The first comprehensive anthology of Navajo (Diné) literature — poetry, fiction, memoir, and essay by Diné writers spanning the 20th and 21st centuries. Essential for any editorial voice writing about the canyon country and Colorado Plateau that is home to the Navajo Nation — a reminder that this land has a rich, living literary tradition in English and Navajo.
The first comprehensive anthology of Diné literature — poetry, fiction, memoir, essay — and one of the most important editorial projects to come out of the Southwest in the last decade. Belin, Berglund, Jacobs, and Webster assembled this reader from contemporary Diné writers and elders, and what you get is the canyon country as it is written from inside rather than from outside. That distinction is the whole point of the book, and it changes how you read every other book on the DM shelf that has an opinion about this region.
The anthology is not a monolith. The Diné writers in it disagree with each other, about craft, about politics, about how much of the traditional material belongs on the page at all. That disagreement is part of what the book is teaching. The public version of Diné culture — the one that shows up in non-Native writing about the Southwest — flattens a thousand-year continuous literary tradition into a set of scenic gestures. This book refuses the flattening. You meet poets in conversation with the Beats, memoirists in conversation with the academy, elders writing about sheep and uranium and the specific geographies of the reservation.
I bring this book up the first time somebody on the river or in a camp starts using any version of the word vanished to describe Indigenous peoples in the Southwest. The Diné Reader is the answer. They didn't vanish. They are, right now, writing some of the best contemporary American literature, in English and in Diné Bizaad, and you can read it in this book. That fact should change how the rest of any given conversation about the region goes.
The book is also, practically, a working resource for anybody trying to write about canyon country without committing the usual non-Native writerly errors. Every piece in the anthology is a small schooling in what sincere representation of a Native landscape reads like — whose voice gets to describe the land, which words are available, what a sentence about a mesa owes the mesa. You can learn a lot of craft from reading these pieces. Most non-Native writers would have better first drafts if they had worked through the anthology once before trying.
Read it slowly. Read it alongside whatever else you're reading about the region. The book is not a substitute for reading any specific Diné writer full-length — Luci Tapahonso, Sherwin Bitsui, Laura Tohe, all have their own collections you should also own — but it is the single best introduction to a contemporary literary tradition that most outside readers have never been told about, and the revelation of that tradition is genuinely important.
