Shimá doo Shi ache’é’é Ołtá’igii

Reflections from a Diné mother and daughter’s doctoral degrees

Wendy S. Greyeyes, Delores Greyeyes

Introduction: Shimá and shi ache’é’é voices

Shimá (my mother/Delores) and shi ache’é’é (my daughter/Wendy) witnessed our own community transformation move from a thriving town to a struggling one after the closure of the Kayenta coal mine ^[1]. The economic signs were always there. Shi zhe’ee/shi hastiin (my father/husband) worked for over 40 years as a coal miner. Our family always saw the signs of an economic change, especially when the United Mine Workers Association’s parking lot filled with dusty trucks. We recognized that our town’s economic reality was built on the backs of these men and women. We knew the day would arrive when Navajo Generating Station (NGS) would close. As many activists praised the crumbling of the NGS towers, there were many of us that felt the painful sting of these crumbling stacks that symbolized our economic fate (Kutz, 2021). The coal mines fed into these towers, and they embodied our father’s and mother’s sweat and tears, each fighting for their family’s survival. Thus, our progression towards our Ph.D. is a story about survival, economy, and family. As Diné women and community members, ours is a fragile walk that came with one clear understanding—the desire to build a hopeful pathway for job security, opportunities, rebuilding our community, and most importantly, our own consciousness awakening to our peoples’ reality. The loss of the Navajo Generating Station shut down resulted in the loss of nearly $80 million dollars to the Navajo Nation in royalty revenues and $114 in employee benefits. Since the shutdown, the Navajo Nation has never found a comparative financial injection of resources. This has only fed into the continued “brain drain” of Navajos highly talented and highly skilled workers movement to the city. Just as the Navajo Nation tribal government has banked on their most enduring resources—natural resources that fuel the U.S. infrastructure and economy—it is our Diné people who have to find and carve that pathway to our economic success.

This experience shaped our consciousness to fuel a modern version of a self-enlightened consciousness within a colonized system that revealed the hard truth of our dependency upon the Navajo Nation government. Our fate as a family and a people relied on the decisions made by our elected president and tribal council members. Our consciousness changed as we recognized that as a mother and daughter, the meaning of our education changed. Through our education, we recognized that the pathway to our understanding of our modern conditions as Navajo women (Diné asdzáán) shaping our next steps and actions would have to embrace the realities of obtaining a higher degree and using our education to express our own articulations of our realities.

We write as a mother and daughter examining our Ph.D. perceptions and experiences. Together, we ask ourselves and each other why we pursued doctoral degrees and how the skills and knowledge we accessed are being used in our current work towards building those pathways with our people. We observe generational differences in the value of a graduate education and the expectations from our colleagues and institutional demands. In this chapter, we also step back from our personal perspectives and conduct a more analytical review of responses to our own questions. We clarify that we define liberal education as learning the tools, skills, and knowledge to become conscious of our institutions. A liberal education is to challenge historic and oppressive norms and to think critically about the history and current state of affairs impacting the social conditions impacting our Navajo communities. We also ground what a liberal education means for us with our work with the Navajo Nation—what does economic independence, cultural intelligence, emotional intelligence, and finally, giving back to our communities look like? We highlight suggestions for doctoral studies that are rooted in Diné epistemology and contemporary Navajo Nation observations and that also refer to the multi-purpose intentions for a liberal education. Finally, we outline recommendations for the future of liberal-minded institutions, particularly those that are Indigenous-serving.

Doctoral education and the Navajo Nation

As family and community members, we have always searched for the pathways out of an unstable economy. Navajo Nation has one of the largest Indian reservations in the United States with 27,413 mi². The Navajo Nation has approximately 143,435 population on the reservation. This is a significant change from the U.S. Census which reports in 2000 reporting 175,228, 2010 reporting 168,337, and 2020 reporting 148,105.^[2] The Navajo Nation endured the hardship of colonization when nearly 9,000 Navajos were forced to migrate to Bosque Redondo, New Mexico. In 1868, the Navajo people were permitted to return to their original homelands after signing a treaty with the federal government that signed away their rights as a sovereign nation. Since 1868, the Navajo people have fought to protect their lands and their inherent sovereign rights to govern themselves. The Navajo people have been able to retain their culture as a matrilineal society in which Navajo children take their mother’s clan and land is owned by the woman.

