A Voice in Her Tribe: A Navajo Woman's Own Story

A Voice in Her Tribe is the autobiography of Irene Stewart, a Navajo woman who told her own story in her own words. Born in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, and raised largely by her grandmother, Stewart lived through the boarding-school era, became bilingual and bicultural, and grew into a community leader active in Chinle on the Navajo Reservation through the mid-twentieth century, closely following local and tribal politics. Her chapters move from childhood and schooling to a hard-won life lived in two worlds.

The volume appeared as Ballena Press Anthropological Papers No. 17, edited by Doris Ostrander Dawdy with a foreword by Mary Shepardson, and published in 1980 by the small but respected Ballena Press of Socorro, New Mexico. First-person Native women's narratives from this period are uncommon, which gives the book real documentary value. This copy, with its printed wrappers and series back-list intact, is a clean example of an important small-press contribution to Navajo and Southwestern letters.