Hidden Heritage: The Cultural Appropriation of Pueblo Indigenous History

Joseph Weixelman, PhD became a Bahá’í when he was an undergraduate studying anthropology and religion at the University of Colorado in 1978. Shortly afterward, he completed his honors thesis entitled “The Traditional Navajo Religion & the Bahá'í Faith,” drawing on interviews with several members of the Kahn family on the Navajo Reservation. He then taught high school in Boulder, Colorado, and Jackson, Wyoming, before beginning a master’s degree in history at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. His master's thesis, a rewriting of the indigenous history of Yellowstone National Park, demonstrated that the tribes in the region were not scared of the geysers and hot springs, as commonly believed, but rather saw them as gifts of power from the Supreme Being and looked upon them with reverence. In writing his thesis, he received assistance from elders from the Shoshoni, Assiniboine, Blackfeet, and Nez Perce tribes. This paper, which he presented at the conference commemorating the 125th anniversary of Yellowstone National Park, subsequently helped to alter the interpretation of the history of America’s first national park.

Joseph began working for the National Park Service during the summers while teaching social studies at a high school in Durango, Colorado. He worked as an interpretive ranger, giving tours of the cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde National Park. After presenting his work on Yellowstone, he also worked for Yellowstone’s Cultural Resource Department and as an interpretive ranger, giving tours of the Mammoth Hot Springs terraces and of Fort Yellowstone at Yellowstone National Park.

When Joseph began work on his doctorate at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, he also worked as an interpretive ranger at Petroglyph National Monument, giving tours of the trails in the canyons to the petroglyph sites. All these experiences led him to his critique of the cultural appropriation of Pueblo Indigenous heritage by the tourist industry in the early twentieth century, an appropriation that has brought confusion to the public and grief to the nineteen Pueblos in New Mexico and the Hopi in Arizona. While researching his dissertation on cultural appropriation, he talked to the then-governors of most of the nineteen Pueblos and interviewed elders on the Hopi mesas. After completing his doctorate in 2004, he taught American history, American Indian history, and the history of the American West at Wayne State College in Wayne, Nebraska. Now retired and back in the Albuquerque area, Joseph continues to write about history. At present, he is reworking his dissertation on Pueblo cultural appropriation for publication; this talk draws on his research.