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The Hopi reservation occupies 1.5 million acres of those aboriginal lands promised them by Maasaw in northeastern Arizona. Over the course of the twentieth century, however, considerable concessions of Hopi reservation lands would be made by the federal government to appease the demands of the larger Navajo Tribe, which surrounds them. These and other concessions have contributed to the much-publicized land dispute between the two tribes, which continues to this day as Navajo holdouts residing on Hopi Partition Lands resist efforts and inducements by the Hopi Tribe and the federal government to relocate to the Navajo reservation. This chapter provides some context concerning the history of Anglo-American-style jurisprudence among the Hopis, and describes the physical settings, legislation, and personnel that inform the institutional operation of contemporary Hopi Tribal Court proceedings. It discusses the impact of the Anglo-American style of jurisprudence on Hopi governance, including that of Hopi villages. It also examines the centralization of Hopi tribal government, the Hopi Court of Indian Offenses, Hopi Ordinance 21, and the Hopi Tribal Court today.

Building on the emerging linguistic anthropological study of language ideologies, metadiscourses, and metapragmatics, this chapter explores the interactional practices by which legal actors participating in the Hopi Tribe's property disputes explicitly and implicitly constructs notions of Hopi tradition and Anglo-American law, as well as the epistemological demands that they claim each makes on how dispute information “must” be told in court. It then argues that such ideologies and metadiscourses are central to the efforts of these tribal legal actors to authorize and challenge their claims to the contested material and symbolic resources that are the heart of these dispute proceedings. The chapter pays particular attention to a segment of conflict talk that emerged in a 1997 Hopi Tribal Court hearing during the Hopi judge's examination of elders called as expert witnesses to testify on their village customs and traditions.

This book analyzes tradition and culture as discourses in and of contemporary tribal law by considering the microdetails of face-to-face communication in one tribal legal context: that of property hearings held before the Hopi Tribal Court. It argues that the complex imbrications of language, culture, and law constitute the emergent “edge” of contemporary Hopi tribal jurisprudence and the social meanings and effects generated there. It supports this claim by analyzing how legal actors work up contradictory formulations regarding the kinds of talk that are the proper modes and objects of Hopi Tribe courtroom proceedings; how they call for or challenge courtroom uses of tradition by invoking notions of Hopi cultural difference, tradition, and claims to tribal sovereignty. It thus offers a fresh look into the politics of indigenous tradition and culture. The book focuses on the ways in which the ideologies, metadiscourses, and metapragmatics that constitute the “courtroom talk about courtroom talk” constitute notions of tradition and cultural difference in ways that reveal multiple, contradictory, even paradoxical meanings and consequences as the sequence of Hopi court proceedings unfolds.

This chapter explores the details of the Hopi Tribe's courtroom interaction with theories of legal narrativity via recent anthropological studies of narrative interaction. It analyzes a third Hopi hearing interaction, examining how the very operations of Hopi Tribal Court proceedings and the whole of tribal law instantiated therein are constituted by Hopi legal actors through narrative interactions that allow for the articulation of both Anglo-style notions of legal process and Hopi notions of tradition. It shows how Hopi litigants work to co-narrate the settings of their dispute claims as informed by “truths” grounded in “relational” notions of Hopi tradition that are “outside” Anglo-style law. In doing so, they are also negotiating the very operations of the Hopi court proceedings with which they are engaged. The result is the production of Hopi hearing narratives, and a macrosociological story of the Hopi law they instantiate, that are informed to their core by a unique admixture of Anglo-style and Hopi traditional norms and processes of property disputes.

This book has presented a historic, ethnographic, and discourse-analytic investigation of the tribal courts of the Hopi Tribe. It has explored the ways in which notions of Hopi tradition and Anglo-American-style law emerge in and shape the constitution of the interactions by which legal actors confront each other in Hopi Tribal Court proceedings. It has also addressed, via sociolegal and linguistic anthropological theories and methodologies, a fundamental issue occupying jurists and scholars working in indigenous legal contexts today, namely, how to think about an indigenous jurisprudence that strikes a balance between managing the influences of colonial oversight and addressing the demands of everyday indigenous life. This chapter reviews trends in sociolegal treatments of the politics of native tradition and cultural difference as well as the role of such politics in the representation of indigenous peoples and their status as sovereign nations. It suggests how the theories and methods employed in this study provide new ways for thinking about tradition and cultural difference, particularly as it informs contemporary indigenous law, politics, and society.