Figure 1: Map of Navajo Nation and the community of Kayenta, Arizona. Produced by Google My Maps. Link: https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1OT-bCaQssFmo-xXtjL_-C3YMvf-2xqU&usp=sharing

Diné women are the caretakers and the backbone of our families. Shimá (Delores) especially embodied these values. She was strict with all her daughters, ensuring that we valued and conquered our education. As her children, it is very clear to us that shimá ensured that our family valued formal education, a strategy that Diné scholars have described through robust research (see Tachine, 2017). And although I, shi ache’é’é (Wendy), reaped the benefits of a home that was educationally-secure, we as mother and daughter recognized the unique struggles that we both encountered in formal learning institutions away from home.

We approached our doctoral education through different paths and at unique points in our lives. Getting an education dominated our lives when shimá Delores completed her Ph.D. at age 55. Working for the Navajo Nation in Arizona, a fluent speaker of both Navajo and English, wife and mother to three daughters, she commuted between Kayenta to Phoenix to complete her coursework. Shi ache’é’é Wendy completed her Ph.D. at age 38, while working in Washington, DC. Unmarried with no children, she completed her Ph.D. in 10 years. While our experiences are different, we both had to weigh the economic realities of obtaining a Ph.D. For example, we both worked full time through our degrees—coursework, dissertation research, and writing—and each carried some level of student loan debt. But once the Ph.D. was completed, shimá continued to work for the Navajo Nation and shi ache’é’é transitioned into a tenure track position at University of New Mexico in Native American Studies.

While our approaches to our doctoral studies differed, we found our common ground: Our drive and passion for education was dictated by the daily realities of our town, Tó Dínéeshzhee’ (Kayenta, Arizona) and our family. For both of us, although a generation apart, grades mattered in our teenage years, and going to college was important because finding a fulfilling job was our goal. Now, for both of us, our doctoral degrees answer a bigger question of what it means to “come home to help our people,” whether they like it or not. We see our community clearly—jobs are scarce, and economic poverty is prevalent. Navajo Nation teachers, community members, elders, and tribal leaders continually impress upon our people the need for education as the key to escaping poverty. There are reportedly 212 doctorates for the population 25 years and over on the Navajo Nation (American Community Survey, ACS 2019), and a majority of those earned doctorates are women (134 female doctorates work and live on the Navajo Nation). Overall, women on the Navajo Nation have higher rates of bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, and doctorate degree completion than men (U.S. Census 2019). In addition, there is a strong linkage between educational attainment to our earnings (Table 1).

Graduate education, Masters and Philosophy Doctorates and professional degrees such as education doctorates and juris doctorates, for Navajo women increases their marketability within a highly wage dependent economic system. So many times, women enter jobs that are within the tribal government funded from federal transfers that places them into fields of education, social work, health care, public safety, transportation, and so forth. In considering goals for a Ph.D., the degree is typically used to offer expanded opportunities in Navajo Nation’s economic system that receives over half of its funding from federal transfers. Based on a report at the Navajo Nation tribal council in March 2020, the nation receives fifteen (15) percent profit from twelve (12) tribal enterprises. The remainder of Navajo Nation’s economy come from self-employment or small businesses, many times not owned by Navajos. Many jobs on the Navajo Nation do not require more than a high school degree. Navajos with a bachelor’s or master’s degree are placed into supervisory roles and are usually the exception, therefore the Ph.D. is rare.

Navajo Nation jobs list a Ph.D. under the category of “highly desired” degrees (Navajo Nation Division of Personnel Management, 2021), meaning there is a general interest from the governing body or decision makers, but is not a determining factor in hiring or general salary increases. Therefore, when acquiring a job on the Navajo Nation, it is not uncommon for the Ph.D. to be viewed as being overqualified, becoming more of a symbol of prestige and status and less about actual job advancement or salary increases. However, this does not dissuade many from pursuing their doctoral degrees. Instead, seeking the Ph.D. contributes to a phenomenon in which Navajo Nation’s investment in scholarships for college and university tuition is met with graduates departing and leaving for opportunities off the reservation, never to return—in transnational studies, this is a phenomenon known as “brain drain.” The loss of investment from the Navajo Nation creates a loss of a critical labor force needed to bolster impoverished and dependent economies (Bearchief 2017, p. 3; McKenzie et al., 2013).

