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This dissertation examines emerging cultural attitudes, language ideologies, and discursive practices among Navajos and Navajo speakers through the lens of new media technologies on the Navajo Nation. New media such as cell phones and the Internet are significant features of contemporary Navajo communities, and act as both a context for and medium of linguistic and cultural vitality and transformation. They have opened new spaces for Navajo language use, generated emergent uses of the Navajo language, and increased the spaces of language contact and change. This dissertation explores the ways in which ideologies of language and technology have shifted and converged, and describes multiple instances of the transformative nature of technology through the mediation of communities. New technologies do not exist in a vacuum, and novel practices emerge from a wide range of existing observable styles, registers, and norms in Navajo communities. Significant are the shifting geographies of communication, expansion of social networks, and increased circulation of bilingual Navajo hane’, or publicly shared “tellings” in the form of stories, jokes, and information that accompany them. This work analyzes the appearance of new media technologies in contemporary Navajo society within broader discourses of modernity and narratives of progress about, and among, Navajo communities. New technology is not incommensurate with existing practice; rather, emergent practices are part of the broader circulation of Navajo identities, defined here as a process linked to social activities, and emergent practices index the ways in which some Navajos are “doing” community in unexpected ways and unexpected places. New expressive forms and genres have appeared, including a migration to English emails by previously monolingual, illiterate elders, the transition of traditionally oral genres to widely circulated emails, and the appearance of locally created bilingual hip-hop music. These are crucial developments that have immediate implications for Navajo language vitality and cultural continuity. / text

The purpose of this study was to develop a Navajo Intercultural Sensitizer. It is an attempt to sensitize non-Navajo educational personnel who have come to work in the Navajo Nation to the attributional system of the Navajo culture. The assimilationist, culturally destructive educational policies of the past have been an objective failure. This effort attempts to build on the cultural strengths of Navajo people by promoting the acknowledgement, respect, and understanding of cultural differences. The method used is based on the identification of critical incidents that produce misunderstanding, confusion, or bad feelings between Anglo and Navajo people. The construction of the Navajo Intercultural Sensitizer involves four phases: episode generation, episode selection and construction, attribution elicitation, and attribution selection. Critical incidents (87) were gathered from Navajo students, teachers, and teachers' aides at two Reservation sites. Fifty-six of the incidents were selected by an eight person bilingual and bicultural panel of Navajos who were community and educational leaders. Attributions were elicited in response to the incidents and questions posed. An Anglo sample was drawn from students who were entering the fields of education, educational psychology, counseling, and clinical psychology. Attributions were elicited from them upon presentation of each episode and associated questions concerning the thoughts, feelings, or behavior of the Navajo participant in the incident. An empirical test, consisting of 56 incidents and the question associated with each episode, was administered to a sample of Navajos (n = 70) from two Reservation sites and the Anglo group (n = 56). Each question was followed by four choices. Forty-six of the incidents yielded significant (p < .05) differences in the attributions chosen by the two cultural groups in a chi-square test of significance. These incidents, plus two more, were used in the development of the Navajo Intercultural Sensitizer. The ICS is in a programmed instructional format. The learner is presented with the incident, the question and four plausible attributions. The task of the learner is to learn how the Navajos tended to attribute meaning to the incident.

This dissertation adopts the perspective of Cognitive Ethnography to examine the work of a grassroots, Navajo environmental organization called Diné Citizens Against Ruining our Environment. Specifically, I will examine the work and the challenges facing the members of this organization in order to evaluate how new communications and information technologies may be of use to them. This analysis begins, as Cognitive Ethnography mandates, with a general description of the tasks which constitute the work of Diné CARE. As will be discussed, these consist primarily in attempts to reassert what the organization's members consider to be traditional Navajo perspectives on economic development and the human relationship with the natural environment. Subsequently, I analyze the representations, measurements of work, and forms of organization required to accomplish Diné CARE's tasks. In all aspects of the work, members were constantly required to manage a dialogue between their preferred means of organizing or representing work, and the means required by the operating environment in which they found themselves, characterized primarily by relationships with various outside sources of legal, technical or financial support. The work of Diné CARE is thus extensively "dialogic." While members continually drew on Navajo traditions for viewing the relationship of human beings to the natural environment, for representing their work, and for building cooperative access to resources for resistance, they were nonetheless required at the same time to position these "traditional" approaches against approaches whose history of development have political, social and cultural roots in Western Europe and modem America. Often, this dialogue brought with it tension and even morally charged conflict for the members of Diné CARE. This tension extended to emerging technologies as well. In spite of many claims to the contrary, new communications and information technologies did little to alleviate the mismatch between "local" and "foreign" ways of doing work. Instead of "empowering" local communities by providing them access to information or the chance to be heard on their own terms, new technologies complicated the scenario of local resistance by requiring practices for representing work which were both difficult to master and often inappropriate.

This qualitative study seeks to determine the critical elements and activities that comprise the cultural history of Dine College as the first tribally controlled college in the United States. An oral history methodology utilizing a narrative Dine "story-telling" inquiry approach allowed this study to blend stories, songs, prayers, and ceremonies from the Dine creation stories to challenge a host of social, educational, and cultural issues which the Dine people confronted in establishing the first post-secondary educational institution on tribal land, owned and operated by tribal people. Goals of this institution were to prepare students for further academic studies, employment, and culturally astuteness. Cultural history reflects the traditional stories, songs, prayers, and ceremonies of a people, and is used here to reconstruct the events of the past to gain a fair, accurate, and objective understanding of Dine College's unique philosophy of Sa'ah Naaghai Bik'eh Hozhoon and its related components: Nitsahakees-Thinking, Nahata-Planning, Iina-Living and Siih Hasin-Achievement. Through oral history narratives of four key Navajo individuals who were directly and indirectly involved in the College's founding, five key themes are revealed: land, leadership, mission, philosophy, and curriculum. They converge together to weave the cultural history of Dine College.

