Damian Yazzie is an Urban Navajo Graduate Student within
Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Being born and raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico, his use of
methodology and research remain interested in recognizing
transformative solidarities and schisms that exist within Southwest
Indigenous-Latinx identities at particular junctions of cultural contact,
leading to rethinking racial paradigms and crossings. He engages
with critical analysis from multi-modal texts from the 17th to the 20th
century, of questioning and complicating notions of Southwestern
Indigeneity. To the questions of Indigeneity, his research has become
more focused on the mechanisms of Indigenous ontology as an
epistemological device to demonstrate a felt survivance and
demonstration of cultural adaptability that weaves together a cohesion
of the past, present, and future, contending a type of autonomy within
the face of coloniality. He is studying Indigenous and Latinx narratives
that create a complex, weaved tapestry of initial cultural encounter
that result into unlikely sites of defiance and resistance, that he plans
to apply within textually and historically based models of solidarity.