“The Sons of Gunshooter” Authors Read at Bright Side Bookshop in Flagstaff, AZ

Date: Sunday, March 1, 2026

Time: 5-6 p.m., MST

Place: Bright Side Bookshop, 18 N San Francisco St, Flagstaff, AZ

Authors Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons will read from their new book, The Sons of Gunshooter, at Bright Side Bookshop in Flagstaff. The reading will be followed by a Q&A and book signing. The event is free and open to the public. 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. 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 is a member of the Diné Studies Conference, based in Window Rock, Arizona.

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.”