Watch and listen as Navajo women open up about their lives, their culture, and their love for each other.
In “Voices of Navajo Mothers and Daughters: Portraits of Beauty,” Navajo grandmothers, mothers, and daughters in twenty-one families tell their stories. Through a series of intimate, revelatory personal histories, they open up about how they have been shaped by powerful cultural and historical forces—and by their love for each other. As they do, their faces are captured in defining portraits.
UPDATE: This book is now available for sale!
Author Kathy Eckles Hooker interviewed more than fifty women about their lives, their interactions with Navajo culture, and their relationships with their women kin. “These are amazing, strong, and resilient Navajo women sharing their hopes, sorrows, and joys,” Hooker says. “Sharing the most personal experiences of their lives took courage.”
At Soulstice, we knew this was a project with soul from the moment of our first meeting with Kathy. Her affection for these women and her abiding interest in their lives was written in her smile as she talked about the women she had interviewed.
A similar smile lit the face of David Young-Wolff, the photographer who traveled with Hooker, sat in on the interviews, and created an insightful series of portraits of the women at home. “I wanted readers to see how the mothers and daughters relate to each other,” he says. “Listening to the stories of generations of Navajo women and photographing their portraits has been an opportunity of a lifetime.”
For anyone who wants to understand the lives of Native American women today, especially the lives of Navajo women, “Voices of Navajo Mothers and Daughters: Portraits of Beauty” will open the door. We’re proud to announce that the book is due out from Soulstice this spring. UPDATE: It goes on sale nationally on Mother’s Day, May 8, 2022. You can buy a copy from us here, or find yours wherever books are sold.
