History that will make history: UNM professors create groundbreaking tribal government textbook
January 31, 2024 - Savannah Peat
This story is one for the history books, which is fitting, as the news itself is about a history book.
A devoted team of UNM Native American professors are planning, developing and writing the first-ever tribal government textbook for young adults.
Although dedicated does not even begin to cover the efforts of American Studies Professor Jennifer Denetdale and Ph.D. student Kara Roanhorse and Native American Studies Professors Wendy Greyeyes and Lloyd Lee, it’s a start.
“We're all academics. For all of us, what's important is that in our scholarship, we teach the ethics and responsibility to our respective tribal nations and our communities that we endorse and support in community-based research. All of us do that as part of our scholarship. It's part of our scholarship for all of us to do this well,” Denetdale said.
After informal surveys, personal testimonies, and firsthand experiences, Denetdale built this team to create a government textbook that not only filled the gaps experienced by Diné high school students but celebrated Diné authors. As she notes, in graduate school, there were so few Diné scholars publishing in academia. Today, Dine Studies is its discipline and rich with so many Diné researching, writing and building for the next generations.
“I was working with my grandson, who was taking a government class, and I was appalled at the quality of the textbook. I was sitting there helping him through the course, and I told our scholars that we need to write a new textbook,” she said.
Read more in the UNM Newsroom
