Christine Ami, (Diné)

Yá’át’ééh! I am a Diné scholar, weaver, wife, and mom whose home base is in Tsaile, Arizona in the heart of the Navajo Nation. After 14 years at my tribal college I am excited to start my new position as an Associate Professor of Native American Studies at the University of California, Davis. 

I write and teach about Indigenous relationships with animals, cultural arts, Native American and Indigenous Studies, and the complicated ways Indigenous knowledge moves through classrooms, communities, families, and everyday life. My contributions highlight Indigenous co-constitutive relationships between human and nonhuman animals based on a re-membering of protocols of respect. I study the heavy socio-political superficial linkings between indigenous animals and people, re-directing the epistemological imperialist lens beyond animal narratology, animism, totemism, and taboo. At the same time, during this process, I explore paradoxes of not only the Indian in academia, but the Diné butcher in a USDA meat processing facility. My forthcoming book, Today, We Butcher: Lessons from Sheep on Life, Death, and Re-Membering, grows from many of those relationships—especially the teachings that emerge among Diné people and sheep. 

But my work does not end when I leave the classroom. I weave, specializing in various twill patterns including two-sided Navajo weavings. These weavings often form the basis of theoretical frameworks such as the fabric of my next project: Beyond the Return: Diné Family Encounters with Woven Kin. I tend sheep. I help my husband, silversmith Carlon P. Ami II, with his art business. And, most importantly, together we are raising two Táchii’nii boys to know where they come from and to carry that knowledge wherever their futures take them.