Infrastructures of Dispossession and Survivance from the Highway to the Suburbs

• In Event: In Pieces: Allotments, Kuleana, and Alienated Indigenous Territories

Abstract

This paper theorizes economic mobility from the passenger seat of a Honda minivan traveling eight hours from the suburbs of Tucson, Arizona to the family business on the Navajo reservation, near a town called Lupton. The Chief Yellowhorse Trad no ing Post was a highway feature on old Route 66 curated by my great uncle, Juan Yellowhorse, into a genre of roadside attraction alongside a place for the purchase of finely made Navajo goods—the Yellowhorses include many silversmiths, jewelers, and weavers. In conversation with Mishuana Goeman’s descriptions of “remapping”, I retrace the trajectory of my family across the Southwest through circuits and layers of economic inclusion in the wage economy. The second half of the essay turns to the figure of the Suburban Indian as an emergent subject of the 21st century, the inheritor of entrepreneurship, commercial infrastructures, employment in the armed forces, associate’s degrees, and a particular subject of what Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor terms “predatory inclusion”. The presence of the Native in the desert suburbs of the growing sprawl in states like Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada highlights how assimilation and dispossession continue beyond their codified forms, finding expression as well in social forms of alienation.

Author

• Lou Cornum, NYU