Restoring Relations Through Stories

This insightful volume delves into land-based DinE and Dene imaginaries as embodied in stories-oral, literary, and visual. Like the dynamism and kinetic facets of hOzhO?,* Restoring Relations Through Stories takes us through many landscapes, places, and sites. Renae Watchman introduces the book with an overview of stories that bring TsE Bit?a?I, or Shiprock Peak, the sentinel located in what is currently the state of New Mexico, to life. The book then introduces the dynamic field of Indigenous film through a close analysis of two distinct DinE-directed feature-length films, and ends by introducing Dene literatures.

While the DinE (those from the four sacred mountains in DinEtah in the southwestern United States) are not now politically and economically cohesive with the Dene (who are in Denendeh in Canada), they are ancestral and linguistic relatives. In this book, Watchman turns to literary and visual texts to explore how relations are restored through stories, showing how literary linkages from land-based stories affirm DinE and Dene kinship. She explores the power of story to forge ancestral and kinship ties between the DinE and Dene across time and space through re-storying of relations.

*A complex DinE worldview and philosophy that cannot be defined with one word in the English language. HOzhO? means to continually strive for harmony, beauty, balance, peace, and happiness, but most importantly the DinE have a right to it.