For many years, vocational rehabilitation services to American Indians and Alaskan natives have been provided by state vocational rehabilitation agencies on a limited basis. Legislative amendments in 1978 allowed Indian nations to assume responsibility for providing vocational rehabilitation services similar to those provided by state vocational rehabilitation agencies. The Navajo Nation was the first American Indian nation to develop and provide vocational rehabilitation services based on an Indian reservation. This qualitative study explores the "lived experiences" of former vocational rehabilitation recipients who were served by the Navajo Office of Special Education and Rehabilitation Services on the Navajo reservation. By utilizing qualitative interviews, the researcher identifies themes of qualifying factors that contributed to successful and unsuccessful case closures of Navajo individuals (male and female) with a disability who were served by Navajo nation vocational rehabilitation agencies. The researcher personally interviewed thirteen individuals with disabilities.A number of factors were found to contribute to the successful or unsuccessful closure of Rehabilitation cases with Navajo consumers who have different disabilities. These factors included personal characteristics of the consumers, the degree to which consumers knew, understood, and acted upon their cultural teachings, the degree to which counselors provided useful support to consumers, the timeliness of the provision of services, and the degree to which the financial resources provided were adequate for the consumer's eventual success.

This dissertation includes a contextual analysis of two female Diné poets who use storytelling and writing and includes a chapter on the pedagogical implications of Native American student storytelling and writing. I first examine poetry written by two Diné women, Luci Tapahonso and Laura Tohe to understand the ways these poets, particularly the poetry, reclaim and revive Diné literacies and rhetorics. My analyses are informed by the historical and cultural contexts that shaped Diné philosophy, particularly, the philosophy that informs and is shaped by the practice of Diné literacies and rhetorics. I draw from mythical, historical, and contemporary Diné, Native American, and other minoritized scholars for lenses of analysis to show how these poets define and reclaim the female Diné voice and identity. Colonial and neocolonial changes in Diné lifeways and traditions and the encounters between Diné and other groups and the imposition of the English language (written literacy) are pertinent to these contextual analyses and pedagogical implications.

This research reviews Diné governance with an eye towards forecasting reform. What do traditional Diné institutions of governance offer to our understanding of the contemporary challenges faced by the Navajo Nation today and tomorrow? The research is part history, and part political science while pioneering applications of cutting edge research methods. Primary and secondary research will detail where Navajo Nation has been. Diné history is explored via creation stories, the Naachid systems, and the various contemporary councils. Unclear aspects of Diné history are illuminated by relying on oral accounts. Analysis pinpoints what is missing in governance today while questioning whether looking to the past alone will help make governance work better tomorrow. Sometimes adopting traditional Diné governance institutions is not feasible, not wanted, or not possible. New methodological territory offers insight when the past and the future do not work well together. The concept building method is utilized as a way of mitigating the loss that occurs when English words fail to capture the essence of Navajo language. Concepts organic to Navajo culture such as Naachid, Naat'aanii, War Naat'aanii, Peace Naat'aanii, etc, are turned to for assistance in dealing with contemporary issues. Navajo concepts are represented in three-level-view depictions. Three-level-view expressions require that concepts be observed on three-levels. Level one is the name. Under the name level are the set of necessary and sufficient conditions which must be present or you do not have an actual concept. Under each of the conditions are the data/observations which must be present in order to verify that the condition is present. Concept building displays where Navajo Nation has been in order to better understand where Navajo Nation needs to go. The visual presentation of traditional concepts of Diné governance makes them more understandable. Interestingly, when the concept building method is applied to post 1922 Diné governance, the true motives of the United States become obvious. A clearer path is presented toward incorporating chapter house government into national government. Developing contemporary concepts of Navajo governance based on traditional teachings equips us to deal with contemporary issues.

Thesis. 1979. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 137-142. / by Rodger J. Boyd. / M.C.P.

Helen Post (1907-1978) was a twentieth century American photographer, whose images of the Navajo offer sensitive insight into the lives of individuals residing on the reservation from 1938-1942. An employee at the time for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Post traveled to the West on numerous excursions, each time gaining perspective and understanding into the intricacies of Native life. Her ability to portray the Navajo in unguarded and intimate moments stands as a significant contribution to discourse on visual records of American Indians. Examining Post's work provides an opportunity to not only reexamine her work, which has largely been overlooked, but also acknowledge misrepresented facets of the Navajo. Unlike other well-known white photographers working prior to and concurrent with Post, she avoided portraying her sitters in the common tropes, instead choosing to humanize the Navajo. Theoretically this examination utilizes Post-colonial theory in order to better understand Post's position as both outsider and friend to her sitters. It also explores the social interactions and cultural differences between photographer and subject. She emphasized rather than neglected the many complexities evident among the Navajo in the late 1930s to early 1940s. Post documented the effects of crucial reform policies and by so doing comprised a poignant collection of images. In her photographs of the Navajo, one sees a celebration of character and emotion, underscored by the simplicity of Post's thoughtful compositions. As stated by John Collier, Sr., Post's employer and former commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Post was one who, "willed above all that the Indian spirit... should live on."