|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
      
|
 |
 |
|
By BETTY WEBB Although he is the highly acclaimed Regents’ Professor of History at ASU, Peter Iverson still considers himself a student when it comes to the Southwest. The territory is vast, and so is its history. “Through no fault of my own, I was raised in northern California, but my grandfather was a Bureau of Indian Affairs employee at Keams Canyon, so I grew up hearing stories about Arizona and New Mexico,” Iverson says from his ASU office. “I always knew I’d end up here.” Before landing at ASU in 1986, Iverson taught at a Navajo college near Canyon de Chelly, working side by side with the very people his grandfather had so admired. The experience was profound and eventually helped shape his academic career. “I discovered that there were many, many false beliefs about the Navajo people,” Iverson explains. “They are often portrayed as being nomadic and rootless, but the truth is much to the contrary. Navajos have a strong sense of place, and their traditional stories tell them to live within the mountains they deem sacred. “And in terms of their assertiveness and ability to bring in new things and call them Navajo, they’re very much like the Americans. For instance, items we tend to think of as quintessential Navajo like the squash blossom necklace, they borrowed it from the Spanish explorers. That flower isn’t a squash, it’s actually a pomegranate blossom. And the horseshoe at the bottom of the necklace? Some people think that’s the Muslim crescent, also brought by the Spaniards. The Navajos saw these things, liked them and incorporated them into their art, and now those things are thought of as Navajo.” Iverson’s love of the Navajo people and culture recently culminated in two separate books: “Diné: A History of the Navajo” and “For Our Navajo People.” The second book grew out of the five-year research Iverson did for the first. “Actually, I thought about writing ‘Diné’ more than 30 years ago while I was in graduate school,” he says. “I started doing some research then, but didn’t really start going deep until five years ago. Then I was lucky to receive two fellowships that helped — one from the National Endowment for the Humanities and one from the Guggenheim Foundation. That freed me up for 18 months and made it possible for me to travel and do even more research.” Iverson also enlisted the help of Navajo photographer Monty Roessel, whose gorgeous color shots are scattered throughout the book. “I wanted to do this with a Navajo person,” Iverson says. “Monty’s photos really add a depth of emotion to the project that it might not have had otherwise. You know, this was really a difficult project. There was just so much ground to cover, and I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to do justice to my subject. For about five years, I’d wake up at 2 a.m. thinking that I just had to get it right or else!” While conducting his voluminous research, Iverson discovered hundreds of letters, speeches and petitions written by and for the Navajo. “And I just kept finding more and more stuff,” he says. “Once in a while you get a good idea, and here it was, the record of an indigenous people speaking for themselves. In these letters and petitions, you see them in the actual process of becoming the Navajo Nation, see their determination, their inner resources. It was just an amazing experience, and I knew I had the makings of yet another book.” Iverson pauses, then adds, “So that’s exactly what I did. Collected them and put them into ‘For Our Navajo People.’” READ IT
|
|
 |
|
| |
 © 2001-2002 East Valley Tribune |
HOME || CLASSIFIED || ADVERTISING |