Of cores and dependencies

It is important to understand the Navajo Nation’s economic system which is a dependent non-capitalist nation that exists on the peripheries of a core capitalist society, the United States. Immanuel Wallerstein (2007), renowned world systems theorist, describes a system of peripheral, core, and semi-dependent nations in a globalized society. It is imperative for other scholars and for universities that claim to serve Indigenous peoples to understand tribal economies in the U.S. and that an Indigenous Ph.D. is not simply a degree but is factored into a dependent, peripheral system that feeds into the core nation with natural resources, land, and its most talented and educated individuals. Many of us that have pursued a doctorate recognize that the degree legitimizes our work for the Navajo people. The irony is that although the Navajo Nation exists in the United States, it still operates as a peripheral nation. The Navajo Nation endured its own period of land theft, exploitation of its coal, oil, water, uranium, and other resources to feed the global might of the United States. In exchange, the Navajo Nation has often received a small fraction of the exploitative effort of companies and the federal government’s taking of these elements. In 2021, the Navajo Nation’s economic system has become ever more dependent on the federal government, with over half of the workers on the Navajo Nation employed by the tribal government. This is a critical element of the background in which our tribal nation’s workers continue to invest and develop their existing skills. This is the terrain upon which many Navajo women from Navajo Nation communities endure in order to maximize and make sense of their higher education experiences and doctoral degrees.

Shimá Ba’hané (My Mother Speaks)

I, Delores, pursed a Ph.D. for a number of reasons, which include filling a gap in law enforcement services through research knowledge.. During this period, I continued to work as a the Director for the Department of Corrections for the Navajo Nation. The goal for me was to find new strategies and ways to resolve the high incarceration of Navajo men and women. I needed the time to reflect through my doctoral studies, ways to build a correctional structure that honored our tradition as Diné (NavajoI also wanted to challenge myself by advancing my education to strengthening my critical analytical thinking and research and writing skills. In management of a large organization, strong skills in these areas are necessary to expand the knowledge base and to be innovative in delivery of services.

I spent what seems like a lifetime working with the Navajo Nation—the past 40 years—and still find that very little research is used for sound decision-making or to deliver social services in a meaningful and effective way. In most Navajo Nation programs, research is not a consideration when intervention and services are developed or to assess what works with Native peoples. I believe it is important when providing intervention services, a model that our Navajo people will respond to, to lower recidivism rates and increase access to services. In addition to wanting to help our nation to meet these needs, I sought to prepare myself for retirement from Navajo Nation government services and to teach at one of the Tribal Colleges or Universities. With my years of experience in social services and public safety, I have knowledge to share with young minds that have an interest in areas of human services and law enforcement and I am uniquely positioned to demonstrate that research can be done to support various interventions.

For example, in the Nations’ work on substance abuse detoxification, intervention services and post treatment services, I have been doing research to see what is being used with Native Americans and what is working for them as they enter and learn to plan and implement programs. My own dissertation focused on the relationship between formal schooling for Navajo students, educational policy, and the school to prison pipeline that is the story of many of our Navajo men today. This work gives pause as the Navajo Nation continues to incarcerate thousands of its own members. While there are services provided each year to detainees prior to release back into the community, these services are short term and not enough to make long-lasting change. Although many of these individuals are repeat offenders, short-term prison stays provide no time for intervention services. My research findings based on interviews and focus group sessions with Navajo men in prison recommended treatment using a “Navajo Intervention Model”^[3] to develop the necessary strategies to address the high incarceration rates. In addition, I was also inspired by the stories of my research participants who talked about their early schooling experiences and how no one defended them from inhumane treatment, and yet they kept returning to the discourse of “if I would have gotten help, using the Navajo teachings, I could have been taken a different path.”

