REWIND: PART II, SAME AS IT EVER WAS (Culture appropriation and displacement in the Best of the West) | Commentary by Bill Keshlear
The truck-stop-diner anthropologist in me believes denigration of working-class culture masked by NIMBYistic environmentalism, appropriation of the Navajo Way by even marginally affluent Americans, and Navajo political opportunists rendered untouchable by invoking “sovereignty” and playing the race card lie at the core of the rift in San Juan County, Utah, provides a snapshot of the social, political and economic dynamic transforming the Best of the West. _________ Marvin Hayden Washington survived the aftermath of a world war aboard an armored cruiser anchored just off the Russian port of Vladivostok, a global pandemic that killed millions, and the Great Depression. He worked at whatever jobs came along during the oil boom days of the 1920s in Texas. (Montage: Bill Keshlear) My grandfather, Marvin Hayden Washington was a soft-spoken Baptist who grew up in south Texas during a period when converts were taken to a muddy creek and, well, dunked “in the name of the Father, the Son,