In the aftermath of the Civil War, New Mexico Territory endured painful years of hardship and ongoing strife. During this turbulent period, a U.S. military officer stationed in the territory assembled an album of photographs, a series of still shots taken by one or more anonymous photographers. Now, some 150 years later, Hardship, Greed, and Sorrow reproduces the anonymous officer's ""souvenir album"" in its totality. Offering an important glimpse of the American Southwest in the mid-1860s, the book opens with a thoughtful foreword by Jennifer Nez Denetdale, who considers the varied and lingering effects that settlement, conquest, and nineteenth-century photography had on the Apaches and Navajos. In her insightful introduction accompanying the photographs, curator and scholar Devorah Romanek places the photographs in historical context and explains their unusual provenance. As she points out, the 1866 album integrates a number of important themes in connection to the Civil War and Reconstruction periods, including the French intervention in New Mexico and the internment of Navajos at the Bosque Redondo Indian Reservation. The story of the album's provenance reads like a mystery: some loose ends remain untied and some questions remain unanswered. In addition to containing what may be the earliest extant photographs of Navajo Indians, the album features both studio and field images of U.S. Army officers, Mexican politicians, and various sites throughout New Mexico. According to Romanek, a number of the album's photographs have appeared in other publications but with scant attention to their original context or purpose. This compelling book reveals what we know about the collection, its compiler, and the photographer - or photographers - who captured such a fraught and complex moment in the history of the American Southwest.

The last few decades have given rise to an electrifying movement of Native American activism, scholarship, and creative work challenging five hundred years of U.S. colonization of Native lands. Indigenous communities are envisioning and building their nations and are making decolonial strides toward regaining power from colonial forces.The Navajo Nation is among the many Native nations in the United States pushing back. In this new book, Dine author Lloyd L. Lee asks fellow Navajo scholars, writers, and community members to envision sovereignty for the Navajo Nation. He asks, (1) what is Navajo sovereignty, (2) how do various Navajo institutions exercise sovereignty, (3) what challenges does Navajo sovereignty face in the coming generations, and (4) how did individual Dine envision sovereignty? Contributors expand from the questions Lee lays before them to touch on how Navajo sovereignty is understood in Western law, how various institutions of the Navajo Nation exercise sovereignty, what challenges it faces in coming generations, and how individual Dine envision power, authority, and autonomy for the people. A companion to Dine Perspectives: Revitalizing and Reclaiming Navajo Thought, each chapter offers the contributors' individual perspectives. The book, which is organized into four parts, discusses Western law's view of Dine sovereignty, research, activism, creativity, and community, and Navajo sovereignty in traditional education. Above all, Lee and the contributing scholars and community members call for the rethinking of Navajo sovereignty in a way more rooted in Navajo beliefs, culture, and values. Contributors: Raymond D. Austin, Bidtah N. Becker, Manley A. Begay, Jr,Avery Denny, Larry W. Emerson, Colleen Gorman, Michelle L. Hale, Michael Lerma, Leola Tsinnajinnie.