JUSTIN B. RICHLAND University of California, Irvine Pragmatic paradoxes and ironies of indigeneity at the “edge” of Hopi sovereignty ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the paradoxes of language, cultural difference, and law in Hopi jurisprudence. In it, I analyze the metapragmatic “talk about courtroom talk,” whereby actors frame court discourse in shifting relations to Hopi cultural distinctiveness and sovereignty, exemplifying how language mediates the cultural politics of Hopi law. I thus argue for a reconsideration of the usual binaries of indigenous identity—in which claims to cultural distinctiveness are either libratory or reifying, autochthonous or other determined—suggesting that a sharper picture of cultural politics takes these antinomies together as the ironic dialectics constituting the emergent “edge” of indigenous governance today. [cultural difference, metapragmatics, indigeneity, Hopi law] I n a 2001 property dispute hearing before the Hopi Indian Tribal Court in northeastern Arizona, a Hopi witness testified to the actions of her opponent, a male clan relative, against whom she had asked the court to issue an injunction. Specifically, she was asking the court to order him to cease entering a plot of land next to her home in one of Hopi’s 12 mesa-top villages, which she claimed belonged to her. On that cold, bright, high-desert December day, the drafty mobile home that houses Hopi Courtroom 2 had become close with the 15 or so Hopi family members, judges, and attorneys who had filled the courtroom for the injunction hearing. The woman sat in a small, thinly padded chair set before the judge’s desk in the otherwise unmarked space designated the witness “stand” and told of a particularly harrowing encounter she had had with her opponent (also present that day) a few months earlier. Speaking into a microphone that directly fed into the court’s analog audio recording system, the witness’s voice quavered as she recounted for the court how she and her sister found the man at the site of the disputed property, in the middle of night, wearing all black, with his long hair brushed over his face. When they confronted him, the witness explained, he refused to identify himself or talk at all. “And I said ‘Who is it?,’ ” the witness said in English, “And he was still standing there. He was standing there.” My Hopi consultant explained that the woman was describing her oppo- nent’s attempts to intimidate them. “He’s trying to indicate to them he has the power to call these supernaturals to help him.” And this largely had to do with his refusal to respond when spoken to: “If he was really trying to get at them you know in this—mentally in that way, you know he wouldn’t speak to them. You know because none of our—when we hear—when we hear these scary stories. The scary person never talks. They don’t say anything. . . . Not talking is the key to this whole scary business.” It is the failure to talk, a refusal to communicate, that announces a certain limit of Hopi com- munity. Interaction marks this horizon of belonging for Hopi and locates the powers “out there” that threaten its dissolution. Interaction grounds community, instantiates it, (re)creates it in the course of life on the Hopi reservation. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 540–557, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C  2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.3.540.