Hannah Renée McElgunn

Hopi lifeways have long fascinated academics, collectors, tourists, and more, resulting in the widespread dissemination of Hopi language and culture. However, many Hopi community members understand their language, and other forms of cultural knowledge, to be a birthright; something inherited by, and belonging to, Hopi people. Across my proposed book, “Language at the Center of the Universe: Knowledge Sovereignty and Linguistic Reclamation in the Hopi Community”, I investigate how outsiders disconnect the Hopi language (and other forms of cultural knowledge) from their contexts of use and value within Hopi speech communities and how tribal members resist this extractive recontextualization. I characterize this resistance as acts of “indexical tethering” that ensure Hopi–as a social formation, a way of life, and a specific locale–remains the center of any universe in which the language circulates. Amplifying efforts to keep the language connected to the community, I further show how liberal ideologies of open access and free circulation are not always ways of spurring creativity or forwarding equality. I identify and destabilize a latent moral grammar underpinning these ideologies that have long pigeonholed Hopi practices and sensibilities as anti-democratic or insular, and in so doing hampered community-led reclamation of language and knowledge.