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Books That Celebrate Navajo Culture

Soulstice Publishing is proud to be the publisher of two books that carry and celebrate the culture of traditional Navajo people:

Voices of Navajo Mothers and Daughters: Portraits of Beauty

“(A) deeply moving, must-read for mothers and daughters everywhere.” -Chanticleer Reviews

Absorb their wisdom as more than 60 Navajo grandmothers, mothers, and daughters in 21 families open up about their lives, their culture, and their love for each other. For anyone who wants to understand the lives of Native American women today, especially the lives of Navajo women, this award-winning book opens the door.

In these compelling, multi-generational oral histories collected by Kathy Eckles Hooker, women talk about their experiences in their own words. As they do, their faces are captured in defining portraits by photographer David Young-Wolff, whose evocative portraits demonstrate the insights gleaned from his 45-year career as one of America’s top producers of stock and portrait photography. 

Published in 2022, this book has won multiple national awards. [Hardbound, $42.95]

We Walk the Earth in Beauty: Traditional Navajo Lifeways

“Infused with cultural knowledge and ways to live in beauty, this wise book carries our Diné elder stories.” -Lolita Paddock, M.Ed., Principal, Leupp Schools, Inc.

Experience the time-honored practices of the Navajo as shared by wisdom-keepers who live close to the land and follow ancestral ways. Watch and listen as Mary Joe Yazzie fires a clay pot, Hazel Nez weaves a rug, and Sam Worker stitches a pair of moccasins for his wife. Each of the book’s 19 chapters invites readers into a Navajo family to learn traditional methods for doing everything from making yucca shampoo to building a hogan.

In We Walk the Earth in Beauty, readers will learn much that is of practical value for living in harmony with our environment. The book was created by Kathy Eckles Hooker in partnership with the extraordinary Caribbean photographer Helen Lau Running.

Published in 2024, this is the third edition of a book originally published by the Museum of New Mexico Press in 1991 with the title Time Among the Navajo: Lifeways on the Reservation. [Hardbound, $34.95]

Read more about Kathy Eckles Hooker

Kathy was born in Palo Alto, California, and grew up in a Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C. Her introduction to Native American cultures began as a child watching Native dancers perform at the Department of the Interior. Kathy attended The College of Wooster in Wooster, Ohio, and graduate school at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio. She and her husband moved to the Navajo Reservation in the 1970s, where he practiced dentistry and she taught English to Diné students at Dilcon Boarding School.

Amazed at how the Diné honored and utilized their land, Kathy studied their traditional lifeways. She worked with photographer Helen Lau Running to research and create a book celebrating those lifeways. It was originally published in 1991 as Time Among the Navajo: Traditional Lifeways on the Reservation. The book is now in its third edition, under the title We Walk the Earth in Beauty.

Later, Kathy taught English at Flagstaff Unified School District for thirty-three years, where again she worked with Diné students. She collaborated with photographer David Young-Wolff on a second book, Voices of Navajo Mothers and Daughters: Portraits of Beauty.

Kathy and her husband live in Flagstaff, Arizona. The couple has two adult daughters.

Read more about David Young-Wolff

Light, the real language of photography, communicated the story and path of David Young-Wolff. As a youngster, he spent time noticing the way light sashayed between leaves, around mountains, sneaking over and under any object in its way. Being a photographer, he utilized the language of light to reveal what was important in each of his photographs.

During nearly forty-four years as a professional photographer in Los Angeles, he became one of the top producers of stock photography. He moved from stock photography to a niche shooting yoga, fashion photography, and creative portraiture. He captured evocative images for his clients and at the same time worked on personal photography projects.

He considers his collaboration on Voices of Navajo Mothers and Daughters: Portraits of Beauty with author Kathy Hooker to be one of the highlights of his career. He met many people and heard stories about Navajo life. The experience, he said, was an incredible education and a privilege. David and his wife now live near Bend, Oregon, where he continues to follow the light.

Read more about Helen Lau Running

Helen Lau Running (1945–2014) was born in Trinidad and Tobago, West Indies, Caribbean, of Chinese and Afro-Caribbean ancestry. In 1964, she married John Running, then a U.S. Marine. They came to the United States in 1965 and moved to Flagstaff, Arizona. Their children, RAEchel and John Paul, were raised there, at the foot of the sacred San Francisco Peaks.

Helen was a woman of many talents. Her vivid creative life is notably evident in her photography. By the mid-1970s, she was sharing a studio with her husband (a photographer) and other artists. She documented the traditional lifeways and environmental stewardship of Indigenous peoples and championed the stories and work of other artists. Her love for humanity and for the cultural landscapes of the Colorado Plateau shines through her photographs.

In 1979, Helen and Kathy Eckles Hooker began a project that would take them across the western side of the Navajo Reservation, documenting elements of traditional Navajo culture. The result was the book originally published as Time Among the Navajo, now in its third edition under the title We Walk the Earth in Beauty. Learn more about Helen at our tribute page.