supposedly black dimensions of both her phenotype and her traditional singing were used to single her out as less than fully Navajo. And, both in her crowning and in her run-in with the law, Radmilla’s identity as a celebrity gained what Daphne Patai (qtd. in Starn 2011, 123) has called “surplus visibility” about racial matters, “always put on the spot when controversy arises.”

Using my own fieldwork singing and playing with the Navajo country-western group, Native Country Band, as a counterpoint to Radmilla’s experience, I examine how individual and collective voices become marked by racial identities. On the one hand, her voice, perceived racial identity, and idiosyncratic singing style designated Radmilla as a cultural outsider. At the same time, in other contexts and because of her ability to broker generational differences in her choice of recorded material, her voice was celebrated as being quintessentially Navajo, securing her insider status as a Diné citize. Bringing sound into conversations about blood, belonging, and indigeneity, I show how racial identities become marked and investigate the role played by voice in this marking. Music and language both reflect and reinforce ideas of inclusion, exclusion, and communal reckoning in contemporary Navajo communities and in U.S. society at large (Harkness 2010; Feld et al. 2004). My larger contention becomes, in the case of Radmilla, the Navajo Nation, and the U.S. nation, that aesthetics—and voice and sound in particular—matter in relation to politics, albeit often in divergent ways and on differing scales…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , , , , ,

The Origins, Current Status, and Future Prospects of Blood Quantum as the Definition of Membership in The Navajo Nation

Posted in Articles, Identity Development/Psychology, Law, Media Archive, United States on 2011-07-21 22:45Z by Steven

The Origins, Current Status, and Future Prospects of Blood Quantum as the Definition of Membership in The Navajo Nation

Tribal Law Journal
University of New Mexico School of Law
Volume 8 (2007-2008)
pages 1-17

Paul Spruhan, Law Clerk
Navajo Nation Supreme Court, Window Rock, Arizona

In this article, the author discusses the origin of the Navajo Nation’s blood requirement. Mr. Spruhan examines the intended purpose of the quarter-blood quantum definition and the role of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He reviews the current status, regulation, and recent attempts to change the quarter-blood quantum requirement. He discusses the future of the quarter-blood quantum requirement with respect to the Navajo Nation Council’s 2002 resolution known as the “Fundamental Laws of the Diné,” a resolution mandating the application of traditional law, customary law, natural law, and common law to the Navajo Nation Government and its entities. In this regard, Mr. Spruhan inquires as to the impact the “Fundamental Laws of the Diné” will have on the quarter-blood quantum requirement and future membership requirements.

In the last few years, scholars, reporters, lawyers, and the general public have focused much attention on tribal membership requirements. Recent controversies over membership of “Freedmen,” or descendants of slaves, in the Cherokee Nation and other Oklahoma tribes have produced scholarly and popular discussions of what it means to be “Indian” and a member of a tribal nation. Enrollment controversies among gaming tribes in California and recently recognized tribes in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, among others, have exposed acrimonious disagreements within tribal communities over how to define tribal membership. Tribes have disenrolled whole extended families and entire categories of members by reviewing prior enrollment records, or amending their laws to redefine membership eligibility. Popular press reports and scholarly articles on these controversies have introduced the concepts of “blood quantum” and “tribal membership” to a wider non-Indian audience. The resulting publicity has tested the power of tribal nations to define their membership independent of state and federal judicial and political control, as calls for outside intervention increase.

In the midst of these controversies, a recent panel at a continuing legal education seminar held in Window Rock, the capital of the Navajo Nation, discussed whether the Nation would experience similar membership controversies in the future, and how such issues might be approached under Navajo law. This article arises out of a presentation the author gave at that seminar on the origins of the Navajo Nation’s current membership rule, which requires a person to have at least one-quarter Navajo “blood.” The presentation described the origins of this requirement in light of the origins of “blood quantum” in federal Indian law, which the author has described in two previous law review articles.

Based on that presentation and the presentations of other panelists, as well as a lively discussion with members of the audience, this article aims to do several things. In Part I, the article describes the origins of the Navajo Nation’s quarter-blood requirement in an attempt to answer the question: how and why did the Navajo Nation adopt blood quantum as the definition for membership? Part I describes how that requirement came about through the resolutions and minutes of meetings of the Navajo Nation Council, and examines what Council delegates thought they were accomplishing through the quarter-blood definition. Part I also discusses the role of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the development of that membership definition. In Part II, the article discusses the current status of the quarter-blood requirement, how the Navajo Nation regulates it, and recent attempts to change the requirement. In Part III, the article analyzes the future prospects for the quarter-blood requirement, and blood quantum generally, in light of recent developments in Navajo Nation statutory law and the jurisprudence of the Navajo Nation Supreme Court concerning the “Fundamental Laws of the Diné.”…

…How might the quarter-blood requirement fare under a Fundamental Law analysis? Would the fact that blood quantum is not a traditional Navajo concept affect its enforceability? The concept of “blood quantum” originated in Anglo-American colonial law to define the status of mixed-race people and bar them from rights afforded whites. The federal government adopted this pre-existing concept to define “Indian” and “tribal member” for various purposes long before the Navajo Nation Council adopted blood quantum in 1953. Traditionally, Navajos use clanship to define identity. Each Navajo has four clans he or she identifies himself or herself by: the mother’s clan, the father’s clan, the maternal grandfather’s clan, and the paternal grandfather’s clan. A Navajo is a member of his or her mother’s clan and is “born for” his or her father’s clan. According to Navajo history, there were four original clans, and many clans that were subsequently adopted. Some of the adopted clans originate from Pueblo or other tribal peoples, as well as Mexicans, who were adopted into Navajo society. Various “non-Navajos” were absorbed into the Navajo people, and clans were created to conform them to the existing system of identity. Navajos also define themselves by “cultural identity markers” derived from origin stories, identified by one Navajo scholar, Lloyd Lee, as “worldview, land, language, and kinship.” Practicing the principles of hozho and sa’ah naaghai bik’eh hozhoon, speaking the Navajo language, and recognizing Navajo kinship, Lee argues, are the true definition of Navajo identity. Blood quantum plays no part in these conceptions of Navajo identity. Significantly, these concepts were essentially absent from the discussions of the prior Council in adopting the quarter-blood requirement…

Read the entire article here.

Tags: , ,