| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.3

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 38.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Working the Navajo Way: Labor and Culture in the Twentieth Century. By Colleen O'Neill. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2005. xvii + 235 pp. Illustrations, maps, table, notes, bibliography, index. $29.95.)

For many Americans, Indian imagery remains linked with a mythical past and a dysfunctional present. If Indians inhabited an idyllic pre-capitalist wilderness prior to contact, their experience with modernity doomed them to a marginal existence in which giving up their culture offered the only escape. This condition accounted for hopeless social problems. Classics in American literature, film, and scholarly studies contributed to this simplistic view. Colleen O'Neill set her study, Working the Navajo Way, in this context to bring attention to such problems of perspective. The book examines the period of rapid economic change from the 1930s–1970s, when a decline in subsistence options persuaded Navajo workers to seek wage-labor opportunities on and off the reservation. O'Neill's treatment of this era portrays Navajo workers not as passive victims of capitalism, but as productive members of society who manage cultural changes brought by the market and who, in turn, influenced the nature of the market. She raises important questions about how the market integration of Navajo labor affected Navajo identity and "how Navajo cultural practices and values influenced what it meant to work for wages or to produce commodities for the capitalist marketplace" (p. 3).

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