“The Sons of Gunshooter” Authors Read at New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe

Date: Saturday, August 15, 2026

Time: 11 a.m., MDT

Place: New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Ave, Santa Fe, NM

Authors Dorothy Denetclaw and Matt Fitzsimons will talk about their new book, The Sons of Gunshooter: A Navajo Resistance Story, at the New Mexico History Museum on August 15. The presentation will be followed by a time for questions and answers, and book signing. This free and open to the public event is part of the city-wide celebration of Santa Fe Indian Market weekend.

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.”