Shifting Nature: Agriculture, Environment, and Health on the Hopi Indian Reservation since 1882

FAIN: FT-278756-21

Tai Elizabeth Johnson
Longwood University (Farmville, VA 23909-1800)

Research for a book on how economic and environmental forces have affected ecological and human health on the reservation of the Hopi Tribe in northern Arizona.   

Shifting Nature: Agriculture, Environment, and Health on the Hopi Indian Reservation since 1882 is the first book to analyze how economic and environmental forces transformed one of North America’s oldest and most biologically diverse food systems, disrupting human and environmental health in the process. Intertwining archival research with oral histories conducted collaboratively with the Hopi Tribe, the book asks questions at the heart of environmental humanities: How do communities lose or maintain control of the cultural, economic, and environmental resources in which their subsistence is rooted? How does the erosion or resilience of traditional foodways shape human and ecological health? And how can oral history help us understand historic shifts in indigenous food systems, disease, and the environment? The project illuminates these questions by using the Hopi story as a microcosm through which to explore shifting histories of subsistence, ecology, and health in modern America.