The University of Arizona Press
August 20, 2026
C-SPAN’s Amercan History TV features a book talk with Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons authors of The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story. Jennifer Nez Denetdale, co-editor of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, moderated the wide-ranging discussion that was filmed at Collected Works Bookstore in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in March 2026. Dorothy Denetclaw is Tótsohnii born for Tł’ááschí’í. She has lived in Indian Wells, Arizona, her whole life. 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, and is a member of the Diné Studies Conference, based in Window Rock, Arizona.
Denetclaw talked about how she came to write this book with Fitzsimons, starting with stories from her childhood: “I didn’t see a white person or hear a word of English until I was nine years old. But during that time, my father talked to us and told us ‘this what happened.’ And he told me all these stories. . . . . Later on, I remembered my daddy’s stories and I started writing. Then Navajo Times newspaper reporter Cindy Yurth wrote the stories with me, and put it in the paper. . . . Matt read the stories in the newspaper and asked Cindy Yurth for my number.”
Watch the fascinating conversation in the video here.
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.
