Description
Book SynopsisDrawing on Dine stories from the LDS Native American Oral History Project, Farina King illuminates the mutual entanglement of Indigenous identity and religious affiliation, showing how their Dine identity made them outsiders to the LDS Church and, conversely, how belonging to the LDS community made them outsiders to their Native community.
Trade Review"An insightful and fascinating study into the lived experiences of Dine Latter-day Saints. It is important as the fullest examination of that history yet published."—Times and Seasons
"In this beautifully rendered autoethnography, Farina King reckons honestly with the injustices of settler colonialism but refuses to grant it a controlling role. Instead, she centers the voices of her own DinÉ family and other DinÉ dÓÓ GÁamalii, Navajo Mormons, showing how they have built lives faithful both to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and to DinÉ identity and peoplehood all at the same time."—Tisa Wenger, professor of divinity, American studies, and religious studies at Yale University, and author of We Have a Religion: The 1920s Pueblo Indian Dance Controversy and American Religious Freedom
"This history illuminates the complexity of relating simultaneously to DinÉ and Latter-day Saint worlds. Richly textured by oral histories and the history of the author’s family, it attends closely to the diversity of views and practices among DinÉ Latter-day Saints."—Matthew W. Dougherty, author of Lost Tribes Found: Israelite Indians and Religious Nationalism in Early America
Table of Contents
- List of Images
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. Diné dóó Gáamalii: Navajo Latter-day Saints
- 2. Gáamalii Bina’nitiní: Missionaries
- 3. Ólta’ Gáamalii: “Mormon School”
- 4. Sodizin Bá Hooghan: Church
- 5. Beyond Diné Bikéyah
- 6. Red Power at BYU
- 7. Diné dóó Gáamalii Perspectives
- Epilogue
- Appendix: Oral History Interviews and Oral History Sources
- Glossary
- Notes
