Beyond the Four Corners of the World: A Navajo Woman's Journey - Softcover

Benedek, Emily

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0806130830 ISBN 13: 9780806130835

Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma Pr, 1998

Synopsis

Reprint of a 1995 biography of a contemporary woman, which also contains a lesson about the power of the past. Tells the story of Ella Bedonie, who was born on the Navajo Indian reservation in Arizona and found herself forced to balance her religious beliefs and family ties with the lures of materialism and modernity when a government relocation program moved her family into a suburban housing development. Woven through her story--a tale of negotiating the distance between the sacred and the profane--is her father's narrative of her parents' own life and times. Lacks an index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

About this title

From the Inside Flap:

of photographs

From Publishers Weekly:

This biographical portrait of a Navajo woman and her family holds important lessons for those seeking to restore bonds of family and community. College-educated Ella Bedonie, born on a northern Arizona reservation in 1952, and her husband, Dennis, an elementary school counselor, navigate two worlds?Native American and white, sacred and secular. At the age of six, Ella was forced to attend a government boarding school, where she endured beatings and was punished for speaking Navajo. Then she spent 10 years with a protective Mormon foster family in California, after which she returned to the reservation to confront a longstanding Navajo-Hopi land dispute (the focus of Benedek's The Wind Won't Know Me), which jeopardized her parents' ranch and camp: Ella's future inheritance. In 1989, she and Dennis moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, and built a house, but their teenage son, Kimo, joined a gang and dropped out of school. Diagnosed with breast cancer, Ella moved her family back to the reservation; Kimo straightened out and her cancer went into remission. Benedek evokes Navajo society, customs and a cosmos in which the gods are nearby and life is imbued with purpose. Photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Univ of Oklahoma Pr
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0806130830
• ISBN 13: 9780806130835
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 343