| Much scholarship on incorporation into the world-system and even European colonialism explains capitalism's expansion as a socioeconomic process most relevant to the past. Dominant accounts of different Native American peoples' incorporation end with the establishment of their reservations in the nineteenth century. As such, incorporation becomes an explanation of the geographic, temporal, and rather linear expansion of European capitalism.; Emerging from a deep discontent with such understandings, this work argues for a new perspective on incorporation. Starting in chapter one and throughout the work, incorporation is argued as a hesitant, highly uneven, and porous process. As understood, capitalism's expansion occurs with successive passes, one upon another, like a 'net' sweeping back and forth. With time, the 'net of incorporation' captures more people and processes, but rarely if ever does total transformation occur. Noncapitalist alternatives persist. Through historical analysis of archives, government documents, newspaper and other secondary accounts, the study recasts the complicated history of the Navajo, or Dine, and their land, from 1860 to 2000, as an ongoing engagement by Dine with intruding but hardly unilinear and determinative capitalist processes. Particular attention is paid to boundary changes, land disputes, and mining as sites of the overlooked importance of land to capitalism's expansion.; Chapter two turns to the historical record to examine an ongoing incorporation across the first six decades of the Navajo reservation. Against the rapid growth of the reservation landbase, different southwestern 'actors of incorporation' had prolonged, yet uneven impacts on Dine and vice versa. Chapter three then scrutinizes mining for the critical role it has played in pulling Navajo reservation lands and people closer to the capitalist world-economy. Critically, for Dine and many other indigenous peoples, land rather than labor has long been the motive force in their incorporation. Lastly, chapters four and five delve into the long history of the Navajo-Hopi land dispute, a conflict deeply implicated in capitalism's persistent expansion. The forced relocation of some 13,000 Navajos, part of the dispute's 'resolution,' presents only the latest vestige of an ongoing, hesitant, and porous incorporation unlike anything considered to date. |
