In 1950, Jonathan Wittenberg, student of biochemistry and biophysics, went to live among the Navajo, or Dine, in New Mexico. With a bulky twin-lens reflex camera, Wittenberg was recording a people and their lives from a time that is essentially unrecorded. Navajo Nation 1950 is an incredible historical document that is not only a unique entree to a time and place, but a surprisingly fine art foray by an untrained photographic eye.
Today the Navajos comprise the largest group of Native Americans and live on more than 16 million acres. Jonathan Wittenberg has been granted exclusive access into this culture at a pivotal time. The photographs include not just portraiture of individuals, but daily activities, the landscape and special events celebrated.
Returning Home features and contextualizes the creative works of Diné (Navajo) boarding school students at the Intermountain Indian School, which was the largest federal Indian boarding school between 1950 and 1984. Diné student art and poetry reveal ways that boarding school students sustained and contributed to Indigenous cultures and communities despite assimilationist agendas and pressures. This book works to recover the lived experiences of Native American boarding school students through creative works, student interviews, and scholarly collaboration. It shows the complex agency and ability of Indigenous youth to maintain their Diné culture within the colonial spaces that were designed to alienate them from their communities and customs. Returning Home provides a view into the students’ experiences and their connections to Diné community and land. Despite the initial Intermountain Indian School agenda to send Diné students away and permanently relocate them elsewhere, Diné student artists and writers returned home through their creative works by evoking senses of Diné Bikéyah and the kinship that defined home for them. Returning Home uses archival materials housed at Utah State University, as well as material donated by surviving Intermountain Indian School students and teachers throughout Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Artwork, poems, and other creative materials show a longing for cultural connection and demonstrate cultural resilience. This work was shared with surviving Intermountain Indian School students and their communities in and around the Navajo Nation in the form of a traveling museum exhibit, and now it is available in this thoughtfully crafted volume. By bringing together the archived student arts and writings with the voices of living communities, Returning Home traces, recontextualizes, reconnects, and returns the embodiment and perpetuation of Intermountain Indian School students’ everyday acts of resurgence.
La jaquette porte : "This book is an ethnohistory of the changes wrought by oil. The economic development spurred by oil leases is a cautionary tale in the transition from a subsistence to a capitalist economy. The federal stock reduction program imposed in the 1930s and 1940s devastated the Navajo agricultural economy and altered family structure. Women had owned and cared for sheep and goat herds which were now reduced in number by hundreds of thousands. Oil did offer some wage work, but only for men who dug trenches, laid pipe, or drove trucks. Following the end of World War II as the millions of dollars generated annually from oil and gas leases became available to the impoverished Navajo Nation, inter-clan squabbles erupted over uses for the money. Navajo was set against Navajo in disputes over lifeways and identity of the Diné people. This book is also an assessment of the price the land and culture of the Navajo ultimately paid for oil. Sadly, greater involvement in Anglo society meant less reverence for the land and sacred sites of the Diné."
"O'Neill chronicles a history of Navajo labor that illuminates how cultural practices and values influenced what it meant to work for wages or to produce commodities for the marketplace. Through accounts of Navajo coal miners, weavers, and those who left the reservation in search of wage work, she explores the tension between making a living the Navajo way and "working elsewhere.""--BOOK JACKET.
This overview is the first to examine trading in the last quarter of the twentieth century, when changes in both Navajo and white cultures led to the investigation of trading practices by the Federal Trade Commission, resulting in the demise of most traditional trading posts.
In 1950, Jonathan Wittenberg, student of biochemistry and biophysics, went to live among the Navajo, or Dine, in New Mexico. With a bulky twin-lens reflex camera, Wittenberg was recording a people and their lives from a time that is essentially unrecorded. Navajo Nation 1950 is an incredible historical document that is not only a unique entree to a time and place, but a surprisingly fine art foray by an untrained photographic eye.
Gladwell "Toney" Richardson came from a long line of Indian traders and published nearly three hundred western novels under pseudonyms like "Maurice Kildare." His forty years of managing trading posts on the Navajo Reservation are now recalled in this colorful memoir.
