Customer Reviews

When Literacy Empowers: Navajo Language in Print

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This book isn't really about native literacy, it's a postmodern ethnography (ugh) which is about what it's like being an anthropologist wandering around Navajoland looking for the occasional scrap of paper with written Navajo on it. It's like Derrida doing a travel magazine article, except with more jargon.

Since this is an ethnography, you occasionally learn a fact or two, like the fact that there's more things written in English than in Navajo -- which the reader could possibly have predicted from the facts that Navajoland is surrounded by the US, and that most Navajos were not taught to read and write Navajo in school. But because this book is from the bad old days of 1980s postmodern anthro, the facts are few and far between, and the book's 200-odd pages are filled with navel-gazing about how challenging it is to write about this subject which the author would be writing about (i.e., Navajos and literacy) if he weren't instead writing ABOUT writing about it.

If this were exactly the only book ever written about Native Americans and/or literacy, it might be worth reading. Lucking, there are other books, which makes it hard for me to imagine there ever being a reason to spend time reading this empty and uninformative book. Instead, consider these, just to name a few:
Margaret Bender's /Signs of Cherokee Culture: Sequoyah's Syllabary in Eastern Cherokee Life/
Deborah House's /Language Shift Among the Navajos: Identity Politics and Cultural Continuity/
Ross Woodruff's /The Development of the Navajo Orthography and the Translation of the Navajo New Testament/
Bernard Spolsky's /Linguistics in practice: The Navajo reading study/