Page 319 - Cultural Studies of Science Education

24 Implications of Sense of Place and Place-Based Education 293

p. 3664) notes: “For refugees, homelessness and; ‘placelessness’ are intrinsic by
definition.” Involuntary relocation is harmful to the displaced, who are extremely
likely to suffer from posttraumatic stress disorder. Cernea (1997) cites other negative
consequences of relocation.
An example of the effects that can result from displacement and relocation
can be seen in a collectively traumatic event that befell the Navajo Nation late
in the previous century. This is the largest indigenous nation living on the most
extensive reservation in the USA, extending across the high-desert Colorado
Plateau region of northern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico, and southeastern
Utah. The Navajo reservation surrounds the smaller reservation of the Hopi
Tribe, earlier occupants of the region who are culturally and linguistically dis-
tinct from the Navajo, but who have coexisted with them for centuries. The
Navajo were also displaced in the nineteenth century and interned for some
years before returning to their homes in this area. This episode is today known
as “The Long Walk.” In 1974, the Navajo–Hopi Land Settlement Act was established
to partition jointly used lands in a buffer zone between the two reservations
(Schwartz 1997). Few Hopis were displaced, but hundreds of Navajos were sub-
jected to what has been referred to as the largest forced relocation in American
history since the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II
(Schwartz 1997). “New Lands” were established for relocatees in an area with
similar physiography, climate, and ecology adjacent to the existing reservation,
but most Navajos did not readily acquiesce, because their culture attaches them
to very specific places by burial of the umbilical cord near the homestead soon
after birth.
This attachment to place is first established during the prenatal stage of life and reaffirmed
at every step on the path to full Navajo personhood is solidified shortly after birth through
burial of the umbilical cord. This act anchors an individual to a particular place. This sense
of anchoring, and the spiritual and historic nature of the connection to one’s home, is
implicitly understood in the Navajo world. (Schwartz 1997, p. 43)
Schwartz (1997) quotes Katherine Smith, a Navajo from Big Mountain, a place of
particularly strong resistance to relocation:

We are not like that [referring to the Euro-American propensity to move]. We just live on
this, in these six sacred mountains all the time, all of our life. When you are in the pregnant,
you are inside of your mother. You got your mother’s breath, and it’s the same with the Big
Mountain, that way. It is my breath. See, I was born around the Big Mountain, and so that
is my mother too. So all of my life, I just will always be thinking of this place. My spirit
is going to be here forever. (Smith, quoted in Schwartz 1997, p. 47)
The threat of removal was traumatic to the majority of relocatees, who were con-
cerned about loss of grazing lands for the livestock that form the basis of their
livelihood, and loss of the ability to pass these lands and herds to their children
(Scudder 1982). Observers noted effects such as impoverishment, depression,
increased alcohol abuse, and higher rates of illness and mortality.
Swainson and McGregor (2008), in their discussion of Malaysia’s removal of
two indigenous Orang Asli communities for dam construction, point out that