Níhikéyah

In commemoration of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, this week’s review highlights the value of Navajo homelands and opportunities for resistance from the perspectives of the Diné people.

Posted on October 14, 2024 in Reviews of the Month

Níhikéyah: Navajo Homeland

ed. by Lloyd L. Lee Arizona, 2023
210p index, 9780816552252 $100.00, 9780816552245 $24.95, 9780816552269

Lee (Univ. of New Mexico) assembles essays from eight Navajo contributors, including tribal activists, artists, and scholars, who share their respective autobiographical accounts and cogent perceptions of the enduring importance of Navajo homelands for the Diné people. These essays elaborate a Navajo “matrix”—a cosmology and epistemology that create the foundation for thought, action, and morality, and conceptions of space, land, time, and person embedded in Native lifeways that are distinct from Western modernity. Ancestral homelands are not a commodity but a complex of physical, emotional, and spiritual reciprocities between other-than-human persons and the four clans. These relationships inform clan histories and collective memories of the Diné. The book is organized in four sections, each with two chapters devoted to the sunrise pattern: east, south, west, and north. Each direction corresponds to a phase in the human lifecycle, a part of the day, a season, and a sacred location. The contributors suggest strategies for tribal intervention, resistance, and revitalization given the legacy of settler colonialism that includes forced removal, reservation paternalism by the Bureau of Indian Affairs (boarding schools, language suppression, treaties and legal regulation), and the enduring injuries from uranium mining and environmental pollution. An important exploration of the cultural significance of the Navajo homeland as told through Native voices.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty.
Reviewer: J. H. Rubin, emeritus, University of Saint Joseph
Interdisciplinary Subject: Native American Studies
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences
Choice Issue: Apr 2024

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