A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body by Wendy Shelly Greyeyes (review)

Abstract

S P R I N G & F A L L 2 0 2 0 W I C A Z O S A R E V I E W Greyeyes starts this book with an example familiar to many community members, which is a collision of interests in a public Diné forum on education. Any Diné person knows and has likely attended one of these forums. This example illustrates an ongoing theme of the book: the intersecting mess of authority that affects the education system and its legacy within the larger context of Native nations and the US government. This book aims to demystify and contextualize one of the longest and most frustrating institutions within the Navajo Nation— education— making an important contribution to the ways that decolonial theory can be put into practice institutionally and politically. Chapter 1 focuses on the meaning and practice of decolonization within American Indian communities and how this theory might be applied to the particular example of Diné education. I admit that the mess of jurisdictions, agencies, acronyms, and stakeholders was confusing in the beginning. However, I found that Greyeyes purposefully avoided the trap of presenting a tidy timeline of events, which would be a disservice to the complexity. The most important moment for me in chapter 1 is when she argues that Diné people typically focus on the future and generations A History of Navajo Nation Education: Disentangling Our Sovereign Body by Wendy Shelly Greyeyes University of Arizona Press, 2022