Navajo Transformative Scholarship in the Twenty-First Century

On multiple levels, from within communities to the academy, indigenous peoples are reclaiming their intellectual traditions. Important critiques of existing scholarship have revealed Western scholarship to be simply another kind of imperialism that reinscribes existing structures of power. Responding to larger calls that our research be transformative, Dine scholars are reclaiming the right to raise questions about the ways in which our people have been represented, and in the process they are theorizing and researching in ways that revalue Dine philosophy. Significantly, they also assert that our intellectual work should uphold Dine sovereignty, as leaders like Manuelito had envisioned.