Restoring Relations Through Stories: From Dinétah to Denendeh

This insightful volume delves into land-based Diné and Dene imaginaries as embodied in stories--oral, literary, and visual. Like the dynamism and kinetic facets of hózhǫ́, * Restoring Relations Through Stories takes us through many landscapes, places, and sites. Renae Watchman introduces the book with an overview of stories that bring Tsé Bitʼaʼí, or Shiprock Peak, the sentinel located in what is currently the state of New Mexico, to life. The book then introduces the dynamic field of Indigenous film through a close analysis of two distinct Diné-directed feature-length films, and ends by introducing Dene literatures.

While the Diné (those from the four sacred mountains in Dinétah in the southwestern United States) are not now politically and economically cohesive with the Dene (who are in Denendeh in Canada), they are ancestral and linguistic relatives. In this book, Watchman turns to literary and visual texts to explore how relations are restored through stories, showing how literary linkages from land-based stories affirm Diné and Dene kinship. She explores the power of story to forge ancestral and kinship ties between the Diné and Dene across time and space through re-storying of relations.

*A complex Diné worldview and philosophy that cannot be defined with one word in the English language. Hózhǫ́ means to continually strive for harmony, beauty, balance, peace, and happiness, but most importantly the Diné have a right to it.

Renae Watchman (Diné and Tsalagi) is Bitter Water, born for Towering House, Bird Clan (Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma), and Red Running Through the Water. She is an associate professor of Indigenous studies at McMaster University and the co-editor of Indianthusiasm: Indigenous Responses.