Organizing in the Context of Tribal Sovereignty: The Navajo Area Indian Health Service Campaign for Union Recognition

Abstract

This article considers the relationships among labor union organiz ing, American Indian tribal sovereignty, and economic development, focusing on a 2001 campaign by the Laborers' International Union of North America to organize employees of the Navajo Area Indian Health Service. Relying on ethnographic methods, I examine the practices, actions, and attitudes of professional and volunteer organizers of this campaign to consider how organizers connect political conditions and strategies to verbal strategies of face-to-face interaction. This article illustrates how organizing drives conducted in Indian country must negotiate the mutually constitutive political and economic interests of tribal members. The LIUNA campaign succeeded by addressing workplace concerns within an overall context of respect for the Navajo Nation tribal government, tribal sovereignty, and tribal members' feel ings about sovereignty, even when the tribal government's actions po tentially threatened the stability and security of tribal workers' jobs.