Northern Hieroglyphics: Nomadic Blackness and Spatial Literacy

In this article, I discuss the linguistic landscape of offi cially sanctioned street name signage on the Navajo Nation. Given the Navajo Nation's Enhanced 9-1-1 and Rural Addressing Initiative, this is a moment of transition for such signage. First I describe, in broad strokes, the linguistic landscape of the Navajo Nation. I then look at street name signs that are ostensibly written in Navajo in Ft. Defi ance, AZ. These signs show "spectacular typos" that suggest a lack of familiarity with written or spoken Navajo. In the conclusion, following work in linguistic landscaping, I take up the issues of what kinds of audience these signs select and what kinds of imagined community these signs create.

Yearbook of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, 2014

This essay confronts the mundane power of street names and street signs in the production of race, space, and difference. It offers a scholarly meditation by using selections from Audre Lorde's poem "A Litany for Survival, " the author's personal narrative, and interdisciplinary research methods. This meditation explores the unique role of Indianness in the production of space within the U.S. The essay illustrates how Native and non-Native communities deploy public markers of Indianness in the form of street names and signs in ways that reflect their distinctive identities, experiences, and cultural and racial projects. It offers a concrete comparison between the Indian-themed neighborhoods of South Lake Tahoe, California, and a Washiw tribal community in central-western Nevada, in order to argue how street names can reflect and help to reproduce not just expected cultural differences, but also racialized identities, racialized space, and the geographies of American colonization and occupation.

Further Developments in the Theory and Practice of Cybercartography, 2019

Genealogy, 2024

This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY

in L’homme 233 (2020), p. 9-43. https://journals.openedition.org/lhomme/36526, 2020

The writing systems of the world vary by origin and development. Most descend from a few creations that, despite their shared origins, change in reaction to their progenitors. Over time, contrast and difference generate a whole series of new scripts, often as part of a process in which writing affirms and marks group identities (Houston & Rojas 2020). Almost all such scripts are line-or stroke-based ; if they ever did have a pictorial basis, it is now long gone, or at least far in the background. But a few scripts do exist that, throughout their history, have retained pictorial signs and a commitment to depicting things. These are the hieroglyphic systems. Alongside the preserved pictoriality of hieroglyphic signs-a major and deliberate cultural choice-we find a thorough integration of hieroglyphic writing with aesthetic culture. Like other scripts, hieroglyphic writing represents language, but it is also an encyclopedically dense mode of visual communication, at once inviting and exclusionary, and, at times, even virtuosic in its making and interpretation. Hieroglyphic signs do not just stand for linguistic values : they are inviolable things in their own right, implying a particular ontology and a capacity for performance. Although some of these properties are found in other types of scripts, hieroglyphic writing has them to a concentrated, intense degree.

John White's 1585 watercolors of the coastal Algonquian people of what is now northeastern North Carolina were among the primary texts of the fi rst attempt at English colonization of North America, what is known as "the Lost Colony." 1 In 1590 copperplate engravings based on these paintings by Theodor de Bry were paired with Thomas Hariot's "A briefe and true report of the new founde land of Virginia," published simultaneously with Latin, English, German, and French text: a seminal event in the history of publication, part of de Bry's multivolume America Mancall 2007:195). These pictures have long been acknowledged as the most signifi cant early representations of what would become English North America (Hulton 1984:12). Beyond providing an important early source of ethnographic knowledge, as William has argued, they constitute an originary use of the "tools of legibility," as James C. Scott (1998) has called the technology of representation that allows for the cataloging, with an eye to possession, of the resources and population of lands brought under central control. This is achieved, visually, largely through the use of synopsis.

American Antiquity, 2019

This article reanalyzes petroglyphs from the Red Bird River Shelter (15CY52), a small sandstone shelter in Kentucky. In 2009–2013, it was claimed that some of the carvings at the site represented the earliest known examples of Cherokee Syllabary writing, dating to the first two decades of the nineteenth century. It was also suggested that Sequoyah, the Cherokee artist and intellectual who invented the Cherokee Syllabary in the early nineteenth century, had made these petroglyph versions during a visit to see his white paternal family living in Kentucky. Our reanalysis categorically contests this interpretation. We do not see Cherokee Syllabary writing at Red Bird River Shelter. We do not believe that historical evidence supports the notion that Sequoyah had white relatives in Kentucky whom he visited there at the time required for him to have authored those petroglyphs. We also believe that this account misrepresents Sequoyah's Cherokee identity by tying him to white relatives f...

Northeast historical archaeology, 2016