The University of Arizona Press

April 19, 2024

This insightful volume delves into land-based Diné and Dene imaginaries as embodied in stories—oral, literary, and visual. Like the dynamism and kinetic facets of hózhǫ́,* Restoring Relations Through Stories takes us through many landscapes, places, and sites. Renae Watchman introduces the book with an overview of stories that bring Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or Shiprock Peak, the sentinel located in what is currently the state of New Mexico, to life. The book then introduces the dynamic field of Indigenous film through a close analysis of two distinct Diné-directed feature-length films, and ends by introducing Dene literatures.

While the Diné (those from the four sacred mountains in Dinétah in the southwestern United States) are not now politically and economically cohesive with the Dene (who are in Denendeh in Canada), they are ancestral and linguistic relatives. In this book, Watchman turns to literary and visual texts to explore how relations are restored through stories, showing how literary linkages from land-based stories affirm Diné and Dene kinship. She explores the power of story to forge ancestral and kinship ties between the Diné and Dene across time and space through re-storying of relations. Read an excerpt from the book’s first chapter below.

Per Diné protocol, I open with a decolonial Diné approach, “kodóó hózhǫ́ dooleeł,” translated as “it begins in beauty” or “in beauty it begins.” Situated in northwest New Mexico, within the four sacred mountains, Tsé Bit’a’í means “Winged Rock,” “Rock with Wings,” or “Wings of Rock,” but is called Shiprock Peak (or just Shiprock). Tsé Bit’a’í is located on the outskirts of a reservation town formerly known in Diné bizaad (the Navajo language) as Naat’áanii Nééz (“tall leader”), but it is now called Shiprock too. The town is a flourishing reservation metropolis on the northern edge of the great Diné Nation, which spans the states of Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. Locals are primarily Diné. Historian Jennifer Nez Denetdale explains, “We call ourselves the Diné or The People. We also name ourselves Náhookah Diné (Earth Surface People) and Bilá’ ashdla’ (FiveFingered Ones).” Shiprock (the town) prides itself as the “Naashjizhii’ Capital of the World.” Naashjizhii’ is dried steamed corn. This designation of Diné culinary pride is featured on the cover of every issue of the annually published Shiprock Magazine, edited by Eugene B. Joe. The magazine is organized by the Shiprock Historical Society (est. 2010), whose aim is to preserve “the cultural significance of the town, the annual Northern Navajo fair and the historical growth of the community.”

Existence, presence, being, and places are reliant on names, but whose version of a place-name, whose toponym, matters? Shiprock is an English name that eclipses two distinct Navajo names: one a landmark, Tsé Bit’a’í; and the other a nearby reservation community, Naat’áanii Nééz. In N. Scott Momaday’s The Names: A Memoir (1976), he makes a grave error. He refers to “Shiprock, which is called in Navajo Naat’aaniineez [sic] (literally ‘tall chief’; the town takes its name from the great monolith that stands nearby in an arid reach of the San Juan Basin). The name Shiprock, like other Anglicizations in this region, seems incongruous enough, but from certain points of view—and from the air, especially—the massive rock Naat’aaniineez resembles very closely a ship at sea.” The tendency for settlers to claim and name lands that they are unfamiliar with is not surprising; however, Momaday lived in Shiprock from 1936 to 1943. That he would retell a settler’s account of the anglicization of Tsé Bit’a’í is surprising. This demonstrates the prominence of settler narratives eclipsing Indigenous ones. Furthermore, Momaday misunderstands the meaning of Naat’áanii Nééz, which does not literally mean “tall chief.” It literally means “tall leader” or “tall one who speaks.” In the context of Shiprock, the town’s name meant “tall boss,” to describe the height of William Taylor Shelton (1869–1944), who in 1903 was assigned as superintendent for the San Juan Indian Agency by “President Theodore Roosevelt to go to New Mexico and establish the Shiprock Reservation for the Navaho [sic].” Momaday also attributes the wrong Navajo name to the pinnacle and does not acknowledge the Diné name Tsé Bit’a’í. Even more troubling is that he completely ignores the traditional Diné stories about Tsé Bit’a’í and privileges an “incongruous” colonial version. In 1860, prior to the Navajo Long Walk to Fort Sumner, Captain J. F. McComb called Tsé Bit’a’í “The Needle.” The Needle was replaced by the English name Ship Rock (two words) in 1870 because non-Navajo settlers believed that it resembled a nineteenth-century “full-rigged sailing schooner.” This renaming reflects an unimaginative and nonsensical nautical nomenclature that further stripped Tsé Bit’a’í of her origin stories. Place naming, and naming in general, is significant to Diné and other Indigenous Peoples. A narrative of “place links present with past and our personal self with kinship groups. . . . Our knowledges cannot be universalized because they arise from our experience with our places. This is why name-place stories matter: they are repositories of science, they tell of relationships, they reveal history, and they hold our identity.” Margaret Kovach’s observations are relevant to Tsé Bit’a’í and the stories of her presence.

Georges Erasmus is Dene, or Tłįchǫ (Dogrib), from Behchokǫ̀ (which means “Big Knife” and replaced the town’s former name, Rae-Edzo) in the Northwest Territories. He advocated for restoration of Dene place-names and turned to Dene literary autonomy: “We made our own history. Our actions were based on our understanding of the world. With the coming of the Europeans, our experience as a people changed. We experienced relationships in which we were made to feel inferior. . . . They began to define our world for us. They began to define us as well. Even physically, our communities and our landmarks were named in terms foreign to our understanding. We were no longer the actors—we were being acted upon. We were no longer naming the world—we were being named.” This instance of Tsé Bit’a’í’s place-name is a case in point. This act of replacing and renaming our storied places interrupted the process of becoming hózhǫ́, affecting communities on both sides of the Medicine Line. If recognized at all, our stories have been dismissed as quaint storytelling and mythologizing. In thinking about Tsé Bit’a’í, my maternal family’s hometown mother, I am grappling with how the regenerative hane’ responds as a corrective.