【Leading-Edge Lecture 20】Climate Change in a time of COVID-19: Living and Transforming the Syndemic in the Navajo Nation

【Leading-Edge Lecture 20】
Topic：Climate Change in a time of COVID-19: Living and Transforming the Syndemic in the Navajo Nation
 
Time: 2021/05/12 14:30-16:30
Venue: Department of Geography, Room 305
 
Speaker: Dana E. Powell (Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology, Appalachian State University)
Moderator: Hong Kuang Chi（Professor, Department of Geography, National Taiwan University）

Abstract
This presentation examines Indigenous Navajo (Diné) apprehensions of the recent collision of three threats to life: contamination, climate change, COVID-19. Though seemingly separate and distinct, the collision of these three in 2020 revealed a true syndemic: the triple threat was, in fact, an entanglement of historically produced conditions. This syndemic is most apparent through the analytic of water, as a fluvial force that transports life and death in the high desert plateau where the Navajo Nation exists. Extreme drought in the US Southwest in recent years has created precarious conditions for human and animal life as natural water resources rapidly dwindle. At the same time, many of these water resources are contaminated from decades of intensive extraction of energy minerals, primarily uranium for Cold War weapons production and, later, coal and natural gas for power generation for export to the urbanizing greater Southwest. Moreover, one-third of Diné households have no access to potable water, exposing the 2020 mandate to “wash hands” to ward off the virus, as an infrastructural and political problem. This presentation examines Diné apprehensions of the syndemic through intertextual and visual media, Powell’s collaborative ethnographic research, and materials published in the public domain, arguing that the Navajo Nation offers a microcosm for understanding how sovereignty-centered strategies of resilience are required to mitigate and transform a triple threat of peculiar historic conditions. 
Note: research for this project has been undertaken in consultation with Diné leaders and with a tribal research permit from the Navajo Nation Department of Historic Preservation.
 
Organizer: Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences, NTU
Co-organizer:
Department of Geography, NTU,
Center for Indigenous Studies, NTU