American Indian communities have long been subject to environmental degradation, but successful “grassroots” struggles to end such exploitation are exceedingly rare. How is it that Joseph William Azure—my father and an unsung hero of social change—came to “notice” in 1985 that “our entire [reservation] mountain range was at risk” from destructive gold mining and, in response, to form “a small grassroots traditional society” that created “a lot of local and national publicity for our cause to save” these mountains? To address this question, I adopted and adapted the approaches and methods of psychobiography to trace shifts in his sense of self in response to midlife socialization into Indigenous traditional spirituality. In developing this brief account of his development as a social change agent, I propose that psychobiography may require “Indigenization” if it is to better represent American Indian lives. Specifically, some Indigenous life stories will perhaps require tellings that center on collective endeavors rather than individual ones, reconstruction of life experiences based on comparably limited (material) archives, deeper preservation of the conventions of orality, and curation by close kin rather than by “distanced” analysts.

中文翻译：

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基层美洲印第安人领导人生活中反采矿抵抗的起源：本土化心理传记的前景

美洲印第安人社区长期以来一直受到环境退化的影响，但成功的结束这种剥削的“草根”斗争极为罕见。1985 年，Joseph William Azure——我的父亲和社会变革的无名英雄——如何“注意到”破坏性的金矿开采“我们的整个[保留]山脉都处于危险之中”，并作为回应，形成“一个小的草根传统社会”，为我们拯救这些山脉的事业创造了“很多地方和国家宣传”？为了解决这个问题，我采用并调整了心理传记的方法和方法，以追踪他的自我意识的转变，以回应中年社会化为本土传统灵性。在撰写这份关于他作为社会变革推动者的发展历程的简要说明时，我建议心理传记如果要更好地代表美洲印第安人的生活，可能需要“本土化”。具体来说，一些土著生活故事可能需要以集体努力而非个人努力为中心的讲述，基于相对有限的（物质）档案重建生活经历，更深入地保存口头习俗，以及由近亲而不是“疏远”的分析师。