Shi ache’é’é Ba’hané (My Daughter Speaks)

When I, Wendy, began my doctoral program, I had hopes of becoming a professor who would teach about issues impacting Native peoples in our country. I felt the appeal of grassroots organizing because it provided new pathways to make change for our people. I also recognized that ideas and thinking, in other words political and cultural ideologies, shaped attitudes and behavior. I felt a need to garner a mastery of the theories that would help me understand why our tribal nations and our dependency upon a global economy continued to manifest itself with each generation. It was important for me to find a program that had the reputation and offered the training to do social science research and the access to theories around globalization and political economies. I spoke with professors from my undergraduate program, and they shared a lot of advice and tips for entering a Ph.D. program. The organization of my application process created a group of “safe” schools (where I believed I could be admitted) and “wishful” schools (schools where I was unsure of admission). With a lot of work and feedback from my undergraduate advisor, Professor Matthew Snipp, my application started to take shape. Oddly, I was accepted into all my “wishful” schools and denied to many of the “safe” schools which were geographically closer to the Navajo Nation. What became evident to me in these decisions was that the admissions process of universities was subjective. I decided on the school that paid for a portion of my degree. As I learned the hard way as an undergraduate, school loans take a very long time to pay off. This continues to affect a lot of my decision making as a faculty member today.

As I have gotten older, I see that debt shapes outlook and decision making in a career as an academic. Ultimately, when I was half-way through my Ph.D. program, I desperately needed a job. Although my tuition and a small living stipend was provided to me, this did not fully cover my living expenses, so I made the tough decision to leave Chicago and return home to the Navajo Nation and the capital of Window Rock. There I secured a job with the Navajo Nation government. It is here that an awakening occurred in my life that gave more meaning to the purpose and significance of my Ph.D. program. I began to apply the knowledge and skills gained through the statistical and demographic analysis on educational data for the nation. I saw models of how we understood our education, but in turn I also saw how our entire educational system was dictated by standards and requirements that did not respect our Navajo values, beliefs, and ideas. I saw the ideas from the theories of globalization, stratification, gender politics, political economies, democratic values, and social inequities playing out internally in our Navajo government and externally in our community. It was here that my dissertation project took on new meaning. I also recognized that it would be extremely challenging to bring these new ideas and experiences back to in my Ph.D. program, which prided itself in forming the basis of American sociology. I began the project of developing Ph.D. proposal while I worked three years for the Navajo Nation government and then three years for the federal government. I spent an entire summer re-reading the works from my department to create its relevancy for my doctoral program but to also rethink the relevance of the works for my Navajo Nation.

I finally defended my dissertation in June 2016 on a very humid day. I flew from Washington, DC to Chicago, Illinois. I remember sitting outside of the sociology building looking upwards to the gargoyle statues that always looked creepy but symbolized the grandeur of a private institution that had taken a chance on me. The defense happened with two committee members being present and one member remotely participating. I was afraid to be in the space because surrounding us was “the dissertation room.” There is something about darkly bound books weighing down on serious bookshelves that made me nervous. Although, I knew my job at University of New Mexico in Native American Studies was waiting for my transcript to show that I completed my degree, there were questions in this space that challenged the background of my research and that required clarification of my arguments—a true westernized university defense process. I had to leave the room twice for the professors to discuss their feedback, resulting in approval. Although there were some revisions to the dissertation, I knew that they were manageable and would require me to work through the weekend. The first step towards becoming a professor was becoming real. I texted my shimá, sisters, and father. The end of this doctoral journey was the doorway to my dream.

We are the 133^rd and 134^th Diné Doctorates

Shimá (my mother) and Shi ache’é’é (my daughter) represent the one-hundred-thirty-third (133^rd) and one-hundred-thirty-fourth (134^th) women that have received our doctorates on the Navajo Nation (U.S. Census 2019: Sex by Educational Attainment). We understand that our deliberate steps to improve our own and our Nation’s opportunities is based not just an economic- minded drive as discussed in the first section of this chapter. We also recognize that we have cultural, intellectual, and community-driven goals as well. As we step back from our personal perspectives to consider the liberal education project, we see our participation in doctoral education as learning the tools, skills, and knowledge to become conscious of our own and dominant institutions. We recognize that despite the challenges that we faced, a true liberal education was a break away from western moves from a non-secular, medieval university (training of clerics) from towards a secular, rational, scientific conception of knowledge.

