2008/01/01 by Jeffrey P. Shepherd · 1 citation
Social Sciences · #Latin American and Latino Studies #Asian American and Pacific Histories #Indigenous Health, Education, and Rights
paper · doi:10.1353/aiq.2008.0008
openalex publication_date 2008/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/04/05
At the Crossroads of Hualapai History, Memory, and American ColonizationContesting Space and Place Jeffrey P. Shepherd (bio) On a cold morning in March 1994 dozens of Hualapais woke up at 6:00 a.m. to prepare for a run that would take them nearly two hundred miles along the Colorado River, from southern Arizona northward to their reservation on the rim of the Grand Canyon. The runners, ranging in age from five-year-old girls and boys to octogenarian women dressed in brightly patterned camp dresses, retraced the steps that their ancestors had taken over a century ago. In 1875 hundreds of Hualapais broke out of an internment camp in which they had been held by the U.S. military for a year. The La Paz Run, named after a camp inside the Colorado River Indian Reservation where the military relocated Hualapais in 1874, is part of what has become an annual, weeklong commemoration of survival in the wake of colonization. During the week of cultural events and social activities, tribal elders recount stories of forced removal, starvation, and the famous escape back to their homelands in northwestern Arizona, a place they call Hai:tat.1 Tribal members on and off the reservation visit with each other, people from neighboring tribes come to the community, and old friends recount the best and worst of times. The stories told by the elders and the collective memories of the community reveal a cultural landscape symbolizing death and suffering as well as hope and inspiration. Along with Keith Basso, I believe that words and places carry meaning. Morals, identity, and culture are embedded in the streams and fields of Native landscapes. . . . Places serve as cultural mnemonic devices that remind people of events and the significance of those events for morality, behavior, and identity.2 [End Page 16] But these acts of commemoration and storytelling about racial violences and conquests serve a purpose beyond reminding people about morality and behavior: they stand as acts of defiance and decolonization. Stories told by the elders about the Long Walk from La Paz and the contemporary retracing of that moment of Indigenous resistance play a part in redefining and rescripting the narrative of colonization in northwestern Arizona. Standard, even "new Indian history" narratives of relocation and removal have generally avoided critical discussions of colonialism, memory, and space. Choosing instead to emphasize the important political, economic, social, and even cultural implications of such dislocations, much of what passes as "Indian" history fails to account for more numerous types of being in time and space. Top-down assimilationist policies and structural changes in the national and global economy have undoubtedly influenced Native patterns of movement, but many scholars have failed to investigate spatiocultural considerations, the persistence of Indigenous knowledge of place, and geographical continuity and the layers of meaning that frame Native identities and sense of place.3 We have failed to think spatially. In short, the sum total of the individual process of remaining in place and the collective experiences that constitute a tribe's spatial memory help them understand their past and future in a decolonial manner. Decolonial frameworks have structured much recent literature about Indigenous peoples and nations.4 Primarily outside or on the margins of the disciplinary fields of American Indian history and ethnohistory, work by critical scholars in American Indian and Native American studies has moved beyond discussions of the material impact of colonialism on Native people. A growing chorus of scholars has interrogated the impact of colonialism upon different dimensions of Native life: language, conceptualizations of history, narrative and performance traditions, relations with landscapes, metaphysics, and identity, to name a few. One such critique from Waziyatawin Angela Wilson has argued that "part of the colonization process for Indigenous Peoples has been the constant denigration of our intellectual, linguistic, and cultural contributions to the world."5 Indeed, colonialism and colonization constitute relations of inequality perpetuated by one nation-state or empire toward other sovereign peoples in an attempt to extract resources, land, wealth, and knowledge. Various forms of control facilitate the extraction of resources. [End Page 17] Racialization facilitated colonialism by consolidating arguments for the appropriation of land and the criminalization of Indigenous...