Search results for ""Author Howard M. Bahr""

The Navajo are the largest tribe of Indians in the United States and, due in part to a fascination with their relative isolation, have been analyzed in numerous documentaries. In this timely supplement to the Navajo Bibliography, Howard M. Bahr engages in a unique postmodern approach to his bibliography of the Navajo culture by combining health-related, artistic, economic, religious, social, scientific, and other literature on the Navajo into one study. The bibliography skillfully downplays disciplinary boundaries by unifying literature that has previously only offered separate classification and access. The more than 6,300 entries are selectively annotated and cover Navajo literature from 1970 to 1990, as well as newly discovered literature, including Franciscans' literature, that was not included in the original Navajo Bibliography. This bibliography is not only the most comprehensive bibliography to date in its coverage of more than two decades of new material, but the only source that supplements the professional literature with local and cultural works. An exhaustive resource that effectively doubles the expanse of Navajo literature surveyed and indexed, Diné Bibliography to the 1990s is an invaluable tool that both highlights the literature already available and expands such data to include coverage of genres that have been previously underrepresented.

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Continuing where the author's previous volume left off, The Navajo as Seen by the Franciscans, 1920-1950: A Sourcebook picks up the story of one of the great cultural confluences in American history. It reflects, from the standpoint of the Franciscan missionaries, the joining of two starkly different ways of life. The years between 1920 and 1950 were not tame times for the Navajos. They were faced with epidemics, a federal education policy that sometimes fostered "child stealing," the era of stock-reduction and the attendant impoverishment of the entire tribe, Navajo political reorganization, a failed mid-1930s attempt to shift Navajo education from boarding schools to day schools, and continual deep underfunding of Navajo programs until the U.S. Congress, spurred by unprecedented media attention to Navajo poverty, in 1950 passed the Navajo-Hopi Rehabilitation Bill. Consisting of both primary—first-hand accounts of families visited, events observed, and actions taken in which the writer participated directly—and secondary—the historical record based on the writings of others—sources of Franciscan writings, the Franciscan literature sampled in this book mirrors the Navajo of the early and mid-20th century. The texts created by the Franciscans and their associates in the course of their labors, constitute a seldom-quoted, little-read, generally difficult-to-access literature of enormous importance to the history of Navajo-white relations. Many of the Franciscans who came to the reservation stayed there for their entire working lives, spending decades learning the Navajo language and serving the population. Their writings to each other, whether published in mission journals or preserved in their correspondence, present an intimate view of Navajo life as observed by missionaries dedicated to serving the Navajo, burying their dead, serving as their advocates with the institutions of white America, teaching their children, and trying themselves to learn the Navajo language.

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The most complete overview and assessment of Mormon village studies available, this volume extends the canon twofold. First, it presents a rich composite view of nineteenth-century Mormon life in the West as seen by qualified observers who did not just pass through but stopped and studied. Second, it connects that early protoethnography to scholarly Mormon village studies in the twentieth century, showing their proper context in the thriving field of community studies.Based mostly on nine famous travellers’ accounts of life among the Mormons, including Richard Burton, Elizabeth Kane, Howard Stansbury, John Gunnison, and Julius Benchley—Bahr’s volume introduces these talented observers, summarises and analyses their observation, and constructs a holistic overview of Mormon village life. He concludes by tracing the rise and continuity of Mormon village studies in the twentieth century, beginning with Lowry Nelson’s 1923 research in Escalante, Utah. Over the following three decades, the genre expanded beyond Nelson and his students, becoming more sophisticated and interdisciplinary; by the mid-1950s it was a subfield within the respected arena of community studies. Researchers continued to study Mormon communities in the following decades and into the twenty-first century.

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