My newest book, Diné dóó Gáamalii, is now available. I am honored that the Lyda Conley Series on Trailblazing Indigenous Futures published the book through the University Press of Kansas (UPK). I enjoyed working with the UPK with my first book. In college, one of the first impactful books that I read was David Wallace Adams’s Education for Extinction that UPK published as well. I recently wrote a blog piece with Tai S. Edwards in honor of Adams.

Diné dóó Gáamalii (“Navajo and Mormon”) focuses on Diné Latter-day Saint experiences in the Southwest Indian Mission, congregations, and church educational programs such as the Indian Student Placement Program, seminaries, and Brigham Young University American Indian services and studies. This book features the voices of Diné Latter-day Saints from oral histories, the development of their communities, and how their embrace of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints affected their Diné identity between the 1950s and early 2000s.

My book addresses how Diné Latter-day Saints like my father developed and engaged with a community that faced a flux of challenges and contradictions in the late twentieth century. Diné dóó Gáamalii communities persisted through tense linkages of different Diné, Indigenous, and Mormon peoples. My contribution of this book, Diné dóó Gáamalii, is to couch a narrative of twentieth-century Native American Latter-day Saints in the intersecting, although sometimes conflicting, contexts and circles of Diné and Latter-day Saint communities through Diné Latter-day Saint perspectives.

There are many people and groups that supported this work and made it possible.

Thank you for your consideration! Ahéhee’!