Stories of a Healing Way: A Navajo Woman’s Media Production for Cultural Representation and Identification
The research study Stories of a Healing Way: A Navajo Woman’s Media Production for Cultural Representation and Identification reveals a Navajo woman’s narrative and practices for resistance against gender and cultural oppression and colonization. It contributes to the literature by drawing attention to the lack of consideration of diversity in education despite the desire for such representations by those who have been marginalized and oppressed. It also demonstrates how alternative media can provide Navajo women with agency to disrupt gender, racial and cultural oppression and can serve as a model for women, particularly women of color, in creating means of
resistance through literacy practices. This study demonstrates how participatory media can be used as a tactic in identifying and addressing sites of oppression, allowing a safe expression for racial, gender, and cultural identities. In this Navajo woman’s reflection, stereotypical and outdated images of Native Americans are reframed and serve as sites for healing from past trauma.
Scholars examining the literacy practices of Native Americans have noted that Native American youth are not often afforded opportunities to meaningfully integrate their cultural knowledge or Indigenous ways of knowing in their literacy practices, nor are they encouraged to establish their unique identities and voices. Educational policies continue to focus on assimilating Native Americans into the dominant culture; educators and others have called for culturally responsive practices to help heal the intergenerational and historical trauma of the past caused by colonization.
Historically, Native Americans have tended to share their stories through forms other than writing, such as through drawings, oral narratives, dance, beading or music to communicate and express their identities. In fact, written language was used as a tool of oppression by white colonists. U.S. government funded boarding schools on Native American reservations to assimilate Native peoples into the dominant culture. Writing
was a vehicle to especially suppress Native American women, who are well respected within their tribes, when their gender performances did not align with white colonists’ patriarchal views, silencing their voices by the texts of white patriarchal men. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, writing became a resistance tactic as Native Americans realized that oral traditions were not as effective of a tool to preserve their culture.
Contemporary Indigenous women and other women of color whose voices had been silenced turned to the nontraditional genre and alternative media of writing called “zines” to self-publish their life stories and experiences. These are accounts that focused not only on the self but on the stories of others, following an unwritten Native rule to not center stories on oneself only. Zines, although an underresearched topic, serve as a platform for those speaking from disempowered positions, revealing the wealth of Indigenous languages, knowledge and teachings. In this study it shows how they can provide a safe space for Indigenous women’s resistance against marginalization and patriarchal colonization, and can support other women of color creating counternarratives against it. Naturally, zines were also taken up by second-wave feminists; in the article, the author goes so far to quote that “to be indigenous is to be inherently feminist”.
The Navajo woman quoted in the study uses zines and comics to educate about her culture, and hopes that her readers that are not part of Navajo culture, are able to relate and somehow learn from them. Most of what is written about the Navajo people is from an anthropological point of view. “By including the Navajo word for coffee and small things like that — things that are not in the past but very present sense — I hope to share my culture. And I want to make it accessible through zines and comics,” she says. This Navajo woman chose a marginalized genre to represent a marginalized people, from a position of vulnerability to one of empowerment through acknowledging the values, practices, and cultural resources that link to home and community ways of knowing.
