Ákó hoo t'éé ñt'éé'

About the Book

This memoir describes the experience of a woman who came from northern New York to teach on the Navajo Reservation in the 1940’s, the life she found, the students she taught, the neighbors she came to understand, the wisdom she found, and the home she made there for the next forty years. It was a complex, wild, and beautiful place in which a complex and rich interaction took place between two cultures, the Navajo and the Anglo. Barbara recounts in intimate and well-lived detail her understanding of place, time, culture, and change, and her story is enhanced by the photographic record of pictures, taken mostly by her husband, Douglas Anderson, over the span of those forty years.

About the Author

Although, by necessity, Barbara Anderson now lives in Glendale, Arizona, she explains to Westerners that she grew up in northern New York, almost in Canada. To Easterners, she explains that she has lived in northern Arizona. She claims that both locales define her. Probably the weekly letters she wrote home from isolated Ganado to rural Gouverneur fostered her conviction that no great experience was quite finished until she wrote about it. She holds a B. A. from Cornell University and an M.A. from Northern Arizona University. She found great satisfaction in teaching and living with another culture.