Book Talk with author Nancy Mattina

🗓️ Saturday | July 25 | 2-3PM

📍 The Peregrine Book Company

An afternoon with author and retired Prescott College educator, Nancy Mattina. She will read from and discuss her new book about the Navajo painter, poet and Intellectual, Adee Dodge.

After teaching linguistics and expository writing at the University of Montana and Prescott College for over two decades, Nancy Mattina began writing historical biographies in her late fifties. Her second book, Adee Dodge: Navajo Artist, Intellectual, and Individualist, like her first, Uncommon Anthropologist: Gladys Reichard and Western Native American Culture, draws on her many years helping Native elders on the Colville Reservation in eastern Washington record and revitalize their ancestral languages. She currently lives in northern Colorado where she is working on her third, likely final, volume featuring larger than life yet nearly forgotten figures of modern Southwest history.

Adee Dodge: Navajo Artist, Intellectual, and Individualist chronicles the life of Navajo artist and intellectual Adee Dodge (1912–92). Born on the Navajo Reservation near Canyon de Chelly, Arizona, Dodge studied anthropological linguistics at Columbia University, taught Navajo literacy at Indian Bureau boarding schools on his reservation, rose from private first class to captain in the army during World War II, and founded Adee Dodge Enterprises, Inc., the first uranium prospecting and mining firm owned by a Navajo. At age forty, by then living in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Dodge began to paint allegorical pictures grounded in Navajo wisdom traditions and aesthetics. By 1960 he was an acclaimed Southwest Native watercolorist based in Arizona’s Phoenix metro area. His devotion to interpreting the Navajo worldview in modernist form earned him praise as the best of the Navajo painters of his day. Upon his death, Dodge left behind a rich record of his intellectual history that has since been conserved at major museums and archives.

Written from a postcolonial perspective, this biography conveys Dodge’s assessment of the contributions the Navajo Nation might yet make to the American experiment, if only Americans would honor their promise to treat tribal peoples with dignity and respect.

“Adee Dodge is an underrecognized Indigenous artist and intellectual in the scholarly record. During his lifetime he received high acclaim from Native art collectors, academics, curators, and aficionados, as well as other Navajo artists for his paintings. This book provides new insights into why much of Dodge’s work went unpublished and why, despite his success as an artist, he was and largely continues to be marginalized from other modern Native painters in most scholarship on this subject.”—Laura E. Smith, author of Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity