Presents papers from a 1993 symposium, "Changing perceptions of Navajo Culture: The Archaeology of the Pre-Fort Sumner Period," held in St. Louis, Missouri. Papers incorporate historical and ethnographical information as well as archaeological data, and draw on Navajo opinions and culture. Contains sections on archaeological concepts of Navajo origins, Navajo expansion out of the Dinetah, and archaeological evidence of Navajo ceremonialism. Includes bandw photos. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

For the first time, a sweeping history of the Diné that is foregrounded in oral tradition. Authors Klara Kelley and Harris Francis share Diné history from pre-Columbian time to the present, using ethnographic interviews in which Navajo people reveal their oral histories on key events such as Athabaskan migrations, trading and trails, Diné clans, the Long Walk of 1864, and the struggle to keep their culture alive under colonizers who brought the railroad, coal mining, trading posts, and, finally, climate change. The early chapters, based on ceremonial origin stories, tell about Diné forebears. Next come the histories of Diné clans from late pre-Columbian to early post-Columbian times, and the coming together of the Diné as a sovereign people. Later chapters are based on histories of families, individuals, and communities, and tell how the Diné have struggled to keep their bond with the land under settler encroachment, relocation, loss of land-based self-sufficiency through the trading-post system, energy resource extraction, and climate change. Archaeological and documentary information supplements the oral histories, providing a comprehensive investigation of Navajo history and offering new insights into their twentieth-century relationships with Hispanic and Anglo settlers. For Diné readers, the book offers empowering histories and stories of Diné cultural sovereignty. “In short,” the authors say, “it may help you to know how you came to be where—and who—you are.”

This volume takes stock of the empirical evidence, theoretical orientations, and historical reconstructions of archaeology of the American Southwest. Themed chapters on method and theory are accompanied by comprehensive overviews of all major cultural traditions in the region, from the Paleoindians, to Chaco Canyon, to the onset of Euro-American imperialism.

A companion to Diné Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, each chapter of Navajo Sovereignty offers the contributors' individual perspectives. This book discusses Western law's view of Diné sovereignty, research, activism, creativity, and community, and Navajo sovereignty in traditional education. Above all, Lloyd L. Lee and the contributing scholars and community members call for the rethinking of Navajo sovereignty in a way more rooted in Navajo beliefs, culture, and values.

While her husband Richard excavated ruins and created a trading post empire at the turn of the century, Marietta learned the rituals and reality of Navajo life from medicine men.

From the author of the #1 New York Times bestseller The Lost City of the Monkey God comes an entrancing, eloquent, and entertaining account of the author’s adventurous journey on horseback through the Southwest in the heart of Navajo desert country. In 1992 author Douglas Preston and his wife and daughter rode horseback across 400 miles of desert in Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. They were retracing the route of a Navajo deity, the Slayer of Alien Gods, on his quest to restore beauty and balance to the Earth. More than a travelogue, Preston’s account of their “one tough journey, luminously remembered” (Kirkus Reviews) is a tale of two cultures meeting in a sacred land and is “like traveling across unknown territory with Lewis and Clark to the Pacific” (Dee Brown, author of Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee).

The Navajo people of Canyon de Chelly must negotiate a delicate balance between the old and the new as they struggle to maintain their traditional ways of life in the midst of archaeologists, U.S. Park Service employees, and the increasing numbers of tourists who come to visit this hauntingly beautiful part of northeastern Arizona. Anthropologist-writer Jeanne Simonelli, who worked at Canyon de Chelly as a seasonal park ranger, interweaves stories of her personal experiences and friendships with canyon residents with discussions of native history and culture in the region. Focusing on the members of one extended Navajo family, Simonelli describes the small moments of their daily lives: shearing goats, baking bread, attending a solemn all-night health ceremony, washing clothes at the local laundromat, playing traditional games and contemporary sports, talking about the history of the Dinthe Navajo peopleand pondering the changes they have witnessed in the canyon and the difficulties they confront. Crossing Between Worlds is sumptuously illustrated with insightful black-and-white photographs that document the everyday activities of Navajo families in one of the most spectacular corners of the American Southwest.