Modern universities bestow the highest degree of Doctor of Philosophy. The university institutionalized two versions of understanding and acquiring knowledge – one through empirical knowledge and the other one empathetic insight (Wallerstein 2007, p. 3). This distinction is important for us to understand. On occasion, decision makers from our own Navajo communities have devalued our training within the humanities and the social sciences in favor of more “hard” science degrees. To us, it is clear that with our degrees, we also work to defend our own programs and universities from many kinds of critics. When we consider the meaning of a liberal education, it is one pathway to create change agents that challenge dominant norms of what constitutes research and knowledge and to think critically about how history is presented and how its processes lead up to the current social conditions impacting our Native American communities. We are thus called to ground what this all means for us with our work with the Navajo Nation, what freedom looks like, and how our completion of our graduate programs contribute to this goal. Thematically, there were a lot of positive experiences resulting from our education—a major one is increased economic advantage, but there is also our own cultural intellectual growth, emotional intelligence development, and refined understandings of giving back to our community.

Western education at its most basic meaning is the social conditioning of individuals to become proficient in a set of pre-established standards defined by those in power. However, western education is also referenced by historic leaders of the Navanjo Nation. Our Chief Manuelito famously stated in the late 1800s that “Education is a ladder to success. Tell our people to take it.” But as Diné women, we also understand that success in this western hegemonic case is a loaded term. From a decolonization perspective, education is intended to construct a freedom of the mind—to build an awareness and a plan of action to free our people from oppression and exploitation. In this case, decolonization becomes about the overthrow of dominant powers and mindsets and about our awareness and a rebinding of our own advantages and strengths. Decolonization is about the creation of a new generation of thinkers, leaders, do-ers, and should not be confused with relying upon regression to a romanticized past (Fanon, 1963, pp. 2-8). Through a decolonizing view of education, an awareness arises of our own self-worth and our value as contributing members and players of our own Navajo Nation. We furthermore recognize something beyond generalized language of decolonization, which is that our cultural knowledge, our values, and our Navajo language is at the core of our entire being and our Nation’s sovereignty. Although shi ache’é’é (Wendy) is not proficient in Navajo language, she/I have made efforts to learn and participate in an immersion program at our tribal college. Overall, the emotional investment to learn and re-learn our culture, history, and language has taken on new meanings, which begins with our own freedom of mind and the confidence to reject dominant and harmful western ways of knowing. The decolonization project is about Navajo-ifying our thinking.

Navajo-ifying our thinking

Cultural intellectualism has been a theme that we realize represents the next step in our awareness. With our degrees, we have actually found that our culture, language, history are foundations to build, create, and to think. For our community and people to survive, we have become the embodiment of the Indigenous intellectual class that must create. This means that we recognize that we must escape the mindset that someone else will come with the solutions. This dependency mindset limits the ability to create or to innovate because it forces us to work, to read, to re-read, to think, to network, to do the outreach, to talk to community members, to educate, to test these ideas and to accept that failure maybe the result, but to reconstruct to grow. The cultural intellectualism is about action that carefully weighs the community’s insight and input on an issue. We also recognize that reaching this point sometimes comes at the toll of community shunning or silencing due to the importance of such moves.

The second part of our growth is the emotional intelligence that has arisen from this experience—both as mother and daughter. Our relationship and engagement with our own community members requires it. We are cognizant of the maturity in our own production of knowledge and our idea-shifting moves with the responsiveness and awareness that it takes to defend these processes. Our emotional intelligence requires recognizing that theories from white men or non-Navajos have little meaning for tribal members and what to do with that. In our engagement with community, we wear a multitude of proverbial “hats,” meaning we hold many kinds of roles—including now as highly formally educated women working with and for our own Nation. Emotional intelligence has become refined as we have learned to be patient with our ideas and movements, with ourselves and with others across our Nation and outside of it. In our own relationship with each other, there is a deeper appreciation of giving space to think, read, discuss, and write. In the past, there was an unawareness of our own entrenchment in our community that had us missing ceremonies, events, family gatherings, and other family time events. There is now an even more delicate dance of protecting this period of work.

