The University of Arizona Press
March 5, 2026
The University of Arizona Press podcast features an interview with Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons authors of The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story. Dorothy Denetclaw is Tótsohnii born for Tł’ááschí’í. She has lived in Indian Wells, Arizona, her whole life. Dorothy is a survivor of the U.S. government’s boarding school system. After studying business in college, she worked on community development projects across the Navajo Nation as an organizer, activist, and interpreter. Dorothy especially enjoys researching her family history, a legacy for her children and grandchildren. Matt Fitzsimons is a former newspaper reporter and the author of The Counterfeiters of Bosque Redondo: Slavery, Silver, and the U.S. War Against the Navajo Nation. He lives in San Diego, California, serves on the board of the Gaslamp Quarter Historical Foundation, and is a member of the Diné Studies Conference, based in Window Rock, Arizona.
When asked about how she met Matt and decided to tell her family’s story in a book, Dorothy replied, “Throughout my childhood, my father was always telling stories about his family, and we would all sit and listen to him, and it was like watching a movie. I developed a passion to record his stories. Beginning in the 1990s, I teamed up with Navajo Times reporter Cindy Yurth to write my father’s stories and publish them in the Navajo Times. . . . Matt read the stories in the Navajo Times and contacted Cindy who called me and told me that Matt wanted to talk to me.”
Listen to the full podcast here, on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
About the book:
In 1919, the brother of one of the West’s most famous Indian traders was shot to death in a remote corner of the Navajo Nation.
Part history, part true crime, The Sons of Gunshooter reexamines the killing and subsequent murder trial, while simultaneously embedding the story in a much larger saga of colonization and resistance. The result is a book that’s sweeping in its scope and surgical in its approach. Rewinding the clock to 1868, the authors follow the intertwining paths of two families to offer a riveting, deeply personal account that has been hailed as “a new way of doing historiography.”
One of the authors is a descendant of participants in the case; the other is an investigative journalist. By merging Diné oral traditions with archival evidence, they succeed in upending one false narrative after another.
