This article draws upon ethnographic fieldwork within a Navajo community to illustrate how weaving knowledge and practices shape contemporary notions of community identity and belonging. The ongoing exchange of Navajo weaving taboos and the careful management of weaving teachings offers community members various opportunities to share and keep…

Navajo trading has been a crucial component of that tribe's localized economy for generations and has been the subject of much scholarship over the years. The role of the Navajo trader in influencing the types and styles of crafts that Navajos created as well as providing tribal members with an outlet for those items remains important to their…

The purpose of this study was to examine students' creativity when writing open-ended stories--across ethnicity, gender, and grades. Participants were 139 students, including 67 males and 72 females, from urban and rural areas of the southwestern United States. The students were in third, fourth, and fifth grades and included three ethnicities:…

The author has been teaching at the Navajo Nation's Dine College for 22 years--five at one of two main campuses and 17 at a remote branch campus in Crownpoint, New Mexico, where he went following his retirement after 30 years as an English professor at Allegheny College. Throughout his academic career, he has made a point of teaching beginning…

Roland S. Persson's (2012a) article addresses a concern that many educators have stressed in their theoretical models, namely the importance of the interaction between the individual and the environment, and the impact of culture on not only values and beliefs, but on behaviour. As Persson (2012a) points out these models all have merit, but he…

During the author's early years of high school, he made it his mission to do well. He is proud and honored to say that he has attended Dine College (Tsaile, Arizona). Dine College was the foundation of his college career. It allowed him to develop a sense of financial awareness and readiness and the right place for him to begin--financially. Now,…

The purpose of this study was to determine if there was a gender difference in how students perceived their classroom environment on the Navajo Nation public school. [The dissertation citations contained here are published with the permission of ProQuest LLC. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission. Copies of dissertations may be…

Kayenta is a rural community located in northeastern Arizona on a Navajo reservation. On the reservation, many families rely on their livestock for income, and as a result, many reservation high school students show a great interest in agricultural education. Having livestock on the reservation is not just a source of income, but also part of a…

In reading queer Native American images, Lisa Tatonetti (2010) criticizes film in which the "boundaries of nation in indigenous contexts are constructed and maintained by the heteronormative gaze" that restricts lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and two-spirit (LGBTQ2) representations. The author's own work differentiates the mere…

This paper discusses ways Dine peoples can use cultural knowledge to rebuild and decolonize the Navajo Nation. In the past, leaders, warriors, and all peoples worked together to sustain their community's way of life. These stories and strategies can be helpful in rectifying and resolving many challenges and problems Dine peoples face in the…

The Navajo Nation, comprising the largest land area allocated mainly to a Native American jurisdiction in the United States, offers a unique opportunity to enhance students' understandings of citizenship rights and sovereignty. For example, what does sovereignty mean on the reservation? What is the relationship between the Navajo Nation and the…

This article argues that federally-funded Indigenous teacher preparation programs housed at mainstream, predominantly White universities can be colonial and thus require significant focused work in order to ensure that they are not. The article has three interrelated objectives: first, to discuss efforts to prepare Indigenous teachers for…

The authors examined the relations between two socially oriented dimensions of student motivation and academic achievement of Native (Navajo) American and Anglo American students. Using confirmatory factor analysis, a multidimensional and hierarchical model was found to explain the relations between performance and social goals. Four first-order…

This paper uses Philip Deloria's "Indians in Unexpected Places" as a lens by which to understand the expectations and reviews of Navajo author Blackhorse Mitchell's "Miracle Hill." Written in Navajo English, the book, from an introduction by T. D. Allen to a number of reviews of the book in the popular press, consistently misrecognized the…

This paper outlines the ways that Navajo poetry was framed in the late 1960s and early 1970s, as "unsophisticated" and non-literary by the introductory materials written by non-Native Americans for collections of Native American poetry. At issue was a view that saw the use of Navajo English, a distinctive vernacular dialect, as a deficient form of…