This life history of a Navajo leader, recorded in the 1960s and first published in 1977, is a classic work in the study of Navajo history and religious traditions. "A skillful, meticulous, and altogether praiseworthy contribution to Navajo studies. . . . Although the focus of Mitchell's autobiography is upon his role as a Blessingway singer, there is much material here on Navajo history and culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Mitchell attended the government school at Fort Defiance, worked on the railroad in Arizona, served as a handyman and interpreter at several trading posts and the Franciscan missions, and later served as a tribal councilman in the 1930s and as a judge in the 1940s and 1950s. His observations on these experiences are relevant to our understanding of contemporary Navajo life."--Lawrence C. Kelly, Western Historical Quarterly "This book stands easily among the best of the 'native' autobiographies. Narrated by a thoughtful and articulate Navajo leader over a span of eighteen years, this life history is brought into English with none of the selective romanticizing that has spoiled some books. . . . (It is) a superb job of bringing one culture ever closer to another."--Barre Tolken, Western Folklore

Navajo Beadwork: Architectures of Light traces the evolution of the art as explained by traders, Navajo consultants, and Navajo beadworkers themselves. It also shares the visions, words, and art of 23 individual artists to reveal the influences on their creativity and shows how they go about creating their designs."--BOOK JACKET.

Drawn from Native American autobiographical accounts, a study revealing white society's program of civilizing American Indian schoolchildren

Around the world, indigenous peoples are returning to traditional foods produced by traditional methods of subsistence. The goal of controlling their own food systems, known as food sovereignty, is to reestablish healthy lifeways to combat contemporary diseases such as diabetes and obesity. This is the first book to focus on the dietary practices of the Navajos, from the earliest known times into the present, and relate them to the Navajo Nation’s participation in the global food sovereignty movement. It documents the time-honored foods and recipes of a Navajo woman over almost a century, from the days when Navajos gathered or hunted almost everything they ate to a time when their diet was dominated by highly processed foods.

Ethnomusicological fieldwork has significantly changed since the end of the the 20th century. Ethnomusicology is in a critical moment that requires new perspecitves on fieldwork - perspectives that are not addressed in the standard guides to ethnomusicological or anthropological method. The focus in ethnomusicological writing and teaching has traditionally centered around analyses and ethnographic representations of musical cultures, rather than on the personal world of understanding, experience, knowing, and doing fieldwork. Shadows in the Field deliberately shifts the focus of ethnomusicology and of ethnography in general from representation (text) to experience (fieldwork). The "new fieldwork" moves beyond mere data collection and has become a defining characteristic of ethnomusicology that engages the scholar in meaningful human contexts. In this new edition of Shadows in the Field, renowned ethnomusicologists explore the roles they themselves act out while performing fieldwork and pose significant questions for the field: What are the new directions in ethnomusicological fieldwork? Where does fieldwork of "the past" fit into these theories? And above all, what do we see when we acknowledge the shadows we cast in the field? The second edition of Shadows in the Field includes updates of all existing chapters, a new preface by Bruno Nettl, and seven new chapters addressing critical issues and concerns that have become increasingly relevant since the first edition.

EDWARD L. SCHIEFFELIN: From The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers

Rebecca Valette’s Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver is the first biography of artist Clitso Dedman (1876–1953), one of the most important but overlooked Diné (Navajo) artists of his generation. Dedman was born to a traditional Navajo family in Chinle, Arizona, and herded sheep as a child. He was educated in the late 1880s and early 1890s at the Fort Defiance Indian School, then at the Teller Institute in Grand Junction, Colorado. After graduation Dedman moved to Gallup, New Mexico, where he worked in the machine shop of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway before opening his first of three Navajo trading posts in Rough Rock, Arizona. After tragedy struck his life in 1915, he moved back to Chinle and abruptly changed careers to become a blacksmith and builder. At age sixty, suffering from arthritis, Dedman turned his creative talent to wood carving, thus initiating a new Navajo art form. Although the neighboring Hopis had been carving Kachina dolls for generations, the Navajos traditionally avoided any permanent reproduction of their Holy People, and even of human figures. Dedman was the first to ignore this proscription, and for the rest of his life he focused on creating wooden sculptures of the various participants in the Yeibichai dance, which closed the Navajo Nightway ceremony. These secular carvings were immediately purchased and sold to tourists by regional Indian traders. Today Dedman’s distinctive and highly regarded work can be found in private collections, galleries, and museums, such as the Navajo Nation Museum at Window Rock, the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and the Arizona State Museum in Tucson. Clitso Dedman, Navajo Carver, with its extensive illustrations, is the story of a remarkable and underrecognized figure of twentieth-century Navajo artistic creation and innovation.

The Anaasází people left behind marvelous structures, the ruins of which are preserved at Mesa Verde, Chaco Canyon, and Canyon de Chelly. But what do we know about these people, and how do they relate to Native nations living in the Southwest today? Archaeologists have long studied the American Southwest, but as historian Robert McPherson shows in Viewing the Ancestors, their findings may not tell the whole story. McPherson maintains that combining archaeology with knowledge derived from the oral traditions of the Navajo, Ute, Paiute, and Hopi peoples yields a more complete history. McPherson’s approach to oral tradition reveals evidence that, contrary to the archaeological consensus that these groups did not coexist, the Navajos interacted with their Anaasází neighbors. In addition to examining archaeological literature, McPherson has studied traditional teachings and interviewed Native people to obtain accounts of their history and of the relations between the Anaasází and Athapaskan ancestors of today’s Hopi, Pueblo, and Navajo peoples. Oral history, McPherson points out, tells why things happened. For example, archaeological findings indicate that the Hopi are descended from the Anaasází, but Hopi oral tradition better explains why the ancient Puebloans may have left the Four Corners region: the drought that may have driven the Anaasází away was a symptom of what had gone wrong within the society—a point that few archaeologists could derive from what is found in the ground. An important text for non-Native scholars as well as Native people committed to retaining traditional knowledge, Viewing the Ancestors exemplifies collaboration between the sciences and oral traditions rather than a contest between the two.

The Garland Encyclopedia of World Music is a ten-volume reference work, organized geographically by continent to represent the musics of the world in nine volumes. The tenth volume houses reference tools and descriptive information about the encyclopedia’s structure, criteria for inclusion and other information specific to the field of ethnomusicology. An award-winning reference, its contributions are from top researchers around the world who were active in fieldwork and from key institutions with programs in ethnomusicology. GEWM has become a familiar acronym, and it remains highly revered for its scholarship, uncontested in being the sole encompassing reference work with a broad survey of world music. More than 9,000 pages, with musical illustrations, photographs and drawings, it is accompanied by 300+ audio examples.