Description: "Dine doo Gaamalii is a history of twentieth-century Navajos, including author Farina King and her family, who have converted and joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), becoming "Dine doo Gaamalii"--both Dine and LDS. Drawing on Dine stories from the LDS Native American Oral History Project, King illuminates the mutual entanglement of Indigenous identity and religious affiliation, showing how their Dine identity made them outsiders to the LDS church and, conversely, how belonging to the LDS community made them outsiders to their Native community. The story that King tells shows the complex ways that Dine people engaged with church institutions within the context of settler colonial power structures. The lived experiences of Dine in the church programs sometimes diverged from the intentions and expectations of those who designed them"--
Brief description:
Farina King is Horizon Chair of Native American Ecology and Culture and associate professor of Native American studies, University of Oklahoma, coauthor of "Returning Home: Diné Creative Works of the Intermountain Indian School, and author of The Earth Memory Compass: Diné Landscapes and Education in the Twentieth Century.
Review Quotes:
"In this beautifully rendered autoethnography, Farina King reckons honestly with the injustices of settler colonialism but refuses to grant it a controlling role. Instead, she centers the voices of her own Diné family and other Diné dóó Gáamalii, Navajo Mormons, showing how they have built lives faithful both to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and to Diné identity and peoplehood all at the same time."--Tisa Wenger, professor of divinity, American studies, and religious studies at Yale University, and author of We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom
"This history illuminates the complexity of relating simultaneously to Diné and Latter-day Saint worlds. Richly textured by oral histories and the history of the author's family, it attends closely to the diversity of views and practices among Diné Latter-day Saints."--Matthew W. Dougherty, author of Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America