Navajo Book

These are a people with a rich and fascinating history that the old ones recount in legends of the four winds, ancestral spiders, and terrifying monsters slain by twin warrior brothers. These are a people who were pushed around the southwest by the Spanish, the Mexicans, and the United States army, and survived it all in a quiet, determined way. This tribe, more numerous than any in North America - some 200,000 in all - now manages an increasingly sophisticated system of self-government, education, and justice. These men and women, boys and girls, live according to a hard-to-define but exacting standard of behavior called hozho in their language, which loosely translates into English as "to walk in beauty." These are the Navajo. Susanne and Jake Page here share their knowledge of Navajo life. Susanne's crisp color photographs depict Navajo medicine people, weavers, ranch hands, construction workers, schoolchildren and tribal elders.

Unlike the work of photojournalists, who visit a place for a few weeks to make their pictures and leave, Susanne's photographs come out of more than two decades of personal contact with Navajo families. Respect for the people she works among has earned her the trust that makes her photographs as intimate as they are. The same is true for Jake Page's text. It has grown out of an earned mutual respect that enables Jake to describe ceremonies, to retell creation stories, to recount personal interactions, and to record and pass on things that few other non-Navajo people, much less writers, have ever been exposed to.