Working on the Railroad, Walking in Beauty

Abstract

10 I especially want to thank those who have steadfastly encouraged me in this work, including my wife, Mary Ellen Vogler; my mother, Pat Youngdahl; my daughter, Coleen Youngdahl; and my friends Bill Haymes, Peter Zarifes, Bill Deverell, and Christine Irizarry. My friend and scholar of the English language, David Schiller, has repeatedly buffed and polished my diction, a difficult task indeed. The remaining mistakes are all mine. Preface xvii disputes are legendary, numerous careful ethnographers have come before me, leaving behind important information and analysis. 11 As projects like this often do, my work went in directions unintended at the beginning. Based on my recorded talks with Navajo people, my efforts have driven me down the historical path of Navajo railroad work. I was able to document the history of the tremendous growth in the numbers of Navajo railroad workers after World War II through studying the archives Many have helped in the editing and construction of the work, including John Alley and all those at Utah State University Press and my son, Benjamin Youngdahl. Archivists and librarians have been uniformly helpful to me in a number of locations, and I thank them. 11 The legendary and ongoing disputes among those who work in Navajo studies wax and wane according to the academic fashions of the day. For example, the pioneering work of Clyde Kluckhohn and Dorothea Leighton, in many ways the founders of this anthropological field, has been criticized by respected Navajo scholar Gary Witherspoon, who wrote, "The accepted literature, mostly compiled during the Kluckhohn era of Harvard psychoanalytical research projects conducted mainly at Ramah, New Mexico, should, in my opinion, be transferred from the category 'accepted' to the category of 'questionable.' Many of the culture and personality studies of this era have come under so much unfavorable scrutiny that the whole effort has been largely discounted by many anthropologists." Gary Witherspoon, Language and Art in the Navajo Universe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1977), 195. Yet, a little over a decade later, Witherspoon's work was sharply criticized by Thomas Patin, a scholar influenced by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Patin argued that Witherspoon ignored issues of power in his work on the Navajo and was part of a Western colonialist mindset "unable to apprehend cultural differences without first circumscribing it with its own desires." Thomas Patin, "White Mischief: Metaphor and Desire in a Misreading of Navajo Culture,"