Guardian of the Garden

This chapter describes what the author saw while watching the birdhouse outside her bedroom window. She enjoyed watching the domesticity of western bluebirds. The author then contrasts the beauty of the bluebird and the menace of the coachwhip. An ancient battle fraught with symbolism was being fought in the author's high desert garden. In Navajo culture, a bluebird is an allegory of creativity and creation, but a snake communicates with the supernatural. In Christian religions, the snake is blamed for the mess we've inherited, all because of a woman's desire for more. The author maintains a healthy respect for snakes and finds them fascinating, beautiful, and maligned. On the other hand, the author is an active advocate for bluebirds.

Navajo Archaeology

The dominant anthropological and archaeological narrative of “Navajo” culture is that upon entering the northwestern New Mexico in the sixteenth century, bands of Athapaskan hunter-gatherers began an acculturative process that led them to adopt and assimilate Pueblo, Spanish, Mexican, and American cultural institutions. The anthropological and archaeological concept “Navajo,” created through Western scholarship by non-Diné, does not align with Diné worldview or conceptions of self and history. Instead, it reaffirms Western scholarship as legitimate, while it marginalizes and brands Diné history as “alternative,” or as not really history. A review of theories that underlie Navajo archaeological literature reveals that the genesis of the erroneous tenets about Diné culture stem from late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas that researchers have only recently begun to re-examine.