In this groundbreaking book, the first Navajo to earn a doctorate in history seeks to rewrite Navajo history. Reared on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and Arizona, Jennifer Nez Denetdale is the great-great-great-granddaughter of a well-known Navajo chief, Manuelito (1816-1894), and his nearly unknown wife, Juanita (1845-1910). Stimulated in part by seeing photographs of these ancestors, she began to explore her family history as a way of examining broader issues in Navajo historiography. Here she presents a thought-provoking examination of the construction of the history of the Navajo people (Dine, in the Navajo language) that underlines the dichotomy between Navajo and non-Navajo perspectives on the Dine past. Reclaiming Dine History has two primary objectives. First, Denetdale interrogates histories that privilege Manuelito and marginalize Juanita in order to demonstrate some of the ways that writing about the Dine has been biased by non-Navajo views of assimilation and gender. Second, she reveals how Navajo narratives, including oral histories and stories kept by matrilineal clans, serve as vehicles to convey Navajo beliefs and values.By scrutinizing stories about Juanita, she both underscores the centrality of women's roles in Navajo society and illustrates how oral tradition has been used to organize social units, connect Navajos to the land, and interpret the past. She argues that these same stories, read with an awareness of Navajo creation narratives, reveal previously unrecognized Navajo perspectives on the past. And she contends that a similarly culture-sensitive re-viewing of the Dine can lead to the production of a Navajo-centered history.

Published in conjunction with an acclaimed new exhibition at the Navajo Nation Museum, this landmark volume explores the complex social, cultural, and political transformations across the Navajo Nation during the critical livestock-reduction period as documented through the extraordinary photography of Milton Snow. Milton Snow was a non-Native photographer hired to document Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier’s paternalistic federal Indian policies, which were intended not only to rehabilitate the land through the elimination of up to 50 percent of Navajo livestock but to introduce and reinforce the use of Western logics and technologies. The images Snow captured from 1937–1959 offer windows to a complex past. Featuring over two hundred archival illustrations and photographic plates from the Navajo Nation Museum, the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, and the Museum of Northern Arizona, this volume privileges the voices of Diné scholars, artists, community members, and allies. The seventeen contributors to the first-ever publication of the Navajo Nation Museum’s Milton Snow Photography Collection explore themes of landscape and home; education, nation, and democracy; community and kinship; refusal and resistance; and visual sovereignty and critical archival studies. Here, Denetdale and McEnaney merge deep historical context and archival research with Diné knowledge systems, oral histories, and community-based relationships, situating the archive as a site for renewed storytelling and sovereignty.

In this groundbreaking book, the first Navajo to earn a doctorate in history seeks to rewrite Navajo history. Reared on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico and Arizona, Jennifer Nez Denetdale is the great-great-great-granddaughter of a well-known Navajo chief, Manuelito (1816-1894), and his nearly unknown wife, Juanita (1845-1910). Stimulated in part by seeing photographs of these ancestors, she began to explore her family history as a way of examining broader issues in Navajo historiography. Here she presents a thought-provoking examination of the construction of the history of the Navajo people (Dine, in the Navajo language) that underlines the dichotomy between Navajo and non-Navajo perspectives on the Dine past. Reclaiming Dine History has two primary objectives. First, Denetdale interrogates histories that privilege Manuelito and marginalize Juanita in order to demonstrate some of the ways that writing about the Dine has been biased by non-Navajo views of assimilation and gender. Second, she reveals how Navajo narratives, including oral histories and stories kept by matrilineal clans, serve as vehicles to convey Navajo beliefs and values.By scrutinizing stories about Juanita, she both underscores the centrality of women's roles in Navajo society and illustrates how oral tradition has been used to organize social units, connect Navajos to the land, and interpret the past. She argues that these same stories, read with an awareness of Navajo creation narratives, reveal previously unrecognized Navajo perspectives on the past. And she contends that a similarly culture-sensitive re-viewing of the Dine can lead to the production of a Navajo-centered history.

Published in conjunction with an acclaimed new exhibition at the Navajo Nation Museum, this landmark volume explores the complex social, cultural, and political transformations across the Navajo Nation during the critical livestock-reduction period as documented through the extraordinary photography of Milton Snow. Milton Snow was a non-Native photographer hired to document Bureau of Indian Affairs Commissioner John Collier’s paternalistic federal Indian policies, which were intended not only to rehabilitate the land through the elimination of up to 50 percent of Navajo livestock but to introduce and reinforce the use of Western logics and technologies. The images Snow captured from 1937–1959 offer windows to a complex past. Featuring over two hundred archival illustrations and photographic plates from the Navajo Nation Museum, the University of New Mexico’s Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, and the Museum of Northern Arizona, this volume privileges the voices of Diné scholars, artists, community members, and allies. The seventeen contributors to the first-ever publication of the Navajo Nation Museum’s Milton Snow Photography Collection explore themes of landscape and home; education, nation, and democracy; community and kinship; refusal and resistance; and visual sovereignty and critical archival studies. Here, Denetdale and McEnaney merge deep historical context and archival research with Diné knowledge systems, oral histories, and community-based relationships, situating the archive as a site for renewed storytelling and sovereignty.