Orem Library

The Return of Navajo Boy reunited a Navajo family and triggered a federal investigation into uranium contamination. It tells the story of Elsie Mae Begay, whose history in pictures reveals an incredible and ongoing struggle for environmental justice. A powerful new epilogue (produced in 2008) shows how the film and Groundswell Educational Films' outreach campaign create news and rally supporters including Congressman Henry Waxman, Chairman of the...

After being taught in a boarding school run by whites that Navajo is a useless language, Ned Begay and other Navajo men are recruited by the Marines to become Code Talkers, sending messages during World War II in their native tongue.

Will Evans's writings should find a special niche in the small but significant body of literature from and about traders to the Navajos. Evans was the proprietor of the Shiprock Trading Company. Probably more than most of his fellow traders, he had a strong interest in Navajo culture. The effort he made to record and share what he learned certainly was unusual. He published in the Farmington and New Mexico newspapers and other periodicals, compiling...

Retired Navajo policeman Joe Leaphorn joins his former partner Jim Chee in investigating the skeleton of a man found on a mountain ledge.

"Yossel, along with his family, flees anti-Jewish Russian pogroms in the late nineteenth century and settles in the American Southwest where he forges a friendship with Thomas, a Native American Navajo boy"--

"Returning to the Navajo Reservation after receiving an offer for a lucrative new position in Washington, D.C., Ella Clah anticipates a cheerful family welcome at the tiny airstrip. What she gets is a firefight--three men in body armor, guns blazing, shooting at anyone who moves. Tribal attorney Kevin Tolino, war hero Nelson Lonewolf, the plane's pilot, and Ella herself duck for cover amid the hail of bullets. Tolino and Lonewolf are seriously injured"--Page...

The first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII.
His name wasn’t Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn’t stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for...

Once an FBI agent, Ella Clah is now a Special Investigator with the Navajo Police. She walks a tightrope between the Najavo and the white worlds, fully accepted by neither but needed by both. Ella's brother, Clifford, a hataali or medicine man, says that her investigave skills are a gift from the spirits who guard and guide the Dineh, but Ella insists it's her FBI training that has honed her instincts.

Just when Navaho rodeo star Joe Lightcloud has it all figured out, his plans go up in smoke. His idea about raising cattle on the reservation is a good one. But you know that great chow Joe and everyone else enjoyed at the community party last night? Turns out somebody's barbecued the herd's only bull! Where Joe goes, trouble follows.