A Diné History of Navajoland by Klara Kelley, Harris Francis (review)

Klara Kelley, an ethnohistorian, and Harris Francis, a Diné (Navajo) cultural resource consultant, provide some interesting detail from Diné oral history, but the authors mention on the first page of their introduction that they only tell “pieces” of this history (3). This partial approach results in a decidedly uneven book in three areas: Diné history, the book’s own purpose, and its lack of attention to science.

The first is Diné history. While Kelley and Francis include interesting chapters on Diné trading post operators and coal mine workers, many other aspects of Diné history are missing: influential Diné leaders Peter McDonald and Peterson Zah do not appear in the index, for example. Also, in the authors’ focus on oral history collected from Diné informants, an important side of the long and conflicted Diné relationship with the U.S. government is either largely left out or, when included, often slanted. For instance, like many historians, the authors comment on “boarding school miseries” suffered by Diné children (24). However, others have found that many Diné appreciated the educational opportunities boarding schools provided them (see Jon Reyhner and Jeanne Eder, American Indian Education: A History, University of Oklahoma Press, 2017).

Second, Kelley and Francis write of their purpose, “We have made this book first and foremost for Diné youngsters,” telling them to “Learn Diné traditional stories and other traditions about the places on the land” (271). However, it can be argued that in the process they are perpetuating some questionable discourse, such as that reported by Deborah House, who took Navajo Studies classes and taught at Diné College in the 1990s. In her book, Language Shift among the Navajos: Identity Politics and Cultural Continuity (University of Arizona Press, 2002), House writes, “[N]on-Navajo students (Anglo, Hispanic, and others) were encouraged to disparage their own upbringing and cultural experiences. Furthermore, their language, literature, religion, family life, and ethnic identities are routinely, and at times painfully, denigrated and devalued by Navajo and non-Navajo instructors, administrators, and other students” (38). House heard about the importance of revitalizing Diné language and culture as is encouraged by Kelley and Francis, but she saw very little being done. An ideal Navajo lifestyle promoted in some classes—“sheepherding and growing a small garden, living in a hogan, and driving a team of horses” (House, 87)—was not really viable anymore, especially because of the great increase in the Navajo population in the last 150 years. Kelley and Francis mention the Diné population growth only near the end of their book and admit, “there’s no going back to the old stockraising way of life” (266).

Third, Kelley and Francis seem to distrust science. Along with the “Long Walk,” when many Navajos were forcefully sent to a concentration camp in eastern New Mexico near the border with Texas and kept there from 1864 to 1867, the federal government’s enforced livestock reduction of the 1930s and 1940s, justified with scientific evidence, was especially traumatic for the Diné. In much the same way climate change is questioned today, Kelley and Francis mistrust the science that the government used then to justify livestock reduction, writing, “Supposedly, overgrazing was destroying the land by erosion” (19). In doing so, the authors help promote the idea found in Diné oral histories (see Ruth Roessel and Broderick Johnson’s Navajo Livestock Reduction: A National Disgrace, Navajo Community College, 1974) that the lack of rain was caused by livestock reduction mandated by U.S. government officials. But the continued challenge that livestock reduction sought to resolve can be seen in a May 6, 2018, Washington Post report by Kristine Philips on the drought-caused death of nearly two hundred Diné horses. The authors also take exception to the many archeologists who find evidence that the Diné were late arrivals to the area they now inhabit. This dispute was central to the contentious land litigation between the Navajo and Hopi tribes.

While A Diné History of Navajoland...