Indeterminacy and history in Britton Goode's Western Apache placenames: ambiguous identity on the San Carlos Apache reservation

Abstract

In this article, I explore the inherent ambiguity of cultural identities through a discussion of placenames around the San Carlos Apache reservation in southeastern Arizona. The Western Apache residents of San Carlos live in a colonized landscape. Residents maintain an attachment to Apache history and cultural sovereignty, not only by preserving and maintaining placenames in the Western Apache language, but through the performance arenas of speech play, verbal art, and code-switching puns. In this article, I concentrate on the placenames compiled by Britton Goode (1911-81), a Western Apache linguist and historian. These language practices problematize the question of identity by reading culture into and through the contingencies of everyday experience, [placenames, verbal art, identity, Western Apache, language and culture] So every day I wove on the great loom, but every night by torchlight I unwove it; and so for three years I deceived the Achaeans.-Homer, The Odyssey 19: 150-152 (Fitzgerald 1963) Penelope's "weaving trick" (Katz 1991) presents the opening and organizing image for the article that follows. Penelope's weaving and unweaving of Old Laertes's funeral shroud implicates a political practice-a kind of crafted (and crafty) filibuster. As a subaltern practice, Penelope takes to a literal end point her son Telemachus's admonition that she tend to her own (female) tasks, "the distaff and the loom" (Fitzgerald 1963:1.410). She uses the gendered practice of weaving to sabotage the desires and expectations of her untiring, unwanted suitors. It is also, I think, a fruitful anthropological image-one that highlights "the indeterminacy of rhetorical action" (Battaglia 1995:4) and the productivity of loose threads in cultural practices. As such, it makes a powerful metaphor for cultural semiosis, playing against the constructionist tropes of weaving, tapestry making, and web spinning that have dominated a certain version of cultural interpretation that often locates the meaningfulness of culture in its internal coherence. 1 American Ethnologist 28(2):277-302.

“They live in Lonesome Dove”: Media and contemporary Western Apache place-naming practices

“…The literature on Apache place names is particularly rich (see Bourke 1890;Goodwin 1942;Basso 1990Basso , 1996Samuels 2001). The place names treated here differ from those discussed in previous studies in their exclusive reliance on English idioms and in the fact that they are predominantly drawn from commercial media.…”

“…As Samuels 2001 points out, Apache place names, whether they evoke the idea of an authentic indigenous practice still robust in the face of encroachment (as is the case for Basso 1996) or whether they take officially imposed names and subvert them with Apache reinterpretations (as in Samuels 2001), are inevitably a strategic engagement with the problem of domination by the surrounding society. The place names considered here are yet a third strategy.…”

The poetry of sound and the sound of poetry: Navajo poetry, phonological iconicity, and linguistic relativity

“…Such a view is conditioned, as our modernist conceits so well described by Bauman and Briggs (2003) and Samuels (2004b) suggests, on the low standing of puns in the serious work of language. But punning is, after all, and to borrow the term from Samuels (2001), a form of phonological iconicity. Words resemble other words through sound.…”

Blackhorse Mitchell's Beauty of Navajoland: Bivalency, Dooajinída, and the work of contemporary Navajo poetry

“…Bivalency reminds us that languages are permeable. "Sacred" and "respect" have been misrecognized -due to phonological iconicity (Samuels 2001;Webster 2009) -as coming from the same linguistic system, where mainstream English is that default language, and hence having near identical semantic meanings and histories. However, they reside in both Kluane English (a local language), for example, and mainstream English and have different historical trajectories (see Leap 1993 on American Indian Englishes).…”