“The Sons of Gunshooter” Authors Read at Bosque Redondo Memorial, Fort Sumner Historic Site, NM

Date: Saturday, May 30, 2026

Time: 1 p.m., MDT

Place: Sumner Historic Site and Bosque Redondo Memorial, 3647 Billy the Kid Drive, Fort Sumner, NM

Authors Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons will talk about their new book, The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story, at the Bosque Redondo Memorial in New Mexico. The presentation will be followed by a time for questions and answers, and book signing. This site is the setting for early chapters in The Sons of Gunshooter. At the Bosque Redondo Reservation in the 1860s, the U.S. Army used scorched earth policies to forcibly remove Diné (Navajo) and Ndé (Mescalero Apache) people from their traditional homelands to this inhospitable outpost along the Pecos River. The Diné call this the Long Walk, when over 50 different groups made the 300+ mile journey over a period of nearly three years. Program is included with admission of $7 for adults and free for children 16 and younger, Native People, Museum of New Mexico Foundation members, and Friends of Bosque Redondo Memorial members.

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.”