Open AccessRADMILLA'S VOICE: Music Genre, Blood Quantum, and Belonging on the Navajo Nation
Author(s) -
JACOBSENBIA KRISTINA
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
cultural anthropology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.669
H-Index - 75
eISSN - 1548-1360
pISSN - 0886-7356
DOI - 10.14506/ca29.2.11
Subject(s) - navajo , politics , sound (geography) , sociology , poetics , gender studies , anthropology , history , media studies , political science , art , literature , linguistics , law , acoustics , poetry , philosophy , physics
In this article, I examine race, sound, and belonging through an analysis of the first Navajo/African American Miss Navajo Nation, Radmilla Cody. Cody, a professional singer and a Navajo citizen, has been a polarizing public figure in Navajo communities since her crowning in 1997. Utilizing a mixed methodology of participant observation, sound recordings, and press releases, I probe how sound and voice inform a politics of indigeneity in today's Navajo Nation (Diné Bikéyah). Focusing on black/Native parentage and how sound serves as an additional form of marking, I foreground how voice, musical genre, and blood quantum inform public opinion about social authenticity and about who belongs as a Diné citizen. My larger contention becomes that both poetics and politics matter, albeit in differing ways and on divergent scales.