Dine: A History of the Navajos, and: "For Our Navajo People:" Dine Letters, Speeches and Petitions 1900-1960 (review)

Assembled by Peter Iverson in collaboration with renowned Navajo photographer Monty Roessel, these companion volumes break new scholastic ground on the largest Native American Nation, the Navajo Nation. Although these are collaborative works, Roessel's voice is only evident through his splendid photographs, which curiously are presented without captions.

The scope of Diné: A History of the Navajos is vast, covering the Navajo from their origins to the first years of the twenty-first century. Four themes successfully focus the work: defense and survival, adaptation and incorporation, expansion and prosperity, and identity and continuation. In many respects, Diné: A History of the Navajos is a rewrite of Iverson's earlier work, The Navajo Nation (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1981). In fact, much of The Navajo Nation's content is found in Diné, but the more recent work represents an expansion on the original analysis on several noteworthy levels: it brings the story up to the present; it highlights multivocality, especially emphasizing Navajo voices; and, most important for this reviewer, it incorporates Navajo scholarship. (One small quibble: although it is understandable that Iverson is proud of his former student, he mentions Jennifer Denetdeal's accomplishments in the text repeatedly, until they become cumbersome.) In sum, it demonstrates the ways in which Iverson's scholarship, in sync with the discipline of history in general and ethnohistory in particular, has blossomed and improved in method and implementation in the two decades since publication of his original study.

Incorporating past scholarship, Diné is based on extensive archival research—much of which is made available for the first time in the companion volume For Our Navajo People, which includes letters, speeches, and petitions that were produced by Navajo people between 1900 and 1960 and that were uncovered by Iverson in the process of researching the previously mentioned volume.

The motivation for publication of For Our Navajo People is threefold. First, materials from the decades covered in this volume are exceedingly rare. Second, most accounts of the Native American past stress defeat and dispossession, exacerbating existing stereotypes. In contradistinction, Iverson strives to portray a new Indian history centered on native actions and the ability of native communities to persist, adapt, and prosper. Whereas Indians were formerly portrayed as victims, here their agency is emphasized. Navajo are portrayed throughout this work as agents of their own destiny who were faced with numerous difficult challenges, rather than as victims of colonialism, racism, oppression, and hostility. This allows emphasis to be placed on how the Navajo have continually found ways to adapt and continue in the face of adversity.

As he clearly states, Iverson strives to tell the story from "the inside out rather than the outside in" (Diné, 2). The manner in which this approach strengthens the work is demonstrated in Chapter 1, when Iverson first covers the establishment of the "Natural Order" of the Navajo world by the Diyin Dine'é (Holy People) as recounted in standard Navajo oral tradition, then goes farther than most non-Navajo scholars by incorporating information such as alternative perspectives debated among Navajo intellectuals. Drawing on the work of Navajo scholar AnCita Benally, Iverson highlights current discourse regarding the actual meaning of the migration motif in the Diné story of origin in regard to scientific evidence demonstrating linguistic connections to Athapaskan speakers in what today are Alaska, Canada, and California. Regarding the origin of vital ceremonials, Iverson draws on the work of Navajo scholar Harry Walters, which suggests an aboriginal origin for the Blessingway ceremony and that the Enemy Way ceremony may in fact result from extended contact with peoples of...