Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century

Winner: Gaspar Perez de Villagra Award

The Diné have been a pastoral people for as long as they can remember; but when livestock reductions in the New Deal era forced many into the labor market, some scholars felt that Navajo culture would inevitably decline. Although they lost a great deal with the waning of their sheep-centered economy, Colleen O’Neill argues that Navajo culture persisted.

O’Neill’s book challenges the conventional notion that the introduction of market capitalism necessar...