This account, authorized by the Rough Rock Demo. School community, documents the history of the school-the first controlled by a locally elected, all Navajo governing board, & to teach in & through the Native lang., innovations which have made it a leade

A Place To Be Navajo is the only book-length ethnographic account of a revolutionary Indigenous self-determination movement that began in 1966 with the Rough Rock Demonstration School. Called Diné Bi'ólta', The People's School, in recognition of its status as the first American Indian community-controlled school, Rough Rock was the first to teach in the Native language and to produce a body of quality children's literature by and about Navajo people. These innovations have positioned the school as a leader in American Indian and bilingual/bicultural education and have enabled school participants to wield considerable influence on national policy. This book is a critical life history of this singular school and community. McCarty's account grows out of 20 years of ethnographic work by the author with the Diné (Navajo) community of Rough Rock. The story is told primarily through written text, but also through the striking black-and-white images of photographer Fred Bia, a member of the Rough Rock community. Unlike most accounts of Indigenous schooling, this study involves the active participation of Navajo community members. Their oral testimony and that of other leaders in Indigenous/Navajo education frame and texture the account. Informed by critical theories of education, this book is not just the story of a single school and community. It is also an inquiry into the larger struggle for self-determination by Indigenous and other minoritized communities, raising issues of identity, voice, and community empowerment. A Place To Be Navajo asks whether school can be a place where children learn, question, and grow in an environment that values and builds upon who they are. The author argues that the questions Rough Rock raises, and the responses they summon, implicate us all.

A Place To Be Navajo is the only book-length ethnographic account of a revolutionary Indigenous self-determination movement that began in 1966 with the Rough Rock Demonstration School. Called Diné Bi'ólta', The People's School, in recognition of its status as the first American Indian community-controlled school, Rough Rock was the first to teach in the Native language and to produce a body of quality children's literature by and about Navajo people. These innovations have positioned the school as a leader in American Indian and bilingual/bicultural education and have enabled school participants to wield considerable influence on national policy. This book is a critical life history of this singular school and community. McCarty's account grows out of 20 years of ethnographic work by the author with the Diné (Navajo) community of Rough Rock. The story is told primarily through written text, but also through the striking black-and-white images of photographer Fred Bia, a member of the Rough Rock community. Unlike most accounts of Indigenous schooling, this study involves the active participation of Navajo community members. Their oral testimony and that of other leaders in Indigenous/Navajo education frame and texture the account. Informed by critical theories of education, this book is not just the story of a single school and community. It is also an inquiry into the larger struggle for self-determination by Indigenous and other minoritized communities, raising issues of identity, voice, and community empowerment. A Place To Be Navajo asks whether school can be a place where children learn, question, and grow in an environment that values and builds upon who they are. The author argues that the questions Rough Rock raises, and the responses they summon, implicate us all.

Woven together in Donna Deyhle’s ethnohistory are three generations and twenty-five years of friendship, interviews, and rich experience with Navajo women. Through a skillful blending of sources, Deyhle illuminates the devastating cultural consequences of racial stereotyping in the context of education. Longstanding racial tension in southeastern Utah frames this cross-generational set of portraits that together depict all aspects of this specifically American Indian struggle. Deyhle cites the lefthanded compliment, “Navajos work well with their hands,” which she indicates represents the limiting and all-too-common appraisal of American Indian learning potential that she vehemently disputes and seeks to disprove. As a recognized authority on the subject, qualified by multiple degrees in racial and American Indian studies, Deyhle is able to chronicle the lives and “survivance” of three Navajo women in a way that is simultaneously ethnographic and moving. Her critique of the U.S. education system’s underlying yet very real tendency toward structural discrimination takes shape in elegant prose that moves freely into and out of time and place. The combination of substantive sources and touching personal experience forms a profound and enduring narrative of critical and current importance. While this book stands as a powerful contribution to American Indian studies, its compelling human elements will extend its appeal to anyone concerned with the ongoing plight of American Indians in the education system.

Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country offers a fresh interpretation of the history of Navajo (Diné) pastoralism. The dramatic reduction of livestock on the Navajo Reservation in the 1930s -- when hundreds of thousands of sheep, goats, and horses were killed -- was an ambitious attempt by the federal government to eliminate overgrazing on an arid landscape and to better the lives of the people who lived there. Instead, the policy was a disaster, resulting in the loss of livelihood for Navajos -- especially women, the primary owners and tenders of the animals -- without significant improvement of the grazing lands. Livestock on the reservation increased exponentially after the late 1860s as more and more people and animals, hemmed in on all sides by Anglo and Hispanic ranchers, tried to feed themselves on an increasingly barren landscape. At the beginning of the twentieth century, grazing lands were showing signs of distress. As soil conditions worsened, weeds unpalatable for livestock pushed out nutritious native grasses, until by the 1930s federal officials believed conditions had reached a critical point. Well-intentioned New Dealers made serious errors in anticipating the human and environmental consequences of removing or killing tens of thousands of animals. Environmental historian Marsha Weisiger examines the factors that led to the poor condition of the range and explains how the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Navajos, and climate change contributed to it. Using archival sources and oral accounts, she describes the importance of land and stock animals in Navajo culture. By positioning women at the center of the story, she demonstrates the place they hold as significant actors in Native American and environmental history. Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country is a compelling and important story that looks at the people and conditions that contributed to a botched policy whose legacy is still felt by the Navajos and their lands today.

Wastelanding tells the history of the uranium industry on Navajo land in the U.S. Southwest, asking why certain landscapes and the peoples who inhabit them come to be targeted for disproportionate exposure to environmental harm. Uranium mines and mills on the Navajo Nation land have long supplied U.S. nuclear weapons and energy programs. By 1942, mines on the reservation were the main source of uranium for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Today, the Navajo Nation is home to more than a thousand abandoned uranium sites. Radiation-related diseases are endemic, claiming the health and lives of former miners and nonminers alike. Traci Brynne Voyles argues that the presence of uranium mining on Diné (Navajo) land constitutes a clear case of environmental racism. Looking at discursive constructions of landscapes, she explores how environmental racism develops over time. For Voyles, the “wasteland,” where toxic materials are excavated, exploited, and dumped, is both a racial and a spatial signifier that renders an environment and the bodies that inhabit it pollutable. Because environmental inequality is inherent in the way industrialism operates, the wasteland is the “other” through which modern industrialism is established. In examining the history of wastelanding in Navajo country, Voyles provides “an environmental justice history” of uranium mining, revealing how just as “civilization” has been defined on and through “savagery,” environmental privilege is produced by portraying other landscapes as marginal, worthless, and pollutable.

Navajos Wear Nikes reveals the complexity of modern life on the Navajo Reservation, a world where Anglo and Navajo coexist in a tenuous truce. With tales of gangs and skinwalkers, an Indian Boy Scout troop, a fanatical Sunday school teacher, and the author's own experience of sincere friendships that lead to hozho (beautiful harmony), Kristofic's memoir is an honest portrait of an Anglo boy growing up on and growing to love the Reservation. --publisher's description.

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).