Peter has listened to the stories old timers heard from their grandparents. He's read BIA records back to the dawn of time (well, maybe not quite that far). He's read Navajo council minutes and memos going back to the founding of that body. There are over 500 sources in the bibliography.

But while recording the documented facts, he has also told the human story of the Navajo people. I suspect that this story has much in common with the experiences of other Native American groups in the USA.

The ever-changing attitudes of White Americans to the people who first inhabited this land have left a trail of tragedy in their wake. The attitudes are shaped more by the exigencies of the dominant culture than by the Native people. The common thread is paternalism. "Move the Indians out of the way." "Christianize and educate the uncivilized." "Keep them on their reservations." 'Sell off the reservations and make them assimilate." "Make them change before they destroy their land." "Don't live up to 19th century treaties, it's unfair to white hunters and anglers." "Open up state-run casinos because the Indians don't deserve all this wealth, and our state is short of money." The pattern is the same whether we look at the Diné, the Dakota who live Redwood Falls, Minnesota, where I went to high school, or the Ojibwe who live just a few miles north of Little Blake Lake (and a few miles east and 25 miles northwest ã that's another story of Native people jerked around by changes in White attitudes).

What's different for the Navajos is cultural survival. Few Native groups have been as successful at this. For the Din´, survival depended upon relative isolation, the determination of many strong people, and good fortune (that reinforced the Navajo traditional religion). The Navajos suffered their own form of the ancient Babylonian exile. And, like the Hebrews who returned, from Babylon, the survivors of The Long Walk brought a strengthened sense of identity back to Diné Bikéyah, the Navajos' country.

The mixed blessings of lumber, coal, oil, and uranium are part of the story. So are political leaders as the Navajos found ways to organize themselves politically for self-preservation. Adaptation has been as important as cultural survival. (When Indians Became Cowboys documents part of that adaptation.)

Tony Hillerman's Navajo police officers were part of that adaptation. Before the organization of a Navajo police force, BIA officers and FBI agents were law enforcement on the Navajo reservation-- now called the Navajo Nation. And the men and women that the fictional Joe Leaphorn, Jim Chee, and Bernadette Manuelito represent haven't been around a whole lot longer than Hillerman's characters.

In fact, there's a whole lot that's new in Diné Bikéyah at the beginning of the 21st century. Of course, if the Navahos are going to continue their success, there must be. Just as there must be cultural preservation. That's the value of Peter Iverson's book. It's a record of what's preceded now. If any of us are going to make choices about how to adapt and what to preserve, we ought to know about the choices our predecessors made. Once again Peter, thanks for the book.