| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Under Sacred Ground: A History of Navajo Oil, 1922–1982. By Kathleen P. Chamberlain. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000. xii, 177 pp. $35.00, ISBN 0-8263-2043-0.)

Professor Kathleen P. Chamberlain's Under Sacred Ground offers a sound study of Navajo-Anglo relations in the twentieth century. This chronicle tells of the manipulation of the Navajo Nation and the exploitation of its natural resources by corporate and public agencies of the United States. The story is related to the reader in terms of the market economy and the landscape and with reference to its mythic context. 1

It is noted that Chamberlain made the effort to study the Navajo language in order better to grasp the nature of events involved in the history of Navajo oil between 1922 and 1982. This kind of commitment to scholarship is all too rare in Native American studies. But, as Chamberlain indicates, it is essential to understanding the thought processes of the Navajo leadership. In this, she is in agreement with Theodore Mommsen, the only historian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, who wrote that historians who do research without the pertinent languages are subject to failure. He noted, 2

The greatest evil which comes from this is not the individual misunderstandings which result, but the lack of intellectual penetration of the subject. A people's language is always its greatest, most enduring, and most multifarious monument.

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