Origins of antimining resistance in the life of a grassroots American Indian leader: Prospects for Indigenizing psychobiography

• Published in: Journal of personality Vol. 91; no. 1; pp. 68 - 84
• Main Author: Gone, Joseph P.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States Blackwell Publishing Ltd 01.02.2023
• Subjects: American Indian or Alaska Native; American Indians; anticolonial resistance; Change agents; Conventions; ecocentric selfhood; Environmental degradation; Exploitation; Humans; Indians, North American; Indigenization; indigenous spirituality; Life experiences; Life history; Midlife; Mining; Mountains; Native North Americans; Preservation; Prospects; psychobiography; Publicity; Resistance; Social change; Social development; Socialization; Spirituality; Traditional societies; American Indians; anticolonial resistance; indigenous spirituality; psychobiography; ecocentric selfhood
• ISSN: 0022-3506; 1467-6494; 1467-6494
• DOI: 10.1111/jopy.12718

American Indian communities have long been subject to environmental degradation, but successful “grassroots” struggles to end such exploitation are exceedingly rare. How is it that Joseph William Azure—my father and an unsung hero of social change—came to “notice” in 1985 that “our entire [reservation] mountain range was at risk” from destructive gold mining and, in response, to form “a small grassroots traditional society” that created “a lot of local and national publicity for our cause to save” these mountains? To address this question, I adopted and adapted the approaches and methods of psychobiography to trace shifts in his sense of self in response to midlife socialization into Indigenous traditional spirituality. In developing this brief account of his development as a social change agent, I propose that psychobiography may require “Indigenization” if it is to better represent American Indian lives. Specifically, some Indigenous life stories will perhaps require tellings that center on collective endeavors rather than individual ones, reconstruction of life experiences based on comparably limited (material) archives, deeper preservation of the conventions of orality, and curation by close kin rather than by “distanced” analysts.