I found this NPR interview with Lynda Lovejoy, a New Mexico state senator who potentially could be the Navajo nation’s first female president, to be particularly fascinating, mostly for what wasn’t discussed.
Lovejoy explained how she, like Hillary Clinton did during her presidential campaign, has encountered some sexism and antiquated ideas about women’s roles during her campaign.
Well, here on the reservation and probably in most reservations, you know, we’re always lagging behind. Women are primarily, although they may be in the council, the priority for most women at least are just taking care of families. Women are not eager to run for positions like the president, probably never really think about it and they enjoy their seats in the council. They are not that aggressive to climb to the highest office. So that’s always kind of been the attitude.
An Indian man before and after attending the Carlisle Boarding School
I can’t claim to be an expert on traditional Navajo culture, but there were many tribes in which gender roles were far less rigid and defined than in European Christian society. Google “two-spirits”, and you’ll find a large body of scholarly work that examines the likelihood that some tribes had more than two genders. There’s also evidence that two-spirits were often considered to have special insight into the world and sometimes were raised to be shamans or healers.
One way boarding schools worked to destroy Indian culture was by inculcating young Indians with Christian ideas of what it meant to be a man and a woman. And, of course, these ideas, back in the late 1800s and early 1900s, were largely centered around the subjugation of women.
Flash forward to modern society, and now the implication in a story like this is that Indians lag behind in gender equality and Lovejoy’s campaign represents a step forward.
Like I said, I’m not an expert on Navajo traditions. But through a quick scan of the ever reliable wikipedia, I found that Navajo traditionally have a third gender called Nadle (meaning “one who is transformed” or “one who changes”).
So if the implication of this story is true (that a tribe seems to be slowly getting over its sexist hangups), it’s only because Christian society possibly stripped the Navajo of their more variegated and inclusive ideas of gender in the first place.
Stories like this worry me. Without the context of boarding schools and the other government policies that forcibly destroyed tribal cultures, media depictions can unintentionally reinforce negative stereotypes of modern Indian people.
Take the Winnemem, the tribe I live with. It was only 70 years ago that the Shasta Dam was built, flooded their village on the McCloud River and took away their main subsistence food, the salmon.
Caleen, the tribe’s chief and spiritual leader (also, by the way, a woman who followed another woman chief and spiritual leader), grew up in the midst of the chaos that followed, and even today, she says, “We’re still trying to figure out what normal is.”
For people like the Winnemem, we can’t begin to assess and analyze the way they live now without accounting for the staggering losses they’ve suffered in the very recent past.
As usual, history and context are everything, and it’s also what’s often missing in journalism.