Welcome to the 2023 Hopi Navajo Study Service Term!
This summer’s group from Goshen College begins their adventure aboard an Amtrak train headed west. The students start in the lush green farmland of the Midwest and travel across the country to the desert Southwest. We, the directors, will meet them when they disembark in New Mexico and we will travel together in the GC minibus to our first destination, a two-day orientation at Mesa Verde National Park. Then we’ll drive south and begin to immerse ourselves in the the culture, history, lifeways and spirituality of the Navajo and Hopi Peoples.
This group of thirteen is honored to be hosted on campus for the first time by Diné College, founded in 1968 as the first tribal-controlled college in the United States. We will be living in the student dorms for several weeks studying language, culture and art with Navajo professors and students who live at the intersection of Western knowledge and Indigenous values.
We will also be welcomed by Black Mountain Mennonite Church, whose Navajo-speaking members have invited us into their homes for host family stays and opportunities for informal interactions and cultural exchanges including wool carding, silver smithing and pottery making workshops.
After spending the first half of the term in the Navajo Nation, we’ll head west to the Hopi community of Kykotsmovi. The Peace Academic Center will be one of our partners in Hopi, offering both a place to stay and opportunities to engage with members of the community. Our other partner will be the Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, whose staff have offered to be our guides on visits to archaeological sites and places of cultural significance.
As outsiders from a distant part of North America, our intention is to listen well to Navajo and Hopi ways of knowing — looking honestly at the schism between the Western and the Indigenous, the colonizers’ culture and the worldviews of the colonized. In the weeks to come we will open ourselves to learning from Native American story tellers, scholars, healers, musicians and artists, as we engage our whole selves in the pursuit of knowledge for the common good.
Jerrell and Jane Ross Richer — directors — Navajo and Hopi Study Service Term 2023
