Making Indigenous Religion at the San Francisco Peaks: Navajo Discourses and Strategies of Familiarization

Navajo claims pertaining to the sacredness of the San Francisco Peaks (as well as those of several other Native American tribes), while no doubt profoundly sincere, are necessarily and strategically positioned in relation to the contemporary legal struggles within which they have arisen. However, I cannot stress too heavily that this should not suggest that their claims are spurious, invented, or in other words “inauthentic.” Greg Johnson asserts that “frequently, the specter against which authenticity is measured is what critics might call “postured tradition,” a shorthand means of suggesting that tradition expressed in political contexts is ‘merely political’” (2007: 3). To be sure, the discourses that posit the sacredness of the Peaks are fundamentally and simultaneously both religious and political; yet this does not necessarily mean that traditional religious claims made in contemporary political contexts are motivated by purely political considerations. Although these claims are necessarily formulated to persuade others of the incontestable “authenticity” of their claims, I suggest that the degree to which this incontestability is achieved is directly related to an accumulation and accretion of discourse resulting from nearly four decades of continuing conflict at the Peaks.