Navajo Historical Selections: Selected, Edited and Translated from the Navajo

Description

The selected articles were published in Navajo in a monthly newspaper: Adahooni igii. The newspaper was printed on a single folded sheet of newsprint and distributed from 1943 to 1957 throughout the Reservation and was a predecessor of the contemporary Navajo Times. Adahooni igii was published by the Navajo Agency of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in Window Rock, Arizona and contributed to the standardization of Navajo orthography. The only widely available texts intended for a Navajo audience up to that point had been religious publications and parts of Diyin God Bizaad – the Bible. The paper was edited by Robert W. Young and William Morgan, Sr. whose task it was to create a simplified Navajo alphabet with Roman letters found on an English typewriter keyboard. They write in the introduction: “We have endeavored to select the best of these historical accounts, to publish them bilingually in the present volume, and it is our hope that they may be of interest to all persons and students of Navajo history.” We find stories about the traditional Navajo country-about the Four Sacred Mountains and how the clans were created, as well as a story about Navajo scouts on the trail of Geronimo. Articles about the livestock reduction period and the resulting economic and social disaster and the long range 10 year rehabilitation program after World War II are also included.