The third theme that we have uncovered based on our own reflections on our doctoral education and conversations with each other is our refined understandings of giving back to our community. For example, shimá (Delores) is recognized in her work with the department of corrections, finding policy remedies for the incarceration of Navajo people begins at the source of schools. Schools embody a space of being both the great equalizer but also a great divider among the people. The doctoral degree helps her to create and develop power and to flex the sovereignty of the Navajo Nation through research that impacts future decision making affecting Navajo children. Her dissertation research gave her clarity towards the root causes that leads to a systematic cycle that draws our children into prisons that require a retooling of our approach to schooling, home life, and Navajo Nation policy. This work is only at the beginning stages and requires added support for the future and community involvement to embed such a project across the Nation that will impact 144 schools and over 40,000 Navajo students attending our institutions.

Conclusion: Calling for futurity frameworks in neoliberal and decolonizing education

It is well-established that westernized universities are neoliberal institutions, creating almost insurmountable tension with Indigenous decolonizing education agendas. How we negotiate this tension is at the core of our experiences.

We see that the objective of a doctoral program should not be about bolstering the current elitist academic attitudes and mindsets of the ivory tower. Instead, doctoral programs for the future must consider the spaces and places where the doctorates return. Many Native doctorates return to their communities and work within their tribal nations, either on their reservations or on the borders, or they represent their nations in other spaces. In our reality, a combination of these has been the case. Shimá is working for the Navajo Nation Department of Corrections, running for elected positions with Kayenta Township and on the Navajo Nation Board of Education, and most recently being nominated by the Navajo Nation President to serve on the Board of Regents for Navajo Technical University. The future for Diné doctorates requires a deep understanding of how tribal nations operate. If this reality is not factored into doctoral programs, those programs have created a future of unemployable students. As Brayboy and colleagues state, “For although Indigenous students maybe interested in going to college to gain skills and knowledge in areas that may benefit their nation, ultimately, these skills are of little use to them if they lack firsthand knowledge or understanding of Native institutions, communities and values (Brayboy et al., 2012, p. 29). Therefore, by perpetuating ignorance, doctoral programs are always at risk of creating graduates who can become detriments to their own nations and the bureaucratic blockades to their own tribe’s nation building projects.

The second objective of a doctoral program ought not be to construct a red-ivory tower, which Vine Deloria Jr. argues is the opposite of Indigenous intellectuals using their talents and time to analyze the issues impacting tribal nations (as opposed to giving time to the issues in the halls of academe) (Wilkins 2018, p. 126). In other words, we know what we do not want, even as we develop ideas regarding what we desire through higher education, and more specifically doctoral education. It is our position that we as Diné people need to build spaces of empowerment and to create an ethos to which all future Indigenous scholars should aspire in order to be the intellectual might in their communities. In this sense, the Ph.D. is only a title to explore and requires action and meaningful relationships with each other. Relationships are critical to build our nation back up.

As other contributors in this volume recognize, it is important to make shifts in how we do the work that is community-facing and educate our future leaders. Many of us may return to the same educational institutions to reteach the future generation, and a new demand for future Indigenous leaders involves also returning into their communities. We highlight our own experiences in a way that offers frames of thinking that are cognizant of the multi-purpose intentions for a liberal education and that underscore recommendations for the future of liberal minded institutions that are interested in Indigenous students. As we argued earlier, an Indigenous Ph.D. is not simply a degree but feeds into our vulnerable tribal nations struggling to rebuild their nations. Many of us that have pursued a doctorate recognize that the degree legitimizes our work for the Navajo people. As a mother and daughter that has earned our Ph.D., we continue to fulfill our duties as the matrilineal backbone of our nation. As we see other Navajo women receiving their Ph.D., we understand that we are a part of an indigenous future of scholars and nation-builders.

References

1. Brayboy, B.M.J., Fann, A.J., Castagno, A.E. and Solyom, J.A. (2012). Framing the Conversation. Postsecondary Education for American Indian and Alaska Natives: Higher Education for Nation Building and Self-Determination, 37(5), 29.
2. Bearchief-Adolpho, Q.A., Jackson, A.P., Smith, S.A., and Benally, M.T. (2017). Navajo Nation Brain Drain: An Exploration of Returning College Graduates’ Perspectives. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 8(1), 1-25. DOI: 10.18584/iipj.2017.8.1.7
3. Fanon, F. (1963). The Wretched of the Earth. New York, NY: Grove Press.
4. Kutz, J. (2021, February). Life After Coal: Diné Activist Nicole Horseherder’s long quest for equaity from the rise and fall of the coal economy. High Country News, 29-34.
5. McKenzie, J. , Jackson, A. P. , Yazzie, R. , Smith, S. A. , Crotty, A. K. , Baum, D. , Denny, A. , Bah'lgai Eldridge, D. (2013). Career Dilemmas among Diné (Navajo) College Graduates: An Exploration of the Dinétah (Navajo Nation) Brain Drain. The International Indigenous Policy Journal, 4(4). Retrieved from: http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/iipj/vol4/iss4/5
6. Navajo Nation Division of Personnel Management (2021, July 13). Department of Personnel Management. DPM Jobs. Link: http://www.dpm.navajo-nsn.gov/
7. Tachine, A.R., Cabrera, N.L., & Yellow Bird, E. (2017). Home Away from Home: Native American Students’ Sense of Belonging During Their First Year in College. The Journal of Higher Education, 88(5). DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00221546.2016.1257322
8. U.S. Census Bureau (2019). Educational Attainment, Navajo Nation Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land, AZ—NM—UT, 2019 American Community Survey 1-year estimates. Retrieved from: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=&t=Educational%20Attainment&g=2500000US2430&tid=ACSST1Y2019.S1501
9. U.S. Census Bureau (2019). Sex by Educational Attainment for the Population 25 Years and Over, Navajo Nation Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land, AZ—NM—UT, 2019 American Community Survey 1-year estimates. Retrieved from: https://data.census.gov/cedsci/table?q=&t=Educational%20Attainment&g=2500000US2430&tid=ACSDT1Y2019.B15002
10. U.S. Census Bureau, "Population 60 years and over in the United States for Navajo Nation Reservation, AZ, NM, UT; Navajo Nation Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land, AZ, NM, UT," 2020 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates Subject Tables, American FactFinder, accessed April 9, 2023, https://data.census.gov/table?g=2520000US2430R&y=2020&d=ACS+5-Year+Estimates+Subject+Tables&tid=ACSST5Y2020.S0102
11. Wilkins, D.E. (2018). Red Prophet: The Punishing Intellectualism of Vine Deloria, Jr. Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing.
12. Wallerstein, I. (2007). World Systems Analysis. Duke University Press.

Notes

1. Kayenta Peabody Coal mine was shut down due to the lessened demand for coal and the shutdown of the Page Generating Station. Kutz, Jessica. 2021. “Life After Coal.” High Country News 53 (2): 28–34. https://search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.unm.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=eih&AN=148275106&site=eds-live&scope=site; MATTHEW BROWN. 2023. “Navajo Company Shuts Coal Mine in Dispute over Sovereignty.” Canadian Press, The. Accessed April 8. https://search-ebscohost-com.libproxy.unm.edu/login.aspx?direct=true&db=pwh&AN=MYO312045322919&site=eds-live&scope=site. ↑

2. U.S. Census Bureau, "Population 60 years and over in the United States for Navajo Nation Reservation, AZ, NM, UT; Navajo Nation Reservation and Off-Reservation Trust Land, AZ, NM, UT," 2020 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates Subject Tables, American FactFinder, accessed April 9, 2023, https://data.census.gov/table?g=2520000US2430R&y=2020&d=ACS+5-Year+Estimates+Subject+Tables&tid=ACSST5Y2020.S0102 ↑

3. The Navajo Intervention Model incorporates traditional Navajo teachings of k’é (relationship) and Hozhó (balance and beauty way) into treatment. ↑