Review
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Title: Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century
Author: Farina King
Publisher University Press of Kansas: Lawrence, Kansas, 2023
Genre: nonfiction
Year Published: 2023
Number of Pages: 312
Binding: Hardback
ISBN: 978-0700635528
Price: 39.95
Reviewed by Greg Seppi for the Association for Mormon Letters
Let me layer on some disclaimers before I launch into this review. First, I have no personal or familial ties to any Native American community, let alone the incredibly nuanced and interesting Navajo (or Diné) communities that this book focuses on. I am writing this review ensconced in an underground section of Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, in an area of Utah that was once home to Ute communities and which my ancestors unceremoniously occupied. As a white male university-educated librarian I write with the benefit of any privilege you can imagine.
One aspect of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that has always attracted me is the idea that one can continue to learn and grow forever. Reading this book is a reminder that learning, knowing, and understanding are entirely different experiences. Without the benefit of a certain perspective, there are experiences that I do not have the privilege of comprehending in the same way that a person who lived through them did. Farina King’s Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saint Experiences in the Twentieth Century is both a history of Navajo who have joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and an autoethnography. Using her experiences growing up with a father who joined the Church after growing up on a Navajo reservation, King extends her unique perspective as a historian and a Diné Latter-day Saint to examining and discussing what it means to experience life as a Navajo Latter-day Saint. This is no small task. In less able hands, or perhaps simply in other hands, this text could have been patronizing, short-sighted in assessing complicated relationships, or simply inadequate to the task of respectfully sharing the lives of its subjects. It is to King’s great credit that this book is none of those things.
Just as the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants are ultimately books about families (Lehi’s on one hand, and an extended clan of Smiths, Whitmers, and associates on the other), Diné dóó Gáamalii is a book about the author’s family—both her nuclear family and her extended network of Diné kinfolk. Rarely has such a tightly written ethnographic history felt so personal. I feel indebted to King for allowing readers such as myself to share in her family’s private lives. To expose one’s culture and family to outside inspection, as King does, is among the most perilous and public revelations one can make. It is risky.
More on this risk below. First, let’s get the basics about Diné dóó Gáamalii out of the way. King traces Diné experiences with the Church over the last hundred and fifty years, though her focus is mainly on the last eighty years, with the emphasis on the past fifty years and creeps into the present. There is much on missionaries (Diné, white European, and Pacific Islander), Church schools (both on Diné lands today and their experiences at Brigham Young University), and a final chapter that traces the experiences of contemporary Diné in the Church today. It is an academic work that appeals to the finer sensibilities of an academic readership while never feeling exclusionary. It is a book that I could recommend to anyone because it is both a personal and a public work—the stories throughout are well-rendered, often touching, and always purposefully set forth to remind its readers that Diné are a living, breathing, thinking, experiencing people today, just as they were a hundred years ago. This is a vital point—King is exceptionally careful to render her subjects in living color, with as many of their complicated and sometimes contradictory experiences and statements as she can fit onto a page. The publishers at the University of Kansas should be commended for the wonderful dust jacket and the book’s clean internal format.
Returning to the idea of risk—the risks of this book are twofold. First, it can trick the reader into thinking they understand the experiences that unfold in its pages. The lure of the parasocial is a constant in our modern world, and to assume that one understands the Latter-day Saint experience of the Diné if one has not lived it, would be a massive mistake. King relates one experience where a fellow student in a class made some assumptions about the experiences of Native American children in the Latter-day Saint Placement program that drew hundreds of them from their homes into the homes of Latter-day Saints (p. 93-95). Though King recognizes that many such children did suffer, her classmate’s lack of appreciation for the complexities of their situation upset her greatly. Perhaps the preferable approach would have been to allow the children to speak for themselves.
So, rather than replicate this mistake, let me just add a picture of my copy of this book. Specifically with review copies of books, I will sometimes dog-ear a page that contains a particularly significant point.
I have reviewed quite a few books over the last eight years. None of them look like this. Practically every page in the center of this book struck me as being significant for this review. I had to stop using this marking strategy because it completely crumbled under the weight of this book’s significance. I could literally pick any random passage from most of these pages to demonstrate this book’s sensitivity to issues of power, culture, and identity. I strongly recommend that readers intrigued by 20th-century Mormon history or the relationship and conflict between Latter-day Saint and indigenous identities up to the present pick this book up. If the academic angle does not appeal, the human-interest aspect might—the stories King shares about her family and friends expose layers of Diné, Utah, and Church history that she is perhaps uniquely qualified to assess.
The other risk to a book like this is in balancing the positive and the negative—the Diné experience with Latter-day Saint colonists and federal agencies such as the Bureau of Indian Affairs have often been marred by violence of every kind. While this book would be impressive if it only examined these conflicts, King is able to draw a nuanced picture of Latter-day Saint- Diné relationships in the late 20th century that traces the border between Diné and Mormon that her community lives on. This is not to say that King writes as an apologist—perhaps the most impressive achievement of this book is that she captures the good and the bad with an insider’s voice and an outsider’s eye for detail.
Diné dóó Gáamalii is a beautifully written book that should meet the needs of a diverse body of scholars, both those interested in Navajo history and those more focused on Latter-day Saint history. I strongly